When Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats unexpectedly became a potential worldwide hit in 1981, producer Cameron Mackintosh called on Martin McCallum, who ran an independent production company, to organize his office.
McCallum, who has died aged 73, did more than that. He collaborated in the management of Mackintosh’s overseas operations and offices in Australia and New York, and worked closely with him on the restoration and refurbishment of the Prince Edward and the Prince of Wales, the first two of Mackintosh’s eight West End theatres. In 2003.
He played a major role in the success of four of Mackintosh’s biggest shows in the 1980s: Cats, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon. “Much of the ongoing success of my companies owes much to the enduring foundations laid so wisely by Martin in the 1980s and 1990s,” Mackintosh said.
On Cats, Mackintosh brought on McCallum as a consultant to help restructure the company to accommodate its international rollout. The production side needed to be strengthened and he suggested that Mackintosh move Nick Allott from New London, where Mackintosh was the theater manager on Cats, to his offices above the Fortune theatre; Allott succeeded McCallum as Mackintosh’s right-hand man and remained so until his retirement from combat in 2023. More importantly, Allott acknowledged how McCallum found ways to finance US tours and run them efficiently.
While at Mackintosh Martin was a proactive Chairman of London Theater Company Solt, promoting the economic impact of West End theater and his time at the Donmar Warehouse (on the board 1992-2008 and its Chairman 1996-2004), where the venue became independent under the artistic direction of Sam Mendes. It proved to be a very important and exciting time as it was launched as a production theatre.
He also helped Robert Noble finance Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures dance company when it was founded in 2001.
McCallum worked in regional repertory theaters and in 1971 joined Laurence Olivier and the National Theater at the Old Vic. He already had impressive experience as production manager and in 1976 he oversaw the technical and practical transfer to the new South Bank building.
He founded the company Production Office with Richard Bullimore in 1978, the year Evita was produced.
This earned him a special friendship with the great US director Hal Prince and a closeness with Prince Edward; this made him particularly well qualified to oversee the adaptation of the theater that Mackintosh required. His technical and practical knowledge of working on theater buildings was equal to that of any theater architect and was crucial to Mackintosh’s project.
Born in Blackpool, Lancashire, Martin was the son of Jessie (née Lamb) and Raymond Higgins, a greengrocer. The family moved south from Manchester to Farnham in Surrey, with her older sister Barbara; He was educated at Frensham Heights, a progressive school with a particular bent on the arts, and at Guildford Technical College.
His first job as an assistant stage manager at the Farnham rep in 1967 earned him £1 a week. According to his father, who called all “art people” useless, the amount might have been £100.
At Farnham, where he also played small roles, he changed his surname to McCallum due to Equity rules, and when the network of performance theaters disbanded in the late 1960s, he left the job of lighting and designing shows.
Mackintosh bought the Prince Edward – and Prince of Wales – theaters from Bernard Delfont in 1991, and McCallum, who now works for Mackintosh, “brought back” the Prince Edward (once a cinema and entertainment house known as the London Casino). ) Producer Robert Stigwood was well prepared for what was needed in the renovation of Evita.
The project became an architectural reconstruction; McCallum worked closely with architect Nick Thompson on improving the auditorium by connecting the levels with new slides (side seats) and boxes, reducing the unwieldy width and creating more opportunities for decoration. It was, and remains, a masterpiece of renovation and one of the great new homes of musical theater in London.
Prince Edward and the Prince of Wales were art deco buildings of the 1930s. McCallum was involved in the restoration of the Prince of Wales to the extent that he was involved in two German theater projects in Stuttgart and Duisburg, which involved the intervention of flying boxes and domed seats in two modernist, featureless halls. metal and mesh that, when properly lit, can bring the box fronts to life.
Work in German theaters took place in the mid-1990s as Mackintosh premiered Miss Saigon and Les Misérables in that country. He wanted them to have the enhanced intimacy of Prince Edward, which was completed in two phases when Mary Poppins opened in 2004, and plans to connect the auditorium to the stage with a system of boxes and auditorium adjustments at the Prince. Wales, completed the same year. So, in a sense, the plan for his first two theaters in London as owner was presented as a preview in two German houses that were to be remodeled into congenial, sympathetic theatres.
While overseeing a Cats tour in Australia, Martin met his third wife, Mary Ann Rolfe, a theater publicist. They married in 1989, and after leaving Mackintosh professionally in 2003, she moved permanently to Sydney, where she designed and built her own home in Palm Beach. He also created a rustic mountainside retreat in the village of Tilba Tilba on the south coast. Although he served on the board of the Sydney Theater Company (2005-14), he became increasingly immersed in the natural world.
McCallum’s three marriages ended in divorce. He married actor Lesley Nunnerley in 1971 and they had two children, Toby and Sophie. In 1986 he married Julie Edmett, a dancer on the original Cats series, and they had a daughter named Amy. He and Rolfe had two sons, Gabriel and Fabian; They divorced in 2005. He is survived by his partner of the last decade, yoga teacher Gwynne Jones, and their children.
• Martin Jeffrey McCallum (Higgins), producer and executive, born April 6, 1950; Died January 14, 2024