Michael Cassel, show man
Michael Cassel wanted this job before he even knew what it was. Now he’s putting on the biggest show in town.
“Did I tell you what I cooked up at the Harry Potter afterparty?” asks Michael Cassel, eyes sparkling with almost childlike excitement as he details his latest project in his very grown-up corner office in Sydney’s Potts Point. The theatre producer had just returned from New York and the star-studded opening night of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway. He went to meet key people to work out how to stage the world’s hottest show in Melbourne in January, but also managed to convince someone he had never met before — actor/singer Darren Criss — to do a concert for him when he was next in Australia.
But this comes as no surprise to those who know Cassel; in fact it sums him up perfectly. The 38-year-old has been putting on shows and cajoling people to be in them, fund them, stage them and buy tickets to see them since he was eight years old. So why wouldn’t he approach a performer he knew only from binge-watching Foxtel series The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story and charm him into doing a one-off concert in Sydney when he was in town on a promotional tour that sold out in a day? It is this combination of instinct, passion and charm that has landed Cassel The Lion King, Kinky Boots, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and his biggest project to date: the billion-dollar-global juggernaut that is Harry Potter.
“I like to call him Michael Cassel: boy genius,” says Thomas Schumacher, president of Disney’s theatre arm and a giant in the entertainment industry having overseen the release of both The Lion King animated movie in 1994 and The Lion King musical in 1997. “I have known him so long, I knew him [literally] when he was a boy. And I will end up working for Michael Cassel. We will all be working for Michael Cassel. I joke that at some point in the future I will be a very very very old man in the corner and people will say, ‘Who is that? Oh, Michael knew him when he was a kid.’”
Schumacher first met Cassel in 2002 when the latter started at Disney as an assistant to then Australian managing director James Thane. Cassel had spent the previous three years under the tutelage of the late legendary promoter Harry M. Miller, who finally relented and hired Cassel years after the teenager wrote to him seeking a job. “Harry suggested I finished high school first and get in touch when I graduated,” recalls Cassel. It was one of dozens of letters Cassel wrote weekly after deciding he wanted to be a producer. It was not only unusual to have such a clear career ambition at such a young age; it was an unusual ambition in itself — many people don’t quite know what a producer actually does (the film/musical The Producers comes to the minds of most).
“I didn’t know what it meant but the one thing I could glean was that it was the guy in charge and that appealed,” Cassel tells WISH. “All I wanted from a young age was a microphone. For every birthday, I asked for a microphone. I had a collection of them. I loved performing, but I realised at the age of 11 or 12 that I wasn’t really talented. It was seeing Jesus Christ Superstar, put on by Harry M. Miller, that I realised there was a job as a producer. I went and saw that show and took the program home and would read that program in bed every night, just poring over it.”
By this point you could argue Cassel had a few years under his belt already as a producer. He would stage musicals inspired by his family’s devout viewing of Young Talent Time and recruit his brothers and his sisters in starring roles. Cassel would get his Dad to build the set, scour the house for costumes, steal his Mum’s lamps for stage lights and even involve visiting aunties and uncles. At the ripe old age of eight, he started charging people for the privilege. The family was on holiday in Brisbane for the World Expo in 1988, so Cassel put on a concert at their caravan park and charged the other holiday goers to come and watch. His parents were a bit bemused but always supportive of his elaborate endeavours. “I think partly it was, Michael is occupying himself, so off you go,” he says of his mum and dad’s reaction to his grand plans.
Cassel significantly upped the ante when he was 14, deciding he wanted to put on a Carols by Candlelight performance in his hometown of Kiama, on the NSW south coast. He wrote to the local council for permission to use the sporting field, which it granted. “I got a couple of thousand people there, it all worked and I immediately wanted to do it again,” he says. And so he did, with different productions. He got so busy he gave his high school office number as a contact point and would use the phone in the principal’s office at lunchtime to make calls to sponsors or venues.
“By the time I was 18, I got a job with Tourism Wollongong and I was employing staff,” Cassel recalls. “I would turn up to school enough to pass my subjects but the first opportunity I would have to leave early, go to a meeting, get changed out of my school uniform, I would do it. Everyone else decided they wanted to do it as well so I was employing half of the students in my year to crew my shows. I did my HSC in December and I did the big Australia Day concert in January — we had 55,000 people and it was the biggest ever concert staged in Wollongong. We had three stages and there were fireworks. So I spent all of January doing that and I started work for Harry M. Miller on January 29.”
It was at Miller’s office that Cassel learnt the art of negotiation and met Thane. An experienced executive producer of scores of musicals, Thane was hired by Disney to set up its Australian theatrical operations in 2002. He took Cassel with him as his personal assistant, but the young man was soon put in charge of running the local productions of The Lion King, in Melbourne and later in China in 2006. The 20-something had never been to China. “It was sink or swim. Career-wise it was a turning point as I was able to deliver the project from beginning to end,” he says. “Tom [Schumacher] took me out in Shanghai for lunch and said what do you want to do? And I said ultimately I want to be a producer and he said, have you ever thought about living in New York and I said, yes, absolutely. And so a couple of months later I was in New York.”
