The super-producer, celebrating his 75th birthday with a retrospective on TV, talks about the pandemic’s effect on commercial theatre – and his fury with government
Cameron Mackintosh will be as inescapable as mince pies this Christmas. An epic documentary, Cameron Mackintosh – The First 50 Years, will be aired on Sky Arts over the holiday season along with many of his most popular productions: the concert version of Les Misérables, a Royal Albert Hall staging of The Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon and the West End production of Half a Sixpence (now called Kipps). The whole MacFest – as I’m tempted to call it – marks his 75th birthday and the documentary is dedicated to Stephen Sondheim.
I went to see Mackintosh at his London flat on a Friday in late November and, within hours of our meeting, the world heard of Sondheim’s death. For Mackintosh, who had his first big success as a producer in 1976 with a revue called Side by Side by Sondheim, the news was especially sad and he was on the phone the next morning to express his feelings: “I was talking to Steve the Monday before he died and he was very on the ball. He’d been to see Company and Assassins on Broadway, told me he liked the Spielberg film of West Side Story and was working on a new show. When I asked how it was going, he said it was a third started and promised me that he would ‘finish the hat’. That wasn’t to be.”
