Word: mackintosh
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IMPRESARIO CAMERON MACKINTOSH made his millions (150 or so of them, in dollar terms) producing musicals of high tech, high technique and high seriousness -- Miss Saigon, Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera and Cats. He was just out for a night on the town with friends in Britain when he saw a jumping, jiving cabaret revue. It could not have been further from Mackintosh's customary taste. He favors life-and-death storytelling; Five Guys Named Moe is a wisp of a tale about a drunken lowlife cleaning up his act and winning back his lady love with...
...matter. Moments after he saw the show, a charmed Mackintosh offered to transport it from its bandbox site to the pilastered prestige of London's West End. There its exuberance and energy wedded happily with a larger space and wittier, more elaborate settings, a fantasy urban landscape in which skyscrapers look like zoot-suited people. So he decided to brave Broadway, where Five Guys Named Moe boogied in last week. It is a slight, sometimes silly but absolutely joyful experience, larkish and lighthearted and a bit like running around with a lampshade on your head...
...Guys and Dolls (1950), and a belated transfer of the off-Broadway hits March of the Falsettos (1981) and Falsettoland (1990), now paired in a single evening. In addition are three "new" musicals recycling songs by black composers: Five Guys Named Moe, produced by London impresario Cameron Mackintosh but mounted by Americans around the work of Louis Jordan; Jelly's Last Jam, featuring Jelly Roll Morton music and tap dancers Gregory Hines and Savion Glover; and The High Rollers Social and Pleasure Club, a review starring New Orleans songwriter Allen Toussaint...
This marketing affirms a musical as something special, says Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert Organization, which owns or operates 17 of Broadway's 36 theaters, including those housing Mackintosh's hits. Canny showmanship, Schoenfeld adds, gets the media to convey the same idea: "When we cut a hole in the roof of the Winter Garden for Cats, it became news in hometowns across America. Events are what the public responds to. They want a sense of occasion...
What the public truly wants is, of course, impossible to fathom -- especially when it is as diverse as the 10 million people who have seen the Big Three on Broadway or the 72.5 million who have attended worldwide. Mackintosh says, "I have no formula. Any man is lucky to be involved in one major success in a lifetime. To be involved in four defies explanation." One clear lesson does emerge. Certain theatrical tastes may be passe, certain critics disgruntled. For all the doomsaying about the Fabulous Invalid, the joy of theatergoing -- to the right show, done in the right...