Meet John Frost, the man behind dozens of hit Australian musicals

HE’S the king of live entertainment with an uncanny ability to pick hit shows. What is John Frost’s secret?

Golden touch: John Frost. Picture: Ellis Parrinder

IF YOU were to look in on him now, in his corner office overlooking Sydney’s heart, you’d find a big man, a successful man; a powerful producer with Australian theatre’s biggest names at his beck and call, Tony awards on the ­mantelpiece and the ability to command respect on Broadway and in the West End. Suddenly John Frost, 61, interrupts himself with a delighted boyish giggle. In a blink you see a scrappy nine-year-old housing-commission kid putting on a show in his suburban Adelaide back yard, stage curtains on the washing line, his stutter-prone Aunt Mary singing The Rain in Spain from My Fair Lady like a trouper. Blink again and the kid’s 13, loitering in the foyer of Adelaide’s Her Majesty’s Theatre three Saturdays in a row just to watch the curtain come down on a musical called The Great Waltz. And then, at 15, there he is rattling across the Nullarbor with $30 in his pocket in hot pursuit of a dream.

It’s the memory of a dream come true that’s prompted the starstruck giggle ringing through the Gordon Frost Organisation’s headquarters, where the corridors are crowded with vintage theatre posters and signed 8x10 glossies of Australian theatre goddesses. Jill Perryman, Nancye Hayes, June Salter, Toni Lamond – Frost has worked with them all. But it was meeting Julie Andrews that floored him. Frost brought the grande dame to Australia last year to tour An Evening with Julie Andrews and he’s still marvelling at having momentarily breathed the same air. “I was a tray boy selling lollies at the Regent movie theatre in Adelaide when The Sound of Music opened,” he recalls, steepling his fingers. “Every night I sat at the top of the stairs and watched Julie Andrews run over that hill.

“And last year I presented her here. I’d be standing in her dressing room, she’d be there ironing her dress, and I’m going” – his voice drops to an awed whisper – “‘Mary Poppins, Maria Von Trapp, is standing there! This is like royalty!” He exhales a rapt sigh. “She was everything you’d hoped and wished Julie Andrews would be.”

Now the kid has grown into a legend himself. But it’s his childlike enthusiasm for showbiz, coupled with sharp commercial instincts, that makes the producer of hit musicals such as Wicked, Annie and, yes, The Sound of Music, so widely respected and beloved.

Celebrating 30 years in the business with no fewer than five multi-million-dollar productions touring the country this year, including Grease and The Rocky Horror Show, he also has the musical The Bodyguard and Noël Coward’s play Blithe Spirit, starring Angela Lansbury, running in London’s West End, as well as investments in Broadway hits If /Then and the long-running The Book of Mormon. And what better anniversary present than to be named the 2014 recipient of the nation’s most prestigious live entertainment honour, the JC Williamson award for outstanding contribution to the performing arts industry? When Frost picks up the gong at the Helpmann Awards in August, he will join Australian icons such as Joan Sutherland, Barry Humphries, David Williamson and John Bell, as well as the late showbiz couple Googie Withers and John McCallum, long-time mentors who were like family to Frost.

In an increasingly corporatised industry, he is a rarity: a creative businessman who conjures up an idea for a show, handpicks its cast, assembles a creative team and markets the result with a passion. He’s a one-man band. He’s Australia’s Cameron Mackintosh. He’s Frosty the Showman.

“He is, in the classical sense, an impresario,” says Tim McFarlane, CEO of the Ambassador Theatre Group’s Asia-Pacific arm, who’s known Frost for decades and is currently co-producing The Rocky Horror Show with him. In 1991, as then-head of the Adelaide Festival Centre Trust, McFarlane teamed with Frost on the Australian production of The King and I – the first Australian production to transfer to Broadway, where it won four Tony awards. “Of course, raising money and doing all those sorts of things are part and parcel of it but he is actually passionate about the business – it’s his life,” McFarlane continues. “I think John woos investors because they get a sense of his passion and they see how good he is at the business, so they go along for the ride.”

