As one West End producer summed up: “In the world of musical theatre, Cameron Mackintosh is god.”
It’s time to order and we both choose scallops with Aleppo pepper and a main course of roasted fish (bass groper for him, John Dory for me), with seasonal vegetables.
The sommelier takes us around the country in search of an unwooded chardonnay. We somehow settle on the Adelaide Hills, via another Mackintosh story (about “Janet” [Holmes a Court], owner of the Vasse Felix winery and one-time owner of a bunch of London theaters that, in the dark days after her husband’s unexpected death in the early ’90s, kept the bankers at bay thanks to Mackintosh’s successful musicals). I’m struggling to keep up.
version of Phantom about to open in Sydney is quite different to the one that has been wowing audiences for years, and I’m keen to know why Mackintosh chose to change a winning formula.
“Actually, with every single one of my shows, and I think I’m the only producer in history that’s ever done this, I’ve redone them after 25 years,” he says. “The only show of mine that sort of hasn’t been redone is cats“That could be on the agenda, though.
Mackintosh says that as they get older, all shows need to be refreshed to stay relevant. But many originators can’t bring themselves to do it. He is, it seems, more hard-headed when it comes to getting bums on seats.
Mackintosh says that from the time he saw his first musical – Salad Days – at age 8, he wanted to be a producer. “I like to know how things work,” he says. “It was the gift God gave me.”
Cats opened at the Theater Royal in Sydney in 1985. Mackintosh’s shows ran consecutively in the theater for more than a decade in the 1980s and ’90s. Bruce Milton Miller
“I get involved in absolutely every element of the theatre, from the writing to the composing, to the orchestrating, to the lighting,” he says, before acknowledging his details guy reputation by adding “to how you’re going to lay out the copy for this piece …
“You know, it’s not that I come up with the new idea of the next show or anything like that. But I’m very good at spotting something that’s special, and then seeing if I’m the one who’s best for actually nurturing it and making it as good as it can be. and that [approach] covers everything I do.”
But, I ask, how do you get the balance right between being across all the detail and being an actual control freak and a nightmare to work for? Mackintosh seems surprised by the question.
“I don’t really know,” he begins, before considering it more carefully. “I just want to get the show right. So, my greatest pleasure is finding something that I think sounds original and then working with others to develop it.” (Later he will speak at length on how all his successes de él have been original ideas based on excellent writing, and why he is always wary of the formulaic.) He backs up the claim with the story of his decade-long effort to bring Mary Poppins to the stage, which involved persuading the two rights holders – author Pamela Travers for the story and Disney for the songs – to get over their many differences.
“Look, I’m sure it can be very irritating that I never stop. But the fact is most of the key people in the theater have continued to work with me over the years.” He says his staff know what he wants and typically do n’t call him in until a production is on his feet and at the fine-tuning stage.
“I couldn’t possibly run my huge empire and keep it personal if I didn’t have 95 per cent of the work done by other people.”
The Australian season of Mary Poppins is a case in point. When Cassel’s casting team made Stefanie Jones her first choice for her to play Mary, Mackintosh could n’t make it to Sydney and was n’t prepared to see the final audition of such a key character over Zoom. Instead, he flew her from her and Jack Chambers, who plays Bert, to London for her final approval. That is, I suppose, staying across the detail.
Stefanie Jones as Mary Poppins in this year’s Australian production. Kate Geraghty
We tuck into the scallops and the Aleppo pepper makes an impact. When the waiter clears the plates Mackintosh politely offers some feedback. “I would just say to the chef that it could do with a little less of the chilli because the poor scallop is fighting for its identity.” I imagine that’s the sort of feedback he’d offer when the lighting or staging or choreography isn’t quite right. Polite, but insistent.
Mackintosh professes three times over lunch that he doesn’t care about money. “To be honest, I never did anything for the money even when I had none,” he says. I have no reason to disbelieve him, but it does get us onto the subject of his businesses from him.
Since the early ’90s, Mackintosh has diversified across the three main lines of musical theatre. After helping create the shows, he can stage them in the eight theaters he owns in London’s West End. “As well as buying them I’ve spent a quarter of a billion pounds doing them up, so they’ll be there for another 100 years,” he says, illustrated with colorful anecdotes about the recently rebuilt Sondheim Theatre. Architecture, he says, is one of his two passions outside theatre, alongside cooking – both pursuits well suited to his eye for detail.
“If you have good ingredients you can always knock something up. I mean, I don’t let any leftovers leave the fridge unless they do so on their own accord. I like to reuse everything.”
