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Dateline: 15th January, 2003 £30m Revamp for Mackintosh Theatres Cameron Mackintosh is to spend £30 revamping his theatres, he announced this week. The first to be refurbished will be the Prince of Wales, which will be improved both internally and externally. Front-of-house facilities will be improved and the 1,100-seater auditorium refurbished, while the frontage will also be updated and improved. The total cost of the refurbishment to the Prince of Wales will be £7m. The work will begin during the coming summer, after Cliff - The Musical ends its run, and will be completed next year, although no specific date has been given for its repoening. Delfont Mackintosh also owns that Prince Edward (home of Mamma Mia!) and over the next four years will resume control of five other West End theatres - Strand, Albery, Wyndham's, Queen's and Gielgud - which will also be refurbished. In his announcement Mackintosh renewed his attack on the state of the West End and suggested that the government should appoint a "tsar" who would have responsibility for the development of the whole area. "I don't care what the person's title is," he said, "but someone needs the authority to bring everything together." The main problem, he believes, is that responsibility for the West End is split between Westminster Council, Camden Council and the Mayor's Office, which means that overall planning is almost impossible. The trouble is, he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, "London is a real effort, it doesn't work properly, that's what visitors are feeling about it. "And my friends who live in London are frustrated by what they see as a lack of pulling together to bring London back to what it is - essentially one of the greatest cities in the world." He pointed to the vast improvements to Times Square and 42nd Street brought about by New York mayor Giuliani. "What they realised in New York was that had to completely redo Time Square and redo 42nd Street to turn it from a seedy place into a centre of entertainment. That is why in the last five to eight years, Broadway has really resurged and people want to go there." London, he says, is the opposite, and something must be done as a matter of urgency. hence his call for a "West End Tsar." Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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