by When Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats became an unexpected worldwide success in 1981, producer Cameron Mackintosh asked 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 refurbishment and refurbishment of the first two of Mackintosh’s eight West End theatres, the Prince Edward and Prince of Wales, before he went on his own. in 2003.
In the 1980s, he was instrumental in the success of Mackintosh’s four biggest shows: Cats, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon. McIntosh said: “The continued success of my companies is largely due to the lasting foundations that Martin so wisely laid in the 1980s and 90s.”
On Cats, McIntosh brought in McCallum as a consultant to help restructure the company to accommodate the international rollout. The production side needed to be nurtured and he suggested that Mackintosh move Nick Allott from the New London, where he was Mackintosh’s theater manager on Cats, to his then offices above the Fortune Theatre; Allott succeeded McCallum as McIntosh’s right-hand man and remained so until he retired from the fight in 2023. Allott admitted that McCallum, importantly, had found ways to tour the US to finance and operate them effectively.
While with Mackintosh, Martin was a proactive president of Solt, the Society of London Theatres, starting a landmark report that studied the economic impact of West End theatre, and his time with the Donmar Warehouse ( on the board 1992–2008, and his time). chairman 1996-2004), it was a crucial and exciting period, as the center was launched as an independent production theater under the artistic direction of Sam Mendes.
He also helped Robert Noble fund Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures dance company when it was founded in 2001.
McCallum worked in regional theaters, and in 1971 he joined Laurence Olivier and the National Theater at the Old Vic. As a production manager, he already had great experience, and oversaw the technical and practical move to the new South Bank building in 1976.
He co-founded his company, the Production Office, with Richard Bullimore in 1978, the year Evita was produced
which brought him a special friendship with the great US director, Hal Prince, and a familiarity with Prince Edward that made him eminently qualified to oversee the theatrical adaptation that Mackintosh needed. His technical and practical knowledge of working in theater buildings was equal to that of any theater architect, and vital to Mackintosh’s project.
Born in Blackpool, Lancashire, Martin was the son of Jessie (née Lamb) and Raymond Higgins, a green grocer. The family, with his older sister Barbara, moved south from Manchester to Farnham in Surrey, where he was educated at Frensham Heights, a progressive school with a special bent in the arts, and Guildford Technical College.
He was paid £1 a week, representing Farnham as assistant stage manager in 1967. It could be £100 as far as his father was concerned, who called the “ne’er-do-wells” all arts people.
At Farnham, where he also played bit parts, he changed his surname to McCallum because of Equity rules and, as the network of representative theaters closed in the late 1960s, he ended up lighting and designing shows .
Mackintosh bought the Prince Edward – and Prince of Wales – theaters from Bernard Delfont in 1991 and because McCallum, who now works for Mackintosh, had “given back” the Prince Edward (which was a cinema and variety house on (known as the London Casino. ) to the producer Robert Stigwood on Evita, he was very impressed with what was needed in the restoration.
The project was an architectural reconstruction, with McCallum working closely with architect Nick Thompson to improve the auditorium by connecting the levels with new slips (side seats) and boxes, reducing the ungainly width and creating more opportunities decorations. It was – and still is – a masterpiece of restoration and one of the great new houses for musical theater in London.
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 as much as he drew on his involvement in two German theater projects in Stuttgart and Duisburg, which showed the intervention of flying boxes and loge seats in two modern halls, without features, and the use of metal and mesh that could enliven the faces of the boxes when they were properly lit.
The work was done in German theaters because, in the mid-1990s, Mackintosh was showing in that country for the first time Miss Saigon and Les Misérables. He wanted the improved intimacy of the Prince Edward, which was completed in two stages by the time Mary Poppins opened in 2004, and the plans to connect the auditorium to the stage in a system of boxes and listening adjustments in the Prince. of Wales, which was completed in the same year. So, in a way, the plan for his first two theaters in London was previewed as an owner in two German houses that needed to be remodeled as sympathetic, sympathetic theaters.
While supervising a tour of Cats in Australia, Martin met his third wife, Mary Ann Rolfe, a theater publicist. They married in 1989 and, following a professional separation from McIntosh in 2003, he moved permanently to Sydney, where he designed and built his own home on Palm Beach. He also created a rural retreat on the side of the mountain in the village of Tilba Tilba on the south coast. While on the board of the Sydney Theater Company (2005-14), he became more in touch with nature.
McCallum’s three marriages ended in divorce. In 1971 he married the actress 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 ten years, Gwynne Jones, a yoga teacher, and their children.
• Martin Jeffrey McCallum (Higgins), producer and manager, born 6 April 1950; he died 14 January 2024