The third act in Mackintosh’s empire is Musical Theater International, the world’s largest licensor of musicals. Been to a school musical recently? Chances are the scripts, scores, programs, logos, staging guide, sound effects, right down to recordings of the individual instruments missing from your school orchestra have been licensed from MTI.
Mackintosh says he’s “not really” in the game of creating new shows any more, but he is able to nurture young talent by supporting them through MTI. “We go to all the workshops and treat the newcomer who’s written a new show with the same passion as we do Stephen Sondheim. We want them to feel that MTI is their hope.”
Each part of the business is equally important, he says, and revenue-wise they are worth about a third each. And unlike most other entertainment companies, he has no investors.
“They are wholly owned, I own everything. So when the shit hits the fan, there’s a lot of shit, and it’s all on me.”
Our fish mains come and go, and the restaurant is clearing out. As we opt for double espressos over more wine, Mackintosh turns to the fallout from the pandemic.
Phantom of the Opera is finally coming to the Sydney Opera House. Opera Australia
While the initial rush back to live shows in theaters has settled, the reluctance to commit has not.
“There is no doubt that people are now looking for shows much later,” Mackintosh says. “They don’t book until two to three weeks out. There’s a sense of ‘All right, that show’s on. I feel like doing something so let’s do it.’ But they won’t book four or five months out like before.”
He says the prolonged pandemic theater shutdown and the corresponding boom in streamed television prompted a lot of theater professionals to leave the industry, something that is showing no sign of being resolved.
But Mackintosh thinks there are bigger, more serious problems that will take longer to sort out.
“I think people are losing sight of the benefits of work, and of going to work.” He says that will hurt companies of all descriptions because the “magic spark that makes a particular company have its outlook happens out of that conversation” you have at work.
“All these people who are thinking ‘I’ve got the best of both worlds. I can live at home and only have to go to work two or three days a week’, what are you going to do with the rest of that time? If half the world is not actually working properly, you can’t get up to the cafe, you can’t go to your Italian favorite because they can’t afford to open.
“In most restaurants, you’re lucky if you get the things you ordered [for dinner] before breakfast the next day. I’m in one of Sydney’s top hotels and I can’t get a f—ing drink after 9.30 unless I sit in my room.”
Eventually, he says, cafes, bars and restaurants will get sick of waiting for staff to show up and turn to robots and AI to do the work.
“I think over the next three to four years all of that is going to come home to roost as the economic pincer does its work.”
When I ask how he manages his money, Mackintosh genuinely seems not to know. “I’m not the right person to ask,” he says, before explaining that he does not like debt so he always has a large amount of money available in the bank. “When I say I’m not interested, I just, I’ve never been driven by money. I just want good people to look after it and do something sensible. But I certainly don’t have a lot of money in the stock market. On the whole I’m fairly risk averse when it comes to investment.”
“I take a salary out every five years, to live through the next five years. I take a lump sum. I put some into my foundation. And all the rest of my money I loan back to my company. So I keep it in there and just draw it down, pay the tax.
“Because also, it’s my wish – I don’t have any children – but I will leave everything I’ve got to my foundation, so I’m going to be worth a lot more dead than alive.”
Not that he’s expecting to shuffle off any time soon. He shows me a picture of his 104-year-old mother, a snappily dressed woman with a sparkle in her eye who looks like she could easily pass as a spritely 80-year-old.
He intends to keep on bringing shows to Australia, but those hoping for another run of Les Miserables will have to wait “til after my 80th birthday”. He is, however, expecting to bring the concert version “home to Sydney”, where it debuted in The Domain during the Bicentennial celebrations of 1988. “That would be special.”
Mackintosh and his partner of 40 years, Australian theater photographer Michael Le Poer Trench, spend most of their time on their working dairy farm in Somerset. He also has an apartment in New York, a house in Malta, where his mother is from and where he keeps his 67-year-old Benetti motor yacht, and an estate in Scotland he inherited from his aunt. All have been painfully restored.
“Now most of the key people in my life are in their mid-30s to mid-40s,” he says, describing it as a conscious effort. “So I’ve recalibrated, and that should see me out. And they’ll think ‘well, I think Cameron would have done this’ when I’m no longer here to do it.”
However long he lives, it looks like Cameron Mackintosh will be across the detail to the end – and beyond.
Rockpool Bar and Grill
66 Hunter St, Sydney
2 sparkling water $18
2 scallops with Aleppo pepper and orange $68
1 roast John Dory $52
1 roasted Bass Groper with Corn, Chorizo and Oregano $49
1 wintergreen $16
1 baby carrot $18
1 Shaw & Smith Lenswood Vineyard $220
3 espressos $15
Total $456