Producer Cameron Mackintosh on reviving 'Oliver!' in the West End

Producer Cameron Mackintosh has been at the top of his game for half a century, masterminding some of the world’s most successful musicals. Now he is bringing back the iconic show Oliver! with a fresh staging and an exciting young cast.

Oliver! seems rarely long-absent from the British stage, and for that credit a producer, Cameron Mackintosh, whose unstoppable career owes no small amount to this particular show.

Sure, Mackintosh birthed the 1980s British mega-musical: that era-defining quartet of shows (Cats, Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon) that put the UK musical on the international map. Before any of those came Lionel Bart’s adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel that launched the stagestruck teenager on his way toward global impresario.

We’re chatting one lunchtime in his capacious Shaftesbury Avenue office atop two of the eight theatres that make up the Delfont Mackintosh portfolio of playhouses; a separate office for Cameron Mackintosh Limited, his own production banner, occupies an elegant period building in Bedford Square.

Posters and portraits adorn the walls testifying to his stature, but talk is dominated by the show he first queued up to see with his Aunt Jean shortly after its 1960 opening at the New Theatre, now the Noël Coward.

That, of course, was Oliver!, with Ron Moody as the charismatically conniving Fagin and Georgia Brown as the woebegone but deeply warm-hearted Nancy. “From within the first number, I was completely swept away. The show had opened to an advance of £145, with the theatre owner at the New thinking it might close on the Saturday.” Instead, Mackintosh recalls, “[Oliver!] ended up taking London by storm. On opening night, a depressed Lionel [Bart] came to the theatre at the end of the show and heard a noise from which he started to run away when the management said, ‘They’re shouting, author! author!’ Here he was thinking it was going to be the flop of all time.”

Instead, the musical transferred in triumph to Broadway, spawned a film that won the Best Picture Oscar, and soon came to define Mackintosh’s life, as it continues to with its current return to the West End, this time to the Gielgud Theatre. “I was destined to look after Oliver!”, Mackintosh freely admits, having been the show’s steward for 50 years and rescuing the financially profligate Bart from poverty in the process. “I’ve supervised it around the world and know the show better than anybody – and I knew Lionel. I helped give some of his royalties back so that he could work in the last decade of his life.”

It was while studying on the technical course at the Central School of Speech and Drama that Mackintosh got a job on the first UK tour of Oliver!, helping call the production as an assistant stage manager but also appearing onstage in the show for a year as well. Richard Easton (a subsequent Tony winner on Broadway in straight plays) was Fagin opposite Marti Webb’s Nancy, and a young Phil Collins was the bullying Noah Claypole. Before he knew it, the starry-eyed Mackintosh was hooked: “I knew then that I was part of one of the greatest musicals of all time” – and his enthusiasm has only intensified now that he’s an astonishingly energetic 78.

Mackintosh, indeed, has overseen so many iterations of Oliver! that you might wonder what this title still offers by way of reinvention or surprise. In fact, he talks of this time-honoured show as something resembling a work-in-progress, with new scenes that are fresh to this airing of it, and some re-ordering of numbers, all achieved in conjunction with the musical’s director-choreographer, Matthew Bourne. (Jean-Pierre van der Spuy is on board as co-director.)

Bourne was choreographer on the lavish 1994 Oliver! directed by Sam Mendes that Mackintosh produced at the Palladium and that was itself reworked in 2009 in a version, patterned by director Rupert Goold after the Mendes version, that starred Rowan Atkinson as Fagin; previous Fagins in the Mendes production included Jonathan Pryce, Jim Dale, Robert Lindsay, and Barry Humphries.

This time round, Mackintosh has chosen to go back to square one, with a fresh staging – newly designed by Lez Brotherston – that promises a smaller, more intimate, rather darker version: show-biz razzmatazz to be sure, but also a show rooted in the inescapable realities of the iniquitous society of orphans and criminals that give the musical such texture.

