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An Interview With Cameron Mackintosh

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"Andrew rang me up to come to just meet him and have a chat at the beginning of 1980. Um, we chatted about everything - about what we believed the musical theatre was, what it lacked in this country, in England, and what it had in America; who were the good directors, how difficult it was to find directors of musicals. Um, and at the end of an extremely, um, "healthy" afternoon, we slid back to Andrew's apartment, and he played me some of the songs he'd set to T.S. Eliot's poems.

"That's all it was at that point. It was a collection of settings that he'd added to over the year, he probably had about nine or ten at this time. It was an idea that he'd had that somehow there was a theatrical show to be made out of T.S. Eliot's poems. And everyone else in the business that he played them to thought he was certifiable, and I suppose I was the last living person in this country that he hadn't played them to. Um, but I immediately saw and shared Andrew's enthusiasm, though neither of us had a hell of an idea of what it could turn out to be. Um, I said, 'Look, there is something there. Um, we should do something with it.' In fact, our first thoughts were that we would do it as a sort of double bill, um, with, um, another piece of Andrew's, which was the Variation album- as one act, and the second act being these poems, perhaps done like a modern facade, with a singer singing the songs, and dancers acting out the poems. And we- between us, we sort of set this idea up and asked every known ballet company here and in America if they'd be interested, and they all said, 'No, this Cats idea is absolutely ghastly, but we might like to do Variations at some point as part of a triple bill.' So, after about three or four months of rejection, we chatted on about it, and Andrew went, 'To Hell with all of them. I'm gonna just get some performers together, and put them on stools at Sydmonton, and we'll sing it and see what happens.'

"In the meantime, um, I got to thinking, 'who on Earth could make a stage show out of T.S. Eliot's poems and Andrew's music?' And the only person that I thought could, who I knew slightly, was in fact Trevor Nunn, who was then running, hugely successfully, the Royal Shakespeare Company. And I knew him really through my relationship with Gillian Lynne, becuase Gillian had done several shows for me, and she'd also worked in recent times with Trevor. So I sort of thought out, well, while Andrew is sorting out Sydmonton, I would see if I could get Andrew and Trevor - who I don't believe had met at that point - and I organized for them to have a meeting at Trevor's office. And Trevor rang me up afterwards and said what a marvelous time he'd had meeting with Andrew, and what an awful shame it was that the only idea Andrew had come up with was the only bad idea Andrew ever had, as he desperately wanted to work with Andrew! Um, however, that was just the start, um, and Trevor was intrigued and wanted to be kept in touch about it, and Gillian very much saw the possibilities of the show, particularly from a choreographic point of view.

"As we prepared for Sydmonton, Valerie Eliot appeared into our lives. And she came down to Sydmonton to see the concert, and that was a major turning point in the creative life of the show for two reasons: One is that for the first time she heard the kind of music Andrew was putting to her husband's poems and was completely bowled over by it. I remember her enthusiasm at the end of the concert. She said, 'God, Andrew completely understood what Tom always wanted. And everyone else always thought it was twee, but Andrew has made it street and exciting, and, you know, that's just what Tom would have wanted.' And out of her voluminous handbag, kept bringing scraps of poems and stuff that had been hidden. [laughs] God knows where it had been hidden in the house. And out of these scraps of poems and other characters that had not been in the published book came the germ that persuaded Trevor, or allowed Trevor to persuade himself that he was the right person to do this. And it was then, shortly after that, that he stumbled on the key lines which, for him, gave the show the 'cat's cradle' that has made it work so brilliantly, which was the little quatrain about, 'Up, up, above the Russel Hotel, up, up, to the Heaviside Layer,' and the idea of tying that with an unpublished poem of 'Grizabella, The Glamour Cat'- which became the character that was outside the tribe and was coming back- and therefore, it was very, very simple. And it's its simplicity which is it's strength which allowed the theatrical magic to be conjured up.

