Forty Years On With Cameron Mack
Next Tuesday Sir Cameron Mackintosh will celebrate forty years to the very day in theatrical management with a big party in the Prince of Wales Theatre. His name first appeared on a poster announcing Kenton Theatre Summer Season, which opened on 26 June 1967 with The Reluctant Debutante by William Douglas Home.
He soon learned the trick of opening bank accounts in far flung places like Jersey and Aberdeen, so that cheques would take that much longer to clear and he could buy himself three or four days of box-office income before they started to bounce.
He was in the West End by 1969 (a revival of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes at the old Saville lost every penny he and his friends had invested). Side by Side by Sondheim was his first hit in 1976, and Cats followed in 1981. The rest is history.
The great thing about Cameron is that he knows how to work hard and he knows how to enjoy himself. And many of his closest friends — the agent Barry Burnett, the actor Christopher Biggins, the singer Julia McKenzie, his photographer partner Michael LePoer Trench — have stuck with him through thick and thin. His office, too, is fairly stable, as they’ve all had such a good time together for so long.
I’m sorry I fell out with Cameron (something I said in a review, natch) when I was doing my book on Andrew Lloyd Webber. His testimony to their remarkable partnership is a big minus in the tome. One of his colleagues, the Phantom designer, now sadly deceased, Maria Bjornson, once said that Lloyd Webber was sort of “in love” with three men, whose opinions he always wanted on everything: Trevor Nunn, Tim Rice….and Cameron.
In the first flush of their success, Cameron and ALW were made for each other, if not indeed mad for each other, and their parting of the ways, inevitable, but regrettable, is as big a loss to our theatre as was the split between ALW and Rice.
I’ve always treasured Cameron’s pugnacity and naughtiness. When I flayed Song and Dance at the Palace, my copy had one mollifying phrase: “I quite like the blond boy who dances cartwheels.” Within a few hours of the newspapers hitting the streets, Cameron had got the poster boys at De Wynters to mock up a display bill with that phrase plastered all over it in huge type, and sent it round by courier. That’s what I call real style in adversity, vengeful wittiness when wounded.
We still don’t give Cameron enough credit for what he’s done, not only on the West End stage and in the fabric of his theatres — the Novello and the Noel Coward, the Prince Edward and the Prince of Wales, are all masterpieces of philanthropic restoration; but also in his support of new writing and composition schemes, and fringe theatres like the Tricyle and the Almeida. They’ve been together now for forty years, the London theatre and Cameron; it don’t seem a day too long. Happy Anniversary!