Martin McCallum obituary
When Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats unexpectedly became a potential worldwide hit in 1981, the producer Cameron Mackintosh called in Martin McCallum, who ran an independent production company, to organise 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 restoring and refurbishing the first two of Mackintosh’s eight West End theatres, the Prince Edward and the Prince of Wales, before he went his own way in 2003.
In the 1980s, he was a very big part of the success of Mackintosh’s four biggest shows: Cats, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon. Mackintosh said: “My companies’ ongoing success is in no small part due to the enduring foundations Martin laid so wisely in the 1980s and 90s.”
On Cats, Mackintosh brought in McCallum as a consultant to help him restructure the company to accommodate the international rollout. The production side needed beefing up and he suggested that Mackintosh relocate Nick Allott from the New London, where he was Mackintosh’s theatre manager on Cats, to his then offices above the Fortune theatre; Allott became McCallum’s successor as Mackintosh’s righthand man and remained so until he retired from the fray in 2023. Allott acknowledged how McCallum, importantly, had found ways of financing US tours and making them work efficiently.
While with Mackintosh, Martin was a proactive president of Solt, the Society of London Theatres, initiating a significant report that studied the economic impact of the West End theatre, and his time with the Donmar Warehouse (on the board 1992–2008, and its chair 1996-2004), proved to be a crucial and exciting period, as the venue was launched as an independent producing theatre under the artistic directorship of Sam Mendes.
He also helped Robert Noble finance Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures dance company when it was founded in 2001.
McCallum had worked in regional repertory theatres, and in 1971 joined Laurence Olivier and the National Theatre at the Old Vic. As production manager, he already had an impressive record of experience, and he supervised the technical and practical transfer to the new South Bank building in 1976.
He co-founded his company, the Production Office, with Richard Bullimore in 1978, the year of the production of Evita
that brought him a special friendship with the great US director Hal Prince, and a familiarity with the Prince Edward that made him especially well qualified to oversee the adaptation of that theatre required by Mackintosh. His technical and practical knowledge of working in theatre buildings was equal to that of any theatre architect, and crucial to Mackintosh’s project.
Born in Blackpool, Lancashire, Martin was the son of Jessie (nee Lamb) and Raymond Higgins, a greengrocer. 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 bias in the arts, and Guildford Technical College.
His first job, at the Farnham rep as an assistant stage manager in 1967, paid him £1 a week. It could have been £100 as far as his father was concerned, who dubbed all “arts people” ne’er-do-wells.
At Farnham, where he also played small parts, he changed his surname to McCallum because of Equity rules and, as the network of rep theatres disintegrated in the late 1960s, he ended up lighting and designing shows.
Mackintosh acquired the Prince Edward – and the Prince of Wales – theatres from Bernard Delfont in 1991 and as McCallum, now working for Mackintosh, had “brought back” the Prince Edward (which had been a cinema and a variety house known as the London Casino) for the producer Robert Stigwood on Evita, he was well primed in what was required in the refurbishment.
The project became an architectural rebuild, with McCallum working closely with the architect Nick Thompson on improving the auditorium by linking the levels with new slips (side seats) and boxes, reducing the ungainly width and creating more opportunities for decoration. It was – and remains – a masterpiece of renovation, and one of the great new houses for musical theatre in London.
The Prince Edward and Prince of Wales were 1930s art deco buildings. McCallum was involved in the restoration of the Prince of Wales to the extent of drawing on his involvement in two German theatre projects in Stuttgart and Duisburg, which featured the intervention of flying boxes and loge seats in two modernist, featureless halls, and the use of metal and mesh that could enliven the box fronts when appropriately lit.
The work in the German theatres was done because, in the mid-1990s, Mackintosh was producing in them that country’s premieres of Miss Saigon and Les Misérables. 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 the plans for linking the auditorium to the stage in a system of boxes and auditorium adjustments in the Prince of Wales, which was completed in the same year. So, in a sense, the plan for his first two London theatres as an owner was previewed in two German houses that needed to be remodelled as congenial, sympathetic theatres.
While supervising a tour of Cats in Australia, Martin met his third wife, Mary Ann Rolfe, a theatre publicist. They married in 1989 and, after the professional separation from Mackintosh in 2003, he moved permanently to Sydney, where he designed and built his own house on Palm Beach. He also created a rustic retreat on the mountainside in the village of Tilba Tilba on the south coast. Though he served on the board of the Sydney Theatre Company (2005-14), he became more taken up with the natural world.
McCallum’s three marriages ended in divorce. In 1971 he married the 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 decade, Gwynne Jones, a yoga teacher, and his children.
• Martin Jeffrey McCallum (Higgins), producer and manager, born 6 April 1950; died 14 January 2024