Left-field casting decisions are Frost’s forte and he’s sparked the stage careers of performers as diverse as Rob Mills (“When he was cast in Wicked, his biggest claim to fame was supposedly sleeping with Paris Hilton,” Frost says), Cameron Daddo, Jeanne Little and, most improbably, Alan Jones. (“I thought, ‘How can I put a cracker up everybody? I know: I’ll cast Alan Jones as FDR in Annie.’ ”)

Lisa McCune, the former Blue Heelers actress, owes her career second-act as a musical-theatre star to Frost, who cast her in The Sound of Music and South Pacific and tapped her for the role of the British governess Anna opposite Teddy Tahu Rhodes in a new co-production with Opera Australia of The King and I. “Yes, his eye’s on the dollar but I don’t think he wants to make a lot of money so he can retire in the Bahamas,” McCune says. “He actually just feeds off the industry in the way we all love it. It’s a very ­honest love he has for what he does.”

Of course, there are theatre sophisticates who pooh-pooh Frost’s populist, bums-on-seats approach, who lament the number of jukebox assemblies, repurposed films and safe-to-go-back-in-the-water revivals filling theatres. But for the majority of Australians who don’t regularly go to the theatre, his grand extravaganzas are cause for a big night on the town. Frost makes money and spreads joy simultaneously. “Back in the early days we did a lot of offbeat plays, but now I’ve probably wised up a bit and thought, ‘Let the Sydney Theatre Company and Belvoir St do all the classy stuff – I’ll do the money-making stuff’,” he laughs.

Anyway, this is a happy story. It comes to you from the land of musical theatre, where people take a stand for what they believe in, overcome heartbreak and adversity, and face down their biggest fears. It’s where the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.

The big man is seated in the second-floor rehearsal room of Opera Australia, lightly tapping his fingers on the knee of his black corduroys as a milky light seeps through windows overlooking Surry Hills. The King and I cast are doing their first read-through of the script. Lisa McCune, hair scraped back, makeup-free, fills the room with the joyful exuberance of the signature tune Getting to Know You. Frost’s fingers become more animated and soon – Getting to hope you like me... – he is conducting an ­imaginary orchestra and grinning from ear to ear. In a blink he’s back at an Adelaide drive-in with his parents and his brother, Shane. It’s 1956, he and Shane have on their dressing gowns and Grosby slippers, and they’ve snuck in for free by hiding under the blankets on the back seat of the car. On the giant screen, a sumptuously costumed Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr are whirling about to Shall We Dance. “All I remember from the movie [The King and I] is a lot of red and Deborah Kerr’s big gold dress; that it was highly theatrical and the score was so good,” Frost says.

In the early 1990s he revisited the memory. Ashley Gordon, his friend and business partner in the Gordon Frost Organisation, had recently died of an AIDS-related illness, leaving Frost bereft and questioning whether he could continue running the business himself. Not surprisingly for a man who’d started out at 16 as a dresser on the JC Williamson production of Mame, and worked his way up each rung of the backstage ladder, the conclusion that Frost reached was this: On with the show.

“I knew The King and I hadn’t been done since the early 1960s in Australia and no one was doing any old revivals of shows so I thought, ‘I can make a dent in the market here if I’m smart by doing something no one else is doing’,” Frost says. His $2 million revival, which starred Hayley Mills as Anna, played to packed houses across the country from 1991, before transferring to Broadway with Donna Murphy and Lou Diamond Phillips in the lead roles. There, the production racked up a remarkable 780 performances before heading to the London Palladium in 2000 with Elaine Paige and Jason Scott Lee and an extremely healthy £8 million in advance ticket sales.

“From the minute it opened in Adelaide, things changed,” Frost says now. “People took me more seriously in the business and when it went to Broadway and won the Tony awards, suddenly – and I say this with great ego – there was not an office I couldn’t walk into in New York or London where I wouldn’t be taken very seriously.”

Earlier that morning, the cast and crew of the new $5 million revival, currently playing in Brisbane before touring to Melbourne and Sydney, had assembled at Opera Australia headquarters, many of them meeting for the first time. There were easily a hundred people, including OA’s artistic director Lyndon Terracini, who also teamed with Frost on last year’s crowd-pleasing South Pacific and calls him “not only a colleague but a great friend”. After each person had introduced themselves to the room, director Christopher Renshaw passed on the best wishes of Ted Chapin, head of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organisation, and Mary Rodgers, the composer Richard Rodgers’ daughter, who called Frost’s 1991 revival the best she’d ever seen.

Frost stood on a chair and reminded them all that when The King and I opened in his hometown, one theatre critic awarded the production five out of 10 and declared it would never get out of Adelaide. “Well, many years later it’s travelled the world and been a major watershed for many of us here,” he said. “It brings great joy to all of us that this is going to come back and it’s going to be bigger and grander. And it will have a lot more jewels.” He bows as the room erupts in wild applause.