"Once I knew that Trevor was finally committed to the show, I obviously started to look for spaces that it could go. And no one was thinking of the New London, where it ended up at the time, for the simple reason that it wasn't a theatre. It was a television studio at the time, and they were doing all sorts of things there. But one day I was in my office, and Andrew rang me. And he'd just gone to do This Is Your Life, or This Is Certainly the First Bit of Your Life. And he rang me, terribly excited, and said, 'Look, you must come and see this!' And he said, 'Standing on this stage, I think it could be the most marvelous place for Cats.' And I remember saying to them all, 'Look, the only reason to come to this white elephant of a theatre is if you designed a show that can only go here and can't go anywhere else.' And remarkably quickly, Trevor and John Napier came up with the brilliant, um, [sic] conceit of having this larger-than-life rubbish dump giving the show its scale. And when Andrew and I went to see the set, we were completely blown away by it.

"During the time that the show was getting into production and going into rehersal, I mean, it was very, very hard raising the money. Um, I think in the business, everyone this is, this could be the bomb of the year. I mean, you know, it had Trevor Nunn, who had never done anything outside the subsidized theatre, let alone a musical; Andrew setting quaint poems as the libretto; me, a sort of up-and-coming, but very much untried person, doing- I'd never done a big, new musical; Gillian Lynne, who was associated very much with the old-fashioned musicals of the 50's and 60's; and John Napier, who'd really not done a musical at this point, and had done lots of incredibly stylish stuff for the R.S.C., but again, wasn't known for giving punters a great ride. Um, so we had everything going against it, and dragging 750 pounds here and there was a nightmare. There was one moment I offered a quarter of the capital whilst we were in rehersal, to two very famous producers in America. [laughs] And we gave them incredible terms, and they turned it down flat. So the money came from people from under mattresses who somehow believed in us. People who had no money, a lot of it. It was...it was absolutely extraordinary.

"Once the set had been built, I suddenly got a call saying that the New London Theatre had pulled out; they didn't want to take Cats. And I hurriedly put together a meeting with the whole board of the theatre that owned it. And Andrew was there, and we showed them the model, and how it would be impossible for us to now move it to another theatre because it was absolutely designed to fit that space. And after two hours of haggling, hugely aided by Bernie Delfont- Lord Delfont, who wanted to make it happen, but had to persuade his board members to change its mind - we hammered a deal. But it was a deal that had a bit of a price. They didn't mind if it flopped in 12 weeks. What they didn't want it to do was struggle on for a few months. Then they would loose all their bookings. So, that they wanted either a quick flop or a big hit. And to subsidize them for that, they demanded an extra 75,000 pounds - which was a lot of money in those days - um, to guarantee that if it came off, I think, after- before 16 weeks or something like that, that that money would have to be forfeited. Well, at this point, Andrew and I were still struggling to raise the money, and, uh, in fact, we were still raising money during the previews. So there was no one, as I didn't have any money at the time, and there was no one other than Andrew to actually say, 'Yes, I'll stand for the 75,000.' And, of course, we did a little deal with Andrew that was necessary to pay for this... um, faith, and I would probably think that that's one of the best investments anyone could ever have made in their life. But, you know, good on him for doing it at the time.

"Judi Dench had two imprints on the show. One was giving us the time to get it right, and the other is because of her relationship with Trevor Nunn, putting together this cast, who had no parts, there were no scripts, you know, it was just the poems, and you had to persuade people who were used to playing leads to play in an ensemble and to play as cast. And all you could do is promise them two moments in the evening. And Judi said, 'I trust Trevor implicitly. I will do it.' And the moment Judi Dench said, 'I'll play as cast and I'll just accept the two bits that you give me,' everyone else fell into place... One cannot underestimate - particularly in those days, when there was, wasn't much talent around - I mean, the talent pool is huge now in this country, but it wasn't then. You could barely pull a cast together for one good show, let alone ten - that she helped us immeasurably.

"The show, when it got into production, I mean, basically, its first run through, I mean complete, non-stop run through, was the first preview. None of us had any idea how it was gonna go. We had a reasonable advance, but nothing spectacular at all. I mean, it would have dribbled away in a few weeks if the audience hadn't liked it. The first preview went, actually, pretty well, considering half the lighting wasn't there and the show was quite long and everything. And bits that Andrew and I thought that we were going to get stoned in the street for the audience lapped up and they were some of the highlights of the evening. And we sat there going, 'What do we know?' And it was, it was bedlam. The second night didn't. I, I think it was a charity or something like that... uh, it was a bit leaden. And you could see gleeful folk rushing to the phones at the interval, saying, 'It's a catastrophe! It's really terrible'. And... so pleased.

