Interview: Sir Cameron Mackintosh
Roll up! Roll up!
As Chichester Festival Theatre pitches its own big top and starts rehearsals for Barnum, this year’s big musical revival, Tim Bouquet talks to top international theatrical producer & West End genius Sir Cameron Mackintosh
It was a desire to tell the true story of Phineas Taylor Barnum that spurred Cameron Mackintosh to buy the rights to the musical that bears the great showman’s name, “but only on the condition that I could reconstruct it for the stage.
“The original version, which I saw with Jim Dale in New York and Michael Crawford in London, was wonderful but it was a succession of circus acts and I didn’t think it would work now.”
Composer Cy Coleman and lyricist Michael Stewart were both dead but Mark Bramble who wrote the book was still alive and he and Mackintosh set to work on the great narrative restructuring of Barnum for the 21st century.
“We found some of Michael Stewart’s cut lyrics, which was wonderful, and reinstated them. I moved songs and reprises around, rearranged them so they are quite different to how they sounded when it was first done and I re-dramatised a lot of it.”
He then made a new recording and hoped that Cy Coleman’s widow Shelby would give it her seal of approval. And the verdict? “She loved it and told me that her only sadness was that Cy was not alive to hear it.”
The new Barnum, co-produced with Chichester Festival Theatre, will show us much more than Barnum the showman. “Although best known for the Barnum and Bailey Circus, he did not go into circuses until his sixties,” Mackintosh explains.
“Before that he had entered politics in his native Connecticut and fought for the abolition of slavery and for women’s rights, set up newspapers, founded hospitals, improved the water supply and was the first person to bring opera to the masses in the shape of Jenny Lind, the ‘Swedish Nightingale’, more than 100 years before Pavarotti.”
He was also famous in his day for Barnum’s American Museum of oddities such as ‘a mammoth fat infant’, ‘Feejeee’, a creature with the head of a monkey and tail of a fish, and General Tom Thumb, ‘the smallest person that ever walked alone.’
“He could have done none of these things without his wife Chairy,” says Mackintosh. Played in the original by a young Glenn Close, “Chairy was the architect of his dreams and that relationship is a strong focus of this Barnum which tended to be glossed over in the first. All the numbers are now anchored in their rather odd-ball relationship. They were opposites. He had the big ideas, he was the gambler. She was down to earth and had the wherewithal.”
Mackintosh’s Barnum is rising Broadway star Christopher Fitzgerald. “He is a very talented actor, singer and performer and has been imbued with circus since he was five years old,” Mackintosh says. “He may not be well known here but I feel that his career is at exactly the same place that Jim Dale’s was when he did Barnum and that made him a huge star. Chris has all the qualities the part requires.”
With a terrific cast of aerialists and acrobats, actors and singers, Mackintosh’s production team is typically top of the bill. Director Timothy Sheader is Artistic Director of the Open Air Theatre Regents Park, responsible for hit shows such as Crazy For You, Into The Woods and Hello, Dolly!. Co-director and choreographer Liam Steel comes straight from the film of Les Misérables while co-choreographer Andrew Wright was Olivier-award nominated for Festival 2011’s Singin’ In The Rain.
“And when I asked the great Bill Brohn, whose theatrical career started all those years ago with Miss Saigon, to re-orchestrate and completely reinvent the score of Barnum, he said: ‘Did I tell you I started off writing music for circus?’”
Resolutely hands-on with all his shows, Cameron Mackintosh had been talking to fellow Barnum enthusiast Jonathan Church for several years about bringing it back nearly three decades after its last outing. “The fact we can do it in the Theatre in The Park was never planned but it’s the ideal venue. Pure serendipity; but I always believe in the fates and the flip of a coin is one of the themes throughout the story of Barnum.”
Reconstructing a musical spectacular about the inventor of the three-ringed circus in a vast theatrical tent has been a great journey so far for Cameron Mackintosh and his team. “We are all looking forward so much to coming to Chichester and to Follow the Band all over again.”
Barnum, Chichestre Festival Theatre, Theatre in the Park,
15 July–31 August
Box office 01243 781312
www.cft.org.uk
Photo Credit: Michael Le Poer Trench
