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Theater & Dance

‘Les Miz’ and Cameron Mackintosh go Hollywood

By Peter Marks,December 13, 2012

Russell Crowe, who told the makers of "Les Miserables" that… (Laurie Sparham/ )

“The cast came to us,” musical-theater impresario Cameron Mackintosh is saying, as his Manhattan production office hums with pre-gala electricity. It’s a few hours until the New York premiere of “Les Miserables,” the 2-hour-37-minute movie-spectacle version of the West End and Broadway musical that Mackintosh ushered to global success, cementing his place among the most influential producers of the English-speaking theater.

He’s explaining that he and the rest of movie’s producing team did not have to twist arms to wrangle an impressive roster of stars for the $61 million film, which opens nationwide on Christmas Day. For example, Hugh Jackman, who plays Jean Valjean — the heroic central character in Victor Hugo’s sprawling novel, set in the politically turbulent France of 1815 and beyond — “rang me” about the part, Mackintosh said. (They’d known each other since a London revival of “Oklahoma!,” in which Jackman played Curly.)

Russell Crowe inquired, too — “I’ve been stretching my voice,” the producer quotes him as remarking — and so Mackintosh set him up with tickets to refresh his memory of the stage musical and help him settle on which of the leads Crowe felt he might better be suited. “Javert’s my role,” Mackintosh says Crowe told him, referring to the single-minded gendarme who pursues the saintly, unfairly persecuted Valjean across the years.

No one earned a part without singing to the satisfaction of director Tom Hooper and the other principal architects of the film. Amanda Seyfried, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, all featured prominently in the movie, which was filmed in various locations in Britain last spring, had to prove their voices could pass muster. “They all auditioned,” says Mackintosh, “and of course it was for their own good.”

Indeed it was. Not only is the lush “Les Miserables” score by Claude-Michel Schonberg and Herbert Kretzmer notoriously challenging: Go ahead, you try singing the falsetto of “Bring Him Home.” But the actors would also be required to sing their numbers with the cameras rolling on the set, not in the cozier confines of the recording studio. “Tom was as passionate as I was about recording it live,” Mackintosh says.

And so, with show-tune geeks counting down the hours and social media awash in commentary from early screenings — “Just saw ‘Les Miz.’ When can I see ‘Les Miz’ again?” Time Out New York’s Adam Feldman posted on Facebook — Mackintosh waits for the worldwide verdicts on whether the translation of “Les Miz” to the big screen will resonate “Chicago”-style, or fizzle, a la “Rent.”

“Look, I’m a dinosaur now,” Mackintosh says, sitting in the suite of offices from which he oversees his Broadway interests. At 66, but looking a decade younger, Mackintosh is one of the last of the old-school titans, a stage producer in the truest sense of the title: an executive who makes big shows happen, rather than just emptying bank accounts into them. (Today, Broadway Playbills list dozens of “producers” for each multi-million-dollar show, but the vast majority of them are, in actuality, merely investors who are indulged by the lead producers.)

He’s most closely associated with the mega-musicals of the 1980s: “Cats” and “The Phantom of the Opera” with Andrew Lloyd Webber; “Les Miserables” and “Miss Saigon” with French musical writers Schonberg and Alain Boublil. Those collaborations brought him immense wealth and influence: His empire now includes seven theaters in London’s West End. In the ensuing years, he’s had other notable ventures, such as the long-running “Mary Poppins,” produced in tandem with Walt Disney Co., and some noteworthy failures: the Boublil-Schonberg musical “Martin Guerre,” an epic that sputtered before Broadway.

His genius is, in part, a matter of regeneration. He’s shown a singular ability to keep his enterprises alive, sometimes to Broadway’s artistic detriment, as his shows sat in the prime musical houses seemingly forever. He helped change the definition of a hit: Smashes didn’t run for two or three or four years anymore; they ran for decades. “Les Miz” lasted an astounding 6,680 Broadway performances over the course of 16 years; “Phantom” is at 10,343 performances and aiming, it seems, for infinity.