I have arrived at the London office of theatre producer Kenny Wax to talk about theatre. He has a new musical about to have its world premiere in the West End but instead of the hard sell you might expect of a producer with a show to promote he gives a somewhat comprehensive history of Manchester’s Jewish community.
“We were an Ashkenazi family, as it happens,” he says sitting at his desk next to a bare brick wall that is festooned with photos and posters of the hit shows that have punctuated an illustrious career. There are pictures of Six, the wives of Henry VIII musical by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, and yet more of the multi award-winning pratfall-fest that is The Play That Goes Wrong. On the floor at the bottom, seemingly not yet allocated a space, is the MBE he was awarded this year for services to charity and the arts.
Producer Kenny Wax
“But in Didsbury my great grandfather was shomer Shabbat,” continues Wax. “The closest shul to him was the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in Queens Road [now Queenston Road]. So I was barmitzvahed in a black silk top hat,” says the 56-year-old.
What an omen. One of the shows on Wax’s wall of fame is his 2011 production of Top Hat, the musical that was brimful of Irving Berlin and although it was newly written immediately felt like it was a lost classic. It won three Olivier Awards.
“All the Jews who were in central Manchester and the Broughton Parks and the Prestwiches, they started to go to the inner Manchester suburbs such as Didsbury,” continues Wax. “So that’s where my grandparents went too.”
The chat could have continued in this enjoyable vein for much longer. But something about the air of efficiency in Wax’s Holborn office turns the conversation to matters theatrical. The sterile thrum of tapping keyboards is the soundtrack of a well-oiled machine that is behind Why Am I So Single?, the second musical by Marlow and Moss which opens this week. Six was coaxed by Wax into becoming a smash hit. Can he do it again? The songs, he promises, are fabulous.
“So this lot run shows and manage them,” explains Wax gesticulating towards a group of about ten people on the other side of a glass wall. “General manager, production coordinator, production assistants. But over there,” he adds as his arm sweeps to the other side of the open-plan office, “ is the Mischief Worldwide company. That’s licensing, and that’s marketing.”
It is here that a part of me expects something calamitous to happen. Perhaps someone carrying a cup of coffee will trip causing a chain reaction that lays waste to the entire office. This is the kind of thing that happens in a Mischief production, the series of shows that began with the Olivier and then Tony-winning The Play That Goes Wrong in which an am-dram group find themselves performing in the West End and are beset by every imaginable thing that can go wrong in a play.
The show spawned other Goes Wrong comedies of which it can be said that they are the only shows in the West End that are part of a Marvel-like franchise. Except that here, the superpower is laughter caused by an extreme form of haplessness.
“It is quite unique,” agrees Wax. “We’ve done The Play That Goes Wrong, Peter Pan Goes Wrong, A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong and The Nativity Goes Wrong.” Rarely for theatre comedies the Goes Wrong stage format has also been adapted by the BBC for multiple primetime TV shows. Sophisticated in the Stoppardian sense they are not. Funny in the laugh-out-loud sense they most certainly are.
I sat in on the rehearsals of the Peter Pan show before it premiered in 2013. There was an air of calm professionalism on that occasion too but as the actor playing Pan got (intentionally) stuck while flying through a window, the mood was pierced by my snorts of suppressed laughter until I just couldn’t hold it in any more and guffawed like a buffoon.
“You’ve just got to promise something quite good and quite fun,” says Wax, reducing what makes his shows work to a single sentence. “The elevator pitch for Six is the six wives of Henry VIII as a modern day pop concert.” In Why Am I So Single? Marlow and Moss have written about themselves, as in written about the experience of looking for an elusive subject for their “tricky” second musical and realising that the subject is them.
“Toby and Lucy, [Cambridge] students when we found them, are now Tony award-winning, coveted and write pop songs. They are a kind of cultural icon of their generation. And I’m sort of seen as their parent which is awful really because they have lovely parents.”
This what you might call nurturing side of Wax’s operation becomes a recurring theme during our conversation. Sure, other commercial producers have their outreach programmes and charity donations. But with Wax, the artists are seen more as family than as talent to be exploited. In an era in which producers are being criticised for charging hundreds of pounds for tickets, he takes a different approach.
“I don’t have a hard-nosed attitude to the industry,” he says when I ask where this caring side comes from.
“To me it is not to me about how much money we can make. It’s genuinely about how cheap can we make the tickets and still make it work. Other producers might, with a week to go on a run, charge £225 for a ticket. For me it’s totally different. For me, it’s about how cheap can we make the show for it to sell out it and give everyone a great time.”
Yes, but there is also something philanthropic about the way Wax defines his priorities. Tickets are priced so that pretty much everyone can afford the show. “I suppose it’s like a socialist approach,” he admits. “I just feel that we are literally all the same. You know, a nurse on 25 grand a year doing a job that is so much more important than the job that we do here. Every person has their own place in society. But just because people have had success, it doesn’t mean they’re any better.”
After the successes of Six and The Play That Goes Wrong in New York Wax is certainly one of the successes. He could retire. And he seems to be toying with the idea. “I have loved it,” he says of the theatre world, using the past tense as if his love of producing theatre is not quite as unconditional as it once was.
“It’s getting harder and harder,” he admits. “Attitudes have changed. Young casts can be high maintenance. The HR side is really tough. To get young people to think they’re not being ripped off and exploited, is really tough. We don’t just employ them and sign a contract. We really look after them.”
One suspects however that there are just too many good Kenny Wax shows in the drawer to retire. After Why Am I So Single? is up and running Wax will probably turn to Top Hat. Not the one he wore to his bar mitzvah, but the musical, which he hopes will be revived at Chichester next summer.
Why Am I So Single? is at The
Garrick Theatre, London
thegarricktheatre.co.uk