Frost may be an old-school ­romantic with an abiding love of show tunes, but he’s still a moneyman. Musicals are a high-stakes, high-risk game – with the potential for high return if you hit it. The Cameron Mackintosh-produced Phantom of the Opera, for example, has grossed more than $5.6 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing piece of entertainment of all time. (Frost got a slice of that pie by partnering with the Asia-Pacific arm of ­Mackintosh’s Really Useful Group to present Phantom, starring Anthony Warlow, here in 2007.) But even medium-sized outings such as Grease or Legally Blonde require an outlay of $4 million to $6 million, and weekly running costs can reach $600,000. Advertising budgets are huge, sometimes hitting $1.5 million before a show opens. For Wicked, which toured here for three years from 2008 before heading to Asia and New Zealand (it returns to Australia next month), Frost had to round up $12.5 million just to get it on. It was well worth it, becoming the most successful theatre show ever staged in Australia, racking up more than $125 million in national ticket sales and playing to 1.4 million people. “There’ll be a hundred people on the payroll, so you’ve got to be making enough money to pay those people every week and enough to make a profit for your investors and for yourself, hopefully,” Frost says. “When I started – and this sounds like a grandfather talking – I could do a show for $100,000. But the days of putting on a show for that amount, if you’re playing in the big commercial field, are gone.”

Even last year’s production of Driving Miss Daisy, a relatively pared-back play with Angela Lansbury and James Earl Jones, cost more than $2 million to mount. “These are big numbers, so if you’re a young person out there saying, ‘I want to be a producer, I’ve got the qualifications’, to go out there and raise $2 million, let alone $12.5 million, is tough,” he says.

Many of his investors, who come from the US and Britain as well as Australia, are racehorse owners. “They’re easy; they’re in – they understand it’s a gamble,” he says. “You get some investors come in and they’re lucky enough to pick the right shows. Then I have a group that will say, ‘I’m in for all of them’ so if you’ve got 10 shows, they know maybe three will break even, maybe two will lose everything and maybe the rest will show a profit.” Frost’s investors typically sink $50,000 to $1 million into a show and his first loyalty is to them. “As much as I’d want to do a show, if it doesn’t break even or show it has the ability to show a return, we don’t do it,” he says.

Frost can boast a high ratio of hits to misses. Wicked and South Pacific broke box office records in this country; Wicked also won a Helpmann Award for Best Musical, as did The Producers and Legally Blonde. He’s also something of a venture capitalist, mixing the safe bets with riskier investments. In 2011, he created two new musicals from scratch, the theatre producer’s equivalent of being shot out of a cannon. Doctor Zhivago made it over the line but the less said about An Officer and a Gentleman: The Musical, the better. It was a rare and resounding flop for Frost, who drew the curtain early on the production after poor ticket sales and lacklustre reviews. “All the critics had a whinge and a whine about it,” Frost says. “That lost $7 million. Some investors lost a few serious paintings off the wall.”

It hasn’t put Frost off new musicals – he is currently working on developing musicals from The First Wives Club and the local hit film Red Dog, as well as Dream Lover: The Bobby Darin Story. Musical theatre ticket sales are down ­generally – from 3.36 million in 2007 to 2.22 million in 2012, according to a survey by Live Performance Australia – and the potential for million-dollar losses explains why financiers prefer to invest in tried-and-true musicals that the punters can sing along to. Grease and The Rocky Horror Show, for example, are each grossing around $1.25 million a week in Australia, with Grease running at 95 per cent capacity.

Über-producer Cameron Mackintosh is widely credited with creating the Aussie appetite for stage spectacle by introducing “event theatre” to this country with Cats in 1985. “Australians like to go and see musicals,” says Tim McFarlane. “At the moment the business is pretty healthy, but the shows that are really popular are the ones the audience knows – they’re all doing fantastic business.”

The recent run of nostalgic safe bets, the musical equivalent of comfort food, is no coincidence. “What I do is not rocket science,” Frost says. “I identified two years ago that this year and last year were going to be economically tough years for Australia. I knew we were going to have an election, a new government would come in and want to clean up the mess and everyone would be squeezed a bit. “So, am I going to go out there and do King Lear and Macbeth? No. I’m going to be doing Rocky ­Horror and Grease and Annie, because I knew they were punters’ delights and I’d be pretty unlucky for them not to work. They were the right things to do for the headspace the public is in and where the economy is.”