The current design hews closer to Sean Kenny’s legendary in dispensing with technologically weighty set pieces in order to allow the imagination free rein. Whereas the 1994 staging, says Mackintosh, “was in many ways a theatrical version of the movie,” this go-round is “a piece of moving architecture” enhanced by the lighting design of the great Paule Constable, whom Mackintosh is pleased to have been able to employ prior to her announced retirement from the industry next year.

From a practical perspective, it was important to come up with a show that could be done in today’s forbidding financial climate. “We had to reinvent Oliver! so that people could afford to do one of our very best musicals,” says Mackintosh, who started by casting some of the children in the show as older – Billy Jenkins’s Dodger, for one – thereby limiting the need for the multiple occupants of a role that are required by the actors’ union Equity for a show involving kids. “I wanted a Dodger who was the same age as Anthony Newley in the David Lean film.” An older Dodger, says Mackintosh, lends the show “a more contemporary edge – it affects the way Fagin and Dodger interact.” Fagin here is dealing with a young man, not a sprightly kid.

He’s also bullish about his two leads, Simon Lipkin and Shanay Holmes, and their suitability for a lustrous score packed with musical theatre standards, “As Long As He Needs Me,” “I’d Do Anything,” and “Be Back Soon,” to name just three.

Lipkin, notes an admiring Mackintosh, “has made Fagin his own,” and brings to the part an awareness of “the Jewish side of Lionel’s version of the novel that is inherent in the music.” Crucial to the show’s defining part, the producer adds, “is a real sense of survival and finding joy in misery and always being quick of thought and quick on your feet.” Lipkin’s youth – at 38 he’s amongst the youngest ever to play this role – brings with it an agility that serves the production as a whole.

Holmes, in turn, played Ellen in the reimagined Miss Saigon that earned raves in Sheffield in 2023, as did its 35-year-old co-star. “Shanay was absolutely brilliant as Ellen and sang the hell out of the role, so was absolutely on my list to play Nancy,” says Mackintosh, at the same time aware that Oliver! as a title has become a draw all its own. That surely accounts at the time of our extended chat of the production having the best advance sale at any of his playhouses.

Why does Oliver! continue to enthral? “The construction of the show is actually quite brilliant in the way that it can go out of laughter and fun into darkness very very quickly and out again: that’s how it works.” Like any good parent who has in this case birthed numerous shows, Mackintosh is reluctant to play favourites.

He’s quick, for instance, to emphasise the importance to his life and work of his longtime friendship with Stephen Sondheim across the 1987 West End premiere of Follies and various revues, the latest of which, last season’s Old Friends, will transfer to New York next spring, once again starring the powerhouse duo of Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga. (A Rembrandt-worthy portrait of Sondheim hangs in the sitting room where we are chatting.) Of Old Friends, he speaks proudly of creating “a Sondheim show for the future that anyone could do” Matthew Bourne is at the helm of that one, as well, and the hope is for a Broadway extension that will allow Sondheim’s legacy to be more fully appreciated in the composer’s home city.

Then there are Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera, both ongoing in London and due to turn 40 over the next two years. (I can attest to that, having been at the first nights of both.) “Those shows rebuilt Broadway and America,” Mackintosh notes matter-of-factly, while granting a pride of place to British musicals that no one could have anticipated at the time: “The two of them have changed the world more than any shows in history.”

His enthusiasms are those of someone half his age, so it comes as something of a surprise when he talks of “needing to harness my energy.” He speaks to the importance of eating healthily, which is facilitated by the produce grown on his longtime Somerset estate, Stavordale Priory, that he shares with his partner, the photographer Michael Le Poer Trench.

But barely has he broached the topic of slowing down before he’s off again in conversation, reminding a listener of his hectic schedule this past year and next and his excitement at the gala anniversaries that await those back-to-back musical behemoths from 1985 and 1986. Small wonder Mackintosh has an abiding fondness for a musical in Oliver! that has a defining number called “Reviewing the Situation”: his has surely been a fine life, indeed.

Book Oliver! tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Cameron Mackintosh. (Photo courtesy of production) Inset: Mackintosh in rehearsals, Les Misérables, Simon Lipkin and Shanay Holmes in Oliver!, The Phantom of the Opera.

This article first appeared in the December issue of London Theatre Magazine.