TV REVIEW : Bravo Profiles Mackintosh, the Man Behind ‘Miss Saigon’

If you can’t be at tonight’s Broadway opening of “Miss Saigon,” try Bravo at 10 p.m.

Entirely by design, Bravo’s “South Bank Show” is running an engrossing hourlong profile of “Saigon” producer Cameron Mackintosh to coincide with the New York launching of that much-awaited, controversial show.

It’s a timely portrait of a man who has deliberately shunned the limelight, but who, having invented the highest-priced theater ticket, can be described as the shrewdest, most hard-nosed and richest producer of the past 20 years.

Segments devoted to his megahits--”Cats,” “Les Miserables,” “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Miss Saigon”--hold few surprises but fascinating statistics (including astonishing global maps of where these hits are currently making money) and snippets of interviews with such collaborators as composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and British impresario Harold Fielding.

The more illuminating sequences, though, come early, focusing on this determined Scottish lad’s youthful efforts and the succession of abysmal failures (“Anything Goes,” “The Dales,” “Trelawny,” “The Card”) that left him broke but undaunted and only tempered his resolve to succeed.

In the end, Mackintosh comes off as complex: a straight-shooter in love with musical theater, a tough and cocky negotiator armed with good instincts on which he confidently relies, a responsible innovator eager to subsidize nonprofit theater to produce musical theater classics and eager to secure the future by endowing a chair of musical theater at Oxford.

Critic Mark Steyn comments that a producer’s success lasts only as long as his taste coincides with that of the public, and that after it no longer does, he’ll lose his hold on popularity no matter what he produces.

Is Mackintosh there yet?

Unlikely.

After raking in total receipts of more than $1.5 billion as of last November, and with “Saigon” just opening in New York at $100 a pop, Mackintosh may laugh it off--all the way to the bank.