Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Impresario and producer of landmark British musicals including Cats, Les Misérables, Miss Saigon and The Phantom of the Opera.
On the island
Eight records
Salad Days. Oh, well, what would have happened to my life if Salad Days hadn't been written, I don't know. It was extraordinary that, you know, that that show, which I didn't really want to go and see when I was first dragged by my aunt at the age of seven, and I was so captivated by the story of a magic piano that made all London dance, that I wanted to go back on my eighth birthday, which I did.
Spike Mackintosh and his All-Stars
Ah, well, my wonderful dad, who was known in the family as Ian Mackintosh and known in the profession and most of the bars in the West End of London, as Spike Mackintosh, and he was a marvellous jazz trumpeter.
Cockaigne Overture, Op. 40 ('In London Town')
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham
It's Elgar, Cocaine Overture in London Town. I love Elgar. I just think his music is one of the great British composers. It's full of theatre, it's full of great melody, it's full of exciting bombast. In fact, it's like one of my shows, and I'm sure if I was around in that time, I'd have tried to get him to write a few.
Another show I did with Stephen was of course putting it together. We didn't do anything f with it for two or three years, and then we decided to do it off Broadway. We had a marvellous day just dreaming of who we'd love to be in it. And I can't remember which one of us said, Oh, Julianders would be fantastic and I said, Well, why don't I ask her? And I asked her, and I asked her, and I asked her. And thank God she said yes.
The 10th Anniversary All-Star Cast
Les Miserables, I mean an extraordinary show for me. This was a show brought to me by a Hungarian director with the Fren original French concept album that they had done back in nineteen eighty. And he said to me, If anyone is mad enough to have done T S Eliot's poems for cats, might take on Les Meserabes.
Well, my sixth record is the Marvellous Raw National Theatre production by Trevor Nunn and Susan Strowman of Rogers and Hammerstein's Great Oklahoma.
You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two
The musical Oliver has been part of my life since I first queued at the wonderful price, I think it was sixpence gallery or something like that at the at the new theatre in London in St Martin's Lane and I saw Lionel Bart's extraordinary musical. And recently I put together an amazing team to do a great revival.
Pie JesuFavourite
Sarah Brightman and Paul Miles-Kingston
The reason I've chosen the Piezu is that I so remember the day we were sitting round his kitchen at home, and instead of blasting me away with his super stereo, he'd just written this requiem for his father who'd died, and he wanted to write this in memory of his father, Bill.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:30I can't really think the fire has gone out of your belly for the musical, has it?
Oh, far from it. In fact, I'm busier now than I have been for ages. I'm just having to put on my shows all the way round the world. No, I mean, I've always known that I was lucky. I mean, I I thought it was quite normal for a ten-year-old to know exactly what they were going to do when they grew up. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I realized that very few people knew what they wanted to do. And luckily, I was able to do it all my life and have been and haven't had to grow up completely on the way.
Presenter asks
2:09What if somebody walks through the door and says, Okay, there's been a lot of wrangling over this for years now, but you can have Mary Poppins?
Mary Poppins looks like … it's got to be a meeting of the minds between Disney, who owned this wonderful film, and the P.L. Travers Estate, who P.L. Travers didn't particularly like the film, and she wanted something nearer the books. And my belief has always been that between the two there is a wonderful, magical, new musical to do. And you would do that. That's exactly how I do it. Of course I would. But I didn't I said new projects. I've had these rights for ten years.
Presenter asks
5:37The keepsakes
The book
Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course
Delia Smith
Everything is in Delia. ... There's not one thing that you can't go into the book to find.
The luxury
a solar-powered magimix, because therefore it comes from the sun. And will help me get through some of my recipes and make new different things whilst I'm rehearsing my penguins.
Because essentially, of course, being a producer is being very bossy. Yes? Would you confess to that?
Um, I don't know. … There's a wonderful spoof that that Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim did, send in the clowns about you, which always began, isn't he rich? And halfway through it goes, always interfering. You know, I that that's exactly what your reputation is. … Exactly. It's why I think I like cooking, you see, because it's the same thing. You get all the ingredients, if it's the way you put them together. But the important thing is not to buy pedigree dogs and bark yourself, because I mean, I've always worked with the best talents, I've been very lucky, and you've got to get the best out of them. I always believe that the authors are the ones that have the inspiration. They're inspired, and then you have to make sure that they are inspired even more to make the work even better.
Presenter asks
8:17What about your mother? What's she [like]?
My mother is the other half, and I think the other r reason that I've always been very practical in my life. My mother comes was from Malta, and she's Italian and Spanish and a little French. And she was she survived incredibly. It's quite difficult to get the stories out of her because she was there during the incredible bombing for two years of Malta and survived the most incredible hardships with her family as the blitzkrieg happened. And it's where she learnt to cook out of any scraps. And I always make the terrible joke about she used to make ratatouille out of real rats in order to feed the family. And of course she used to she didn't say she quite ate rats, but they certainly ate cats out there. It was the only way to survive. And she always used to make the family budget stretched far beyond any realms of possibility. Whereas my father would spend it down the pub.
Presenter asks
20:39What about Martin Guerre, which flopped really? I mean, a tough word flopped. And it's it's it is amazing because it was out of the same stable. There's Les Miserable and Miss Saigon, it was Boubild and Schoenberg and so on. It should have been a huge success.
Yes, I've got a feeling sev well there were several things that didn't work for that at the time. One is I think that kind of musical was already we'd had too many of them. … An operatic sung through dramatic musical. I think it had been more than ten years since we'd started out with the musicals of the eighties and of Les Meserab at that point. And also the idea of the show, which I still think is a a wonderful idea, … Was very difficult. It's a show about the seat. The whole story, and it's a true story, which is again unusual for a musical, is about the seat.
Presenter asks
23:19So come and tell me is it then dull of us we the public, I mean, the musical theatre going public to only want regurgitations, revivals, Oklahoma, my fair lady, why don't we want anything fresh and new and different?
I don't think it's dull. I think it's something that we go through. I think it's a cycle that theatre has gone through on a regular basis. I mean, in the twenties there was a whole period of going back to see the old operettas. Then you got the sort of bright young thing of the thirties and the crash came. And then there was another area of seeing old shows. And then you went into a new period with Oklahoma. And at the end of the golden era of the American musical, which is thought to be 1965 with Fiddler on the Roof, then other than the odd success, an oddball show like Chorus Line, it didn't really get him to gear until the end of the 70s with Andrew and well, with Andrew and Tim first, with … Evita. … A Vita and then shortly followed us by Andrew and myself and everyone else in the eighties.
“I thought it was quite normal for a ten-year-old to know exactly what they were going to do when they grew up. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I realized that very few people knew what they wanted to do. And luckily, I was able to do it all my life and have been and haven't had to grow up completely on the way.”
“What Katz first did was pay off all the debts that I'd tried to keep away from the bank manager for the previous twenty years. But not only did it pay off my debts, but it gave me my creative independence. That was the thing I realized it was the best. From that point on, I didn't have to have another show in order to keep the turnover going. I could actually just do the shows I wanted. And that is a privilege which very few people are blessed with.”
“Up until Martin Guerre, they assumed that these big hits came down the pike like a sausage machine. And they don't. And I think the one good thing about Martin Guerre for the whole industry was to show that actually that is not the norm. What is abnormal is to have hits like Cats, Le Miserab, Saigon and Phantom.”