Hey, big spender
Patrick Boyle
HEY MR PRODUCER by Sheridan Morley and Ruth Leo Weidenfeld, £25, pp. 192 Ilove musicals. Even the bad ones inspired moments or something that m the evening worthwhile. Yet it has 1 been fashionable among the arts-lov intelligentsia to be snooty about them, p ticularly if the music is composed b Andrew Lloyd Webber. They are regarde as inconsequential, middlebrow entertain ment, popular with Radio 2 listeners an coach parti4 from Birmingham, confec tions designed to please the gay communi ty, New York Jews and Women's Institute members from the shires. In music shops, songs from musicals come under the head- ing of 'Easy Listening'. Whoe pr admitted their taste in music to be Easy .steni Amazingly, there still people who believe musicals, like inese meals, to be all more or less the sas — slight romantic plots, interrupted by s gs, dollops of sen- timent, lightweight jolles and a line of poofters prancing about in the background. In fact, modern musicals have long since ceased to be anything like that. Crazy for You is the only recent one to fit that description, and that was a slick pastiche of a Thirties musical comedy and a celebra- tion of Gershwin's glorious songs. Far from being similar to one another, the modern musical can only hope to succeed by being original. Ever since Oklahoma and Pal Joey in the 1940s, every composer, lyricist and impresario scours libraries and newspapers for subject matter that is different. Musi- cals nowadays must strive to break new ground, or, as Sheridan Morley and Ruth Leon say of Cameron Mackintosh's work, to 'redefine the limits of musical theatre'. Stephen Sondheim, with the likes of Pacific Overtures or Sweeny Todd or Sunday in the Park with George, seems to glory in choos- ing subjects that are self-evidently unsuit- able for adaptation to a musical. In contrast to the popular output from Holly- wood, which thrives on continually rework- ing the same plots and repeating the same movie titles, the musical world has no My Fair Lady Returns or Guys and Dolls II or The Sound of More Music (Grease II was a film and doesn't count).
Far from being simple and undemand- ing, a good musical is intricate and cora- pkx. It is about the matching — or, in some cases, mismatching — of half a dozen egos and talents. It is about the welding together of many disparate elements songs, sets, theatres, choreography, lyrics, writers, actors, singers, musicians, costumes — and the elusive trick is to get the whole unwieldy contraption airborne. Inevitably, most prototypes persist in bumping along the ground, offering only brief glimpses of the ideas that inspired them. But when one really takes off, it is a most exciting thing. It transports you onto another level. Only opera at its best can also do that for you.
One thing that distinguishes the major musical from other theatrical productions is the greater financial risk involved in stag- ing one. Unlike the offerings from other performing arts, a musical is seldom a modest success or a marginal failure. It is either a hit, a mega-hit or a complete disaster. Most, of course, are disasters. Whatever anyone may tell you after the event, nobody really knows what story or combination of talents will result in suc- cess. Even after the first night when the reviles have appeared in the papers, you can ffill be wrong. Both Cats and Les Mis- erables were slated by most of the critics and yet they emerged as the most success- fulir of musicals in theatre history. j C eron Mackintosh was — and still is — t producer of Cats and Les Miserables, and Sheridan Morley and Ruth Leon have written a eulogistic text for an attractively illustrated book about his work. It is the story of a Scotsman who loved musicals, backed his own judgment and took huge financial risks. He went on to produce two other mega-hits, Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon. He spent £3.6 million on audi- tions and preparations for Miss Saigon before he had presented a single perfor- mance. More recently, he ran into trouble with Moby Dick and Martin Guerre, but he has not yet accepted defeat on Martin Guerre. It now looks as if he and its authors, Boublil and Schonberg, have made the necessary changes and plan to relaunch it and bring it back as a hit. According to a Sunday Times survey, he is the 39th richest man in Britain, which only means you are more likely to read about him in the business section than in the arts pages.
Hey Mr Producer (the title is taken from a line from Sondheim's Follies and was made to rhyme with 'I'm talking to you, sir') was also the name of a recent star- studded gala concert staged to honour Mackintosh's work. However, I don't think Morley and Leon's book will make a good musical. Like other life stories of famous producers/impresarios (Barnum or Mack and Mable, for instance) it follows a pre- dictable pattern — the kid from a modest background determined to break into show business, the hard knocks, the lessons learnt on the way, the single-minded vision, the first great success followed by fame and fortune. In this story, there isn't even any love interest, but I suppose that might be a welcome change. There are cer- tainly great opportunities for spectacular sets and well loved songs, but, as all musi- cal lovers have now come to appreciate, it is the originality of the concept and the quality of 'the book' that usually determine the show's fate.
But again, who knows what makes a suc- cessful musical? Who but Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber would have backed a plot- less and dated book of poems about cats? And a love story set in Vietnam doesn't seem an obvious winner. At the same time, it's worth remembering that Mackintosh also put his faith in Moby Dick.
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