When Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats unexpectedly became a potential global hit in 1981, producer Cameron Mackintosh brought in Martin McCallum, who ran an independent production company, to organize his office.
McCallum, who has died aged 73, did more than that. He helped manage Mackintosh’s overseas operations and offices in Australia and New York, and worked closely with him on the restoration and renovation of the first two of Mackintosh’s eight West End theatres, the Prince Edward and the Prince of Wales, before he started building his own theaters. way in 2003.
In the 1980s he played a major role in the success of Mackintosh’s four biggest shows: Cats, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon. Mackintosh said: “The continued success of my companies is due in no small part to the sustainable foundations that Martin so wisely laid in the 1980s and 1990s.”
At Cats, Mackintosh brought in McCallum as an advisor to help him restructure the company to enable its international rollout. The production side needed to be strengthened and he suggested that Mackintosh move Nick Allott from New London, where he was Mackintosh’s theater manager at Cats, to his then office above the Fortune Theatre; Allott became McCallum’s successor as Mackintosh’s right-hand man and remained so until retiring from contention in 2023. Allott recognized how McCallum had, importantly, found ways to finance American tours and keep them running efficiently.
While at Mackintosh, Martin was a proactive president of Solt, the Society of London Theatres, and initiated a major report examining the economic impact of West End theatre, and his time at the Donmar Warehouse (on the board from 1992-2008, and his time). chair 1996-2004) proved to be a pivotal and exciting period, as the venue was launched as an independently producing theater under the artistic direction of Sam Mendes.
He also helped Robert Noble fund Matthew Bourne’s dance company New Adventures when it was founded in 2001.
McCallum had worked in regional repertory theaters and in 1971 joined Laurence Olivier and the National Theater at the Old Vic. He already had an impressive track record as a production manager and in 1976 he supervised the technical and practical transfer to the new South Bank building.
He co-founded his company, the Production Office, with Richard Bullimore in 1978, the year of Evita’s production
that brought him a special friendship with the great American director Hal Prince, and a familiarity with Prince Edward that made him particularly well qualified to supervise Mackintosh’s required adaptation of that theater. His technical and practical knowledge of working in theater buildings was equal to that of any theater architect, and 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 with his older sister Barbara to Farnham in Surrey, where he was educated at Frensham Heights, a progressive school with a special preference for the arts, and at Guildford Technical College.
His first job, at the Farnham rep as an assistant director in 1967, paid him £1 a week. It could have been £100 as far as his father was concerned, who called all ‘art people’ ‘do-nothing-good’.
At Farnham, where he also played small roles, he changed his surname to McCallum due to Equity rules, and when the rep theater network collapsed in the late 1960s he eventually turned to lighting and designing shows.
Mackintosh acquired the Prince Edward – and Prince of Wales – theaters from Bernard Delfont in 1991 and as McCallum, now working for Mackintosh, had owned the Prince Edward (which had been a cinema and variety house known as the London Casino) ‘brought back’ ) for producer Robert Stigwood about Evita, he was well prepared for what was needed during the renovation.
The project became an architectural conversion, with McCallum working closely with architect Nick Thompson to improve the auditorium by connecting the levels with new slips (side seats) and boxes, reducing its unwieldy width and providing greater opportunities for decoration. It was – and remains – a masterpiece of renovation, and one of London’s great new homes for musical theatre.
The Prince Edward and Prince of Wales were Art Deco buildings from the 1930s. McCallum was involved in the restoration of the Prince of Wales, drawing on his involvement in two German theater projects in Stuttgart and Duisburg, involving the intervention of flying boxes and box seats in two modernist, featureless halls, and the use of metal and mesh that can enliven the front of the box if properly illuminated.
The work in the German theaters was done because Mackintosh produced that country’s premieres of Miss Saigon and Les Misérables there in the mid-1990s. He wanted them to have the improved intimacy of the Prince Edward, which had been completed in two phases by the time Mary Poppins opened in 2004, and plans to link the hall to the stage in a system of boxes and hall adaptations in the prince. of Wales, which was completed the same year. So in a sense the plan for his first two London theaters as owner was viewed in two German houses to be converted into sympathetic, sympathetic theatres.
While overseeing a tour of Cats in Australia, Martin met his third wife, Mary Ann Rolfe, a theater publicist. They married in 1989 and after Mackintosh’s professional divorce in 2003 he moved permanently to Sydney, where he designed and built his own house on Palm Beach. He also created a rustic mountainside retreat in the village of Tilba Tilba on the south coast. While serving on the board of the Sydney Theater Company (2005-2014), he became more preoccupied with the natural world.
McCallum’s three marriages ended in divorce. In 1971 he married actor Lesley Nunnerley, and they had two children, Toby and Sophie. In 1986, he married Julie Edmett, a dancer in the original Cats, and they had a daughter, Amy. With Rolfe he had two sons, Gabriel and Fabian; they divorced in 2005. He is survived by his partner of the last ten years, Gwynne Jones, a yoga teacher, and his children.
• Martin Jeffrey McCallum (Higgins), producer and manager, born April 6, 1950; died January 14, 2024