A few days before his Broadway production of ”Miss Saigon” was due to recoup its $10.9 million investment, Cameron Mackintosh was at work in Chicago, auditioning talent for the October opening of the megamusical in the Auditorium Theatre.
Seated at a long wooden table with key members of the ”Saigon” creative team flanking him, Mackintosh spent two days in a rehearsal hall in the Fine Arts Building early this month, watching and listening to about 100 hopefuls try out for the show`s 44 parts.
”Then we`ll go back to New York,” he said. ”We`ll see and hear 200 more persons there, and when it`s over, we should have the show completely cast.”
A few days later, Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil, creators of
”Les Miserables” and ”Miss Saigon,” will have a rough draft of their proposed new music drama ready for Mackintosh`s inspection; and soon after that, he will be readying ”Five Guys Named Moe,” his latest London hit, for its April 8 American premiere in New York.
In May, he`ll be off to Tokyo for the Japanese premiere of ”Miss Saigon,” where the managers of the Imperial Theatre have cleared an unprecedented 18 months for the run, anticipating another big hit in the ”Les Miserables” mold.
Back in Chicago, as construction crews in the Auditorium are installing the girders necessary to handle ”Saigon`s” heavy scenery, ticket sales by mail and phone orders already have passed the $5 million mark, more than eight months before the first preview performance Oct. 3.
This is to be the second production of ”Miss Saigon” in North America, and Mackintosh hopes it will run a year here. With a stage depth of about 65 feet, the Auditorium is better suited to handling the show`s elaborate machinery (including the famous scene of the helicopter landing on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon) than the Broadway theater in New York, where the stage runs back only about 50 feet.
Consequently, Mackintosh expects, the Chicago version will combine the best scenic elements of the New York and deep-stage London productions.
In all, Mackintosh says, ”There are only about eight theaters in North America that are able to handle a show this size.” In fact, two theaters are being specially built to house the next two ”Saigon” productions, one in Toronto, set to open in 1993, and another in Stuttgart, Germany, scheduled for its debut in 1994.
Once the full-scale productions have run their course, Mackintosh plans to mount a more compact version of the show for smaller theaters. That should take him well into the `90s, past the scheduled film version of ”Les Miserables,” past the premiere of his latest London musical comedy presentation, ”Moby Dick: A Whale of a Tale,” and on and on.
The producer attributes the incredible productivity of the Mackintosh machine to ”a large network” of offices he has set up in England, the U.S. and Australia to handle his many affairs. Among them they are able to keep the shows running efficiently. After that, Mackintosh insists, ”People just want to see the show, and that`s eventually what makes them successful-not the publicity or the marketing.”
In the case of ”Miss Saigon” in New York, the word of mouth apparently has been terrific. The show, which has grossed $33 million on Broadway, continues to play to 100 percent capacity, and for the week of Dec. 30 to Jan. 5, buoyed by New Year`s Eve prices, it took in an all-time Broadway record $837,851.
New York, where Mackintosh fought a bitter battle with Actors` Equity Association over his right to cast English actor Jonathan Pryce in the key role of the halfbreed pimp who arranges the Madame Butterfly romance between the Vietnamese heroine and her American GI lover, ”is not a place where you can have fun in working in the theater,” he believes.
Far easier, at least in casting, is the situation in Tokyo, where the entire ensemble is Japanese. This might cause some problems in differentiating between the American and Vietnamese in the musical, Mackintosh reckoned, but then the Japanese presenters told him it would be worked out very simply.
”Tall Japanese will be Americans,” they told him. ”Short Japanese will be Vietnamese.” End of problem.
