Word: mackintosh
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...night that Les Miserables opened in London in October 1985, lyricist Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schonberg asked their producer, Cameron Mackintosh, if they now had an assured career in the theater. When he said yes, the two French creators told the impresario they had a new project: they wanted to update the Madama Butterfly story. This time their inspiration was not a 1,000-page Victor Hugo novel but a single news photograph of a Vietnamese mother and daughter parting at an airport. The mother had raised her child with one goal: to locate the girl's father...
...junked at a cost of $500,000. But the show was radically revamped and opened on stage in London, where it remains the town's hottest ticket. On its way to Broadway, it ran afoul of the performers' union, Actors' Equity, and assorted ethnic lobbying groups. Charges that Mackintosh had not sought out enough Asian Americans escalated into a probe of racial hiring practices on all his shows; at one point he canceled the Broadway engagement in disgust and, he now reveals, reverted Miss Saigon's rights to its authors. The battles ended, as everyone always predicted, with Broadway making...
...tally of the former champion, The Phantom of the Opera. It seems set to pay off its production cost of $10 million, also a record, by the turn of the year. In an era when many musicals run a year or two without repaying a cent of their investment, Mackintosh aims to show a profit after 36 weeks, a timetable he accomplished with Miss Saigon in London. Such claims of financial wizardry might be suspect from almost anyone else but this disarmingly frank and casual ex-stagehand. A keen intellect with a common touch, he presented four of the foremost...
...Even for Mackintosh, mounting a musical about Vietnam that recalls both the agony of defeat and the shame of abandonment -- and that ends in thwarted love and suicide -- seemed a risky business. Suppressing an impulse to premiere the show directly on Broadway, something he had never done, Mackintosh tried Miss Saigon in the West End, where theatergoing is a steadier habit and Vietnam guilt is not a local concern. He then relied on word of mouth among U.S. tourists to build up a buzz. By now it is a crescendo, enough to let him catapult Broadway's top single-show...
...deliberately left hanging. As she dies, the person holding and comforting the child is not the father nor his new wife nor an American friend on the scene but the Engineer, who has viewed the boy chiefly as a human passport to the paradise of American prosperity. Says Mackintosh: "The audience has to leave not knowing what will happen to the child. That is the truth of the world we live...