Cassel spent five years at Disney’s NYC theatrical headquarters and touring its productions all around the world, including taking The Lion King to South Africa, Brazil, Japan and The Philippines. He came home to Australia and then got the call from theatre legend Cameron Mackintosh to produce Les Miserables here with his backing. That is when Cassel decided to go out on his own and set up his own production company in 2013. He was just 33. Les Miserables ran for 19 months and took $72 million at the box office, recouping its costs in just 14 weeks. Within a year, he had convinced the producers of Broadway hits Kinky Boots and Beautiful to hand over the rights and allow him to stage the shows in Australia.
“He charms you somewhere between hel and lo,” laughs Doug McGrath, the playwright behind Beautiful. “What he conveys is utter enthusiasm and care for the material.” McGrath, who started his career as a writer on Saturday Night Live before writing and directing films (including the 1996 Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow), says what stands out about Cassel was how he took care of the creative team when they came out to Australia. This included taking everyone out on a seaplane over Sydney Harbour after they had been cooped up inside for days for technical rehearsals.
“It was very thoughtful of Michael,” McGrath says. “He didn’t take us to a restaurant on our day off, he thinks: ‘Where have they been? They have been in a dark room, so let’s go and get some sunshine!’ To me that makes him a great producer because he is thinking of other people. And you need a great producer at the helm of a show to pull it all together and get the right people and support that team in their vision. The only shows that work are the shows with a united vision.”
Two more essential ingredients for a great producer, McGrath says, are passion, which Cassel has “in abundance”, and hard work — “and he works like an ox, that guy.” These attributes were immediately recognised by the creators of Kinky Boots, who had a drink with Cassel in New York as soon as he got off the plane from Sydney. “We loved his enthusiasm,” says Daryl Roth, who had the original idea to turn a small British independent film into a Broadway show after seeing it at the Sundance Film Festival. “He had such a passion for it and we trusted him totally with the production because we weren’t there.”
It is this trust, which Cassel has spent decades building up with key producers around the world, that scored him one of the most sought after jobs in the world: staging Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in the first venue outside Broadway and London: the Princess Theatre in Melbourne. It was such a coup for the city that it was announced via tweet by Premier Daniel Andrews. The two-part five-hour play is a sequel to the books (which have sold a staggering half a billion copies) and is set 19 years later when Harry has a family of his own. The play, written in conjunction with JK Rowling, opened in London’s West End in 2016, has been sold out ever since and has scored dozens of awards.
The Harry Potter juggernaut reached Broadway in April this year and has taken the title of most expensive play in history. The average Broadway show costs $US3-5 million ($4-7m). This one, according to The New York Times, cost $US68.5m including $US33m to completely remodel the Lyric Theatre. But the investment is already being returned in spades: Cursed Child smashed box office records in its first week, with $US2.1m in ticket sales. The play has also contributed to 2017-18 being the highest attended season ever on Broadway, with 13.8 million tickets sold to 33 productions worth $US1.7 billion.
There is no underestimating the phenomenal popularity of the boy wizard among not only children but grown-ups around the world. At a preview performance of the play in New York in April, WISH was told to arrive at least 90 minutes early as there would be lengthy queues to get through security and into the Lyric — and there were. The line of fans snaked back three or four Broadway blocks and there was barely a child in sight. Instead there were adults with Harry Potter scarves tucked under their suit jacket collars or turned out in full witch or wizarding regalia. The atmosphere in the theatre was extraordinary: more than 1500 people cheering as the curtains came up, as familiar characters stepped on stage and audible gasps at the jaw-dropping special effects (WISH is still flummoxed about how it was all done).
The weight of expectations in staging such a massive production was not lost on Cassel as he sat there in the audience with his wife Camille on opening night on April 22. “It’s a bit intimidating,” he confesses. “The scale of the show is enormous. I was sitting down in that theatre, thinking, wow, this makes your heart race and we are about to realise this all in Australia.” Cassel spent the week in New York with his team (from prop supervisers to costume staff to technical directors) meeting with their key Broadway counterparts to get all the details and advice about how to pull it all off.
Meanwhile back home, sets are being built in workshops in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne, the cast has been announced, costumes fitted and rehearsals are under way. “You never want to fail but you definitely don’t want to fail on this one. You have to make sure that you have the right thinking and the time behind it to do it properly, and we do,” he says. “The pressure is on. We have talked about it for so long — first it was West End, then it was Broadway and next it is Melbourne.”
But as always with Cassel, his eye is out for the next project, the next show that will inspire and enthral him. On this trip to New York, as well as meeting his Harry Potter commitments, he saw a different Broadway production every night (Mean Girls, Dear Evan Hansen, Hamilton for starters). He is already working on Pretty Woman: the Musical and a show based on Cher’s life (both US productions) as well as vying to bring hip-hop musical Hamilton to Australian shores.
“It’s invigorating,” he says of Broadway, his eyes sparkling again with a passion that you cannot help but get caught up in. “I always come back with a long list of things to do and a million ideas. That is why the plane ride is so dangerous because you have all that time to think on the way home. And you never know where the next good idea is going to come from.”