Don’t forget the old faves: Producer Cameron Mackintosh knows why shows like ‘Les Misérables’ endure
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“We are in an irreplaceable industry” says theater producer Cameron Mackintosh, speaking from Australia. “As humans become endangered of being overwhelmed by artificial intelligence, theater will be the one thing that has to be put together by live people with ideas.”
Mackintosh has had a few of those himself
The producer, who came from humble beginnings but is now a 76-year-old billionaire, has been in the musicals game since 1967. And when it comes to success, it’s hard to think of a peer: Mackintosh, a household name in his native Britain for decades, developed such new shows as “The Phantom of the Opera,” which closes in April after a Broadway run of some 35 years, “Cats” (a non-Equity tour plays Chicago, again, from Feb. 21-26), “Miss Saigon” (once a megahit, now a controversial title), and “Les Misérables,” which returns to Chicago beginning Wednesday. He developed major revivals of such titles as “Mary Poppins.” And “Oliver!” is coming to New York’s City Center this May and maybe then moving to Broadway, as City Center productions often do.
His Delfont Mackintosh group owns eight theaters in London’s West End and he is one of the main keepers of the legacy of his close friend Stephen Sondheim, with plans to develop another starry London revue of the late, great composer’s work featuring stars of the caliber of Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, the original star of “Miss Saigon.” The plan is in many ways an expansion of an emotional Sondheim memorial that Mackintosh put together in May, an event so popular that it took over two theaters simultaneously.
Mackintosh’s influence has been global but Chicago is a good microcosm.
Mackintosh’s musicals ran collectively for years at the Auditorium Theatre (the late Hollis Resnik starred there as Fantine in “Les Misérables”), anchoring Chicago’s South Loop for around a decade. Those shows were virtually indistinguishable from the productions in New York and London; Mackintosh essentially created the rule that so-called road cities deserved exactly the same level of spectacle as New York and London. Throughout the 1990s, shows with scenery that filled 15 or more trucks would travel around the Midwest; cities like Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio blew out the back walls of their historic venues just in order to accommodate them. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, people once lined the streets to see the “Phantom” trucks arrive in town, seen as a measure of their own centrality.
But those days are gone now. Even before the pandemic, the advent of digital scenic effects made so much scenery obsolete. And while Mackintosh’s shows were always very expensive, costs have risen exponentially. And Mackintosh’s audience-centered attractions have, in many ideologically elite theater circles, become unfashionably populist — even though many of the people who now decry their spectacle first developed a love for the theater by sitting, open-mouthed, in one of their audiences.
So it has gone. As Mackintosh well knows.
“The era of the big, old classics like ‘My Fair Lady’ is coming to an end,” he says, cheerfully mixing his metaphors. “The old warhorses are winding down. I am afraid there has been a changing of the guard and it is now very difficult to put a tour together on one of the older titles.”
What Mackintosh says he has come to realize, though, is that shows like “Phantom” and “Les Mis,” which many older people still think of as contemporary musicals, have replaced the postwar classic titles. These shows, he says, are now the nostalgia plays. Audiences come back to them, often after years away, often hoping to replicate the experience of having seen them the first time around. Most people going to “Les Mis” at the Cadillac Palace Theatre over the next three weeks will not be heading to the barricades for the first time.
In the case of “Phantom,” the Broadway closing notice has, of course, boosted the box office to the point where most performances now are sold out, a popularity fueled by a combination of FOMO and repeat business. “With a show like that,” Mackintosh says, “the best thing you can possibly do, marketing-wise, is say that it is coming off. Otherwise, people go on thinking it is part of the wallpaper.”
“Phantom,” he insists is, in fact, coming off (for one thing, Broadway’s Majestic Theatre is overdue for a renovation) but that doesn’t mean it won’t be back, or that “Les Misérables” won’t be back, too.
The latter of Mackintosh’s Big Two has seen more change: the production now touring has been on the road for several years, and is hardly shorn of spectacle, but it is separate from the Trevor Nunn staging, replete with turntable. “Phantom” remains much as the Hal Prince production was at opening; in fact, the run has outlasted the long life of its widely beloved director. And, of course, the show was created in the pre-digital era; the various technological retrofits over the years cannot obscure the reality that “Phantom” would be produced very differently today, if it were produced at all, given the plot of sensual pursuit that stops just short of a kidnapping.
What does Mackintosh make of all of this change?
“Well,” he said, “the work has to actually exist first before someone can do a reinterpretation. Whatever people are involved in that creation, shows have to start out being great in order to last and audiences have to be attracted to the subject matter if they are going to work over time. That’s still true. COVID created a mess. But I think the pandemic also has made people appreciate the preciousness of the theater; those that still come really appreciate it and no longer take so much for granted.”
“Les Miserables” runs Feb. 15 to March 5 at the Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 W. Randolph St.; tickets and more information at 800-775-2000 and broadwayinchicago.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