But rules were made to be broken, and every now and then, along comes a show like Once. Frost saw the acclaimed musical, adapted from a wistful, low-budget Irish movie, on Broadway last year and fell in love with it. “I thought, it has to be seen by Australian audiences,” he says. “It’s not Grease, it’s certainly not Annie – it’s so unusual and different, but the time feels right for it to grab the imagination of the public.” Once, a co-production with the Melbourne Theatre Company, will open in October.

Frost is busier now than he’s ever been. With the new availability of Asian markets opening up for his shows, he works across four continents. “About four years ago I accelerated the business for no reason,” Frost says. “Maybe I just had a good night’s sleep one night and I said, ‘Instead of doing two or three shows a year, let’s do five or six’.”

When The Weekend Australian Magazine caught up with him he’d just returned from the Philippines, where his production of Wicked has been playing to sell-out crowds, and was about to jump on a plane to London for the opening of Blithe Spirit. He admits to being a victim of opening-night nerves and typically downs “a couple of Scotches” before sneaking in the back just as the house lights fade.

Theatre folk are a superstitious lot and Frost is no exception. His office is dominated by a low-set, ornately carved table (“I bought it on eBay for about $300. Cut the legs off it”) and he frequently leans forward during conversation to “touch wood” for luck. Large framed photos of Googie Withers and John McCallum watch over his deal-making. He still lives in the house at Bayview, on Sydney’s Pittwater, that he bought around the corner from them in 1999. He shares it with his partner Shane O’Connor, production associate at the Gordon Frost Organisation, and a gallery of Australian theatre legends, lovingly framed and proudly displayed – the touchstones of his decades-long career.

“He has such a deep respect for those performers,” says Lisa McCune. “In this country we actually forget the legacy of some of these amazing performers, but Frosty’s sense of loyalty is so great. He doesn’t have a use-by date on them.”

The original theatre sign for the 1959 JC Williamson production of My Fair Lady takes pride of place in the entrance to the Gordon Frost Organisation. “It’s about the tradition of it all,” he says, noting that Bunty Turner, the star of that long-ago production, is on his guest list for the opening night of The King and I. “I don’t want to see people like that forgotten. I don’t want to see that era forgotten.”

It’s why Frost was able to reference Angela Lansbury’s celebrated 1966 turn as the original Mame on Broadway when she worked with him on Driving Miss Daisy last year. “I was amazed at his knowledge and his memory of those days because he’s a great deal younger than me,” Lansbury, 88, tells The Weekend Australian Magazine. “It was thrilling to talk to somebody who had such a clear view of that period and the success I’d had in New York with Mame. He must have been a little tiny lad then but he certainly knew all about it.”

The secret to Frost’s success, she surmises, is that he doesn’t delegate. “He does it all himself,” says the Oscar-winning actress. “The great people in the business are the ones who have taken that route. He’s just a very savvy person when it comes to theatre and he understands, certainly, the Australian taste in entertainment. He happens to be an extremely nice person, as well. So he’s a combination of all the good stuff.”

Frost pays his respects to the past, but no one could accuse him of not being au courant. When he learnt that some US theatres were engaging the digital generation with so-called “tweet seats” – a number of seats set aside for patrons prepared to tweet about the performances using a special hashtag – he was wholeheartedly in favour. “I thought it was a great idea,” he says, dismissing the notion of the theatre as a sacred, technology-free space. “We tried to do it for Legally Blonde, encourage people to Twitter away about it, and we did talk about having certain seats where people could live-tweet the performance to get word-of-mouth going. It’ll happen soon, there’s no doubt it will happen.”

He is also a fan of using reality TV contests to source new stage stars. “Shows like So You Think You Can Dance and The X-Factor are our variety shows now,” he says. “So you look at someone like Rob Mills or Anthony Callea – these are our new stars and it’s easier to build them up to someone than it is Betty Blogs coming out of NIDA. At the end of the day they are names that people recognise and will buy tickets to see.”

Frost sees parents taking their children along to his shows and rejoices at the creation of tomorrow’s audience. “If anything, I think people are going to the theatre more now than they ever have, because it’s now more acceptable to do; it’s in our psyche,” he says. “You can go to the footy, but it’s also cool to go to the theatre.”