"Um, theatre's a wonderful place. There was one terrible moment when someone in the circle shouted 'Rubbish!', like that. And Andrew and I cowered in the back, and we met at the interval and we just sat in the corner going, 'This could be one of the worst nights of our life, couldn't it?' And we had lots and lots to drink. And we then discovered that, uh, in fact, it was someone who was drunk himself...and uh, thought they were being clever about the, the set. But, you know, considering everything, and considering you know, we'd just lost Judi Dench ten days before the first preview, and Elaine Paige wonderfully and bravely stepped into the fray, and sort of went on with four hours rehersal, and um, not knowing what her big song was... I mean, at one point, the song was called 'Good Times' and, um, written by, um, I think Don Black wrote 'Good Times', was the first title of 'Memory' in Cats. And then we had the two versions of Tim Rice and, um, Trevor Nunn, both working in different corners, trying to deliver it. And, um, so poor Elaine, finally, - on the night before the first preview, she said, 'I don't care which one I do, but this is the one I'm singing tomorrow night!' And so she went on, and I think, sang Tim's version on the first preview, and then the second preview, uh, she did Trevor's version.

"However, by the Saturday night, the show had started to come together much more, in a way that it was permanently coming together, as opposed to hit-or-miss. And that was the first glimmer that we got that the show really had something special about it... for the audience. I mean, we thought it was special before, but we had no idea what it was, 'cause it was unlike any other show that's ever been done before or ever will be done. It's part of, uh, that's what make it unique.

"And then, you know, basically, the word-of-mouth got stronger and stronger during the previews, but it was by no means unanimous. And the next day, we got some pretty good notices, not entirely unanimous at all, as you rarely do in a musical, but many of the key ones were things that ignited the word of mouth that was already building through the previews. Immediately after the show opened, I mean, there were queues and queues and queues, and, um, we knew we had a big success on our hands. It took us about four or five months to realize that we had a phenomena, and the first signs of it were actually not just the fact that everybody in America wanted it - which, you know, if you have a hit of this kind, you expect that - but even more interesting was that people from other parts of the world were coming over and saying, 'We'd like to do Cats, but we want to do your version of Cats,' something that had never happened in Europe. And, in fact, Vienna was the first place for it to open, um, in Europe, and it was actually a very, very good test run for New York, because, of course, the New London is a unique theatre, being in the round, and, um, we had to adapt proscenium theatres. You couldn't afford to build a complete new theatre for every production of Cats. And so we tried out a lot of the design and then John was able to perfect it for when we went to America. But I think that the simplicity that the New London gave us and the discipline of doing that original show will never, ever be eclipsed.

"The legacy of Cats to the British theatre is enormous, um, though Andrew had done Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita and, you know, Lionel Bart had done Oliver! and things like that. We'd had some successes in England, up until the point of Cats nobody felt that a song-and-dance musical could be done properly by the British. And that slayed that dragon forever, and showed, um, that the British, actually, were just as capable of doing great musicals. And, in fact, you know, the idiocy that's spoken between British musicals and American musicals, in fact there's only one thing that matters, and that's good musicals. Nobody - the audience never cares where the show comes from. And, you know, the best trade in talents is actually taking the best from wherever you get. So, I think from that point of view, um, Cats was a complete watershed into what we - to what, to what we are capable of doing as a, as a nation. And because of that - because the talent pool expanded, and therefore, the number of musicals expanded to go along with it - you know British talent is now the equal of any in the world. The show - uh, it's long term effect in the musical theatre - it proves the thing that is most important to the survival of musical theatre: that the dottiest idea, done by the strangest people, can work if it's brilliant. And, um, the theatre is about those balmy ideas coming together. And, uh, it's not about corporate planning." - Cameron Mackintosh, in the CATS DVD (Ultimate Edition) </object></layer></div></span></style></noscript></table></script></applet><script language="JavaScript" src="http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mc/mc.js"></script><script language="JavaScript" src="http://us.js2.yimg.com/us.js.yimg.com/lib/smb/js/hosting/cp/js_source/geov2_001.js"></script><script language="javascript">geovisit();</script><noscript><img src="http://visit.geocities.yahoo.com/visit.gif?us1256608383" alt="setstats" border="0" width="1" height="1"></noscript> <IMG SRC="http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=76001079&t=1256608383&f=us-w1" ALT=1 WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1>