The role of a general manager on a big West End musical is to facilitate the producer’s vision on the stage, hire the technical team, do the contracts and deliver the goods or, occasionally, the not-so-goods. The Broadway model of a general manager for hire, rather than someone already ensconced in the producer’s office, was adopted in Britain for the first time by Andrew Treagus, who has died aged 78.
From the mid-1970s onwards, Treagus was the go-to general manager for any big import from Broadway – A Chorus Line, Annie, Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes, the rocked-up Pirates of Penzance, Bob Fosse’s Dancin’, La Cage aux Folles and City of Angels – through to homegrown spectacles such as Starlight Express, The Hired Man, Saturday Night Fever and Aspects of Love.
He was generally agreed to be the best in the business, steady as a rock, imperturbable. He was, said Robert Fox, who worked on many of those shows with the well-connected producer Michael White, up on every single aspect of the production process: “He knew everything.”
So, when he encountered the producer Judy Craymer in 1998 as she wrestled with her ambition to create a musical using the music of Abba, it was obvious, to her at least, that she should seek the help, advice and practical knowhow of Andrew Treagus Associates, which had been formed in 1982.
The moment Mamma Mia! opened at the Prince Edward theatre in April 1999, it was a hit. But making that happen was largely down to Treagus’s brilliant deployment of the technical and artistic forces at his disposal, led by the director Phyllida Lloyd and the designer Mark Thompson.
The “everything” he knew started early on in the Mole Valley village of Ashtead, Surrey, where he was born and raised, the second son of Ivy (nee Onslow), a nurse, and Walter Treagus, a verger in St Bartholomew’s church. Both parents were keen amateur theatre practitioners in the local area, where the long-established Archway theatre in nearby Horley held sway.
In 1951, Walter founded the St Bart’s Players, an operatic and drama club formed from various members of the Sunday school choir and the youth fellowship. This group complemented the Archway, who moved in 1952 into their extraordinary new home in 10 old railway arches.
Young Andrew was drawn into this world of theatre, not least because of his ability as a carpenter; carpentry was the subject at which, as well as mathematics, he excelled at Purley high school for boys. His mother and father died within a year of each other when he was just 14, a double blow that marked him for life. At first, he went to live with his older brother, Peter, who was 26 at the time. But soon after, he was informally adopted by Jonathan and Moira Field, family friends and stalwarts of the Archway company.
His backstage experience suggested he might make his living in the professional theatre. His first job, in 1963, was in stage management at the Arts theatre in Belfast. Andrew was asked by the director to make an appointment of an assistant stage manager from the photographs of two suitable applicants. “I’ll have the blonde,” he said, and thus he met and worked with Sandra Freeman, whom he married in 1970.
After a couple of seasons in Belfast, he took another stage management post at Peter Cheeseman’s exciting new company at the Victoria, Stoke-on-Trent, where the actors included Ken Campbell, Ben Kingsley and Mike Leigh. He moved quickly on to Pitlochry, again as stage manager, and stayed for three seasons, learning a good deal more in the carpentry workshops and around the stage in general.
Then he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company to travel round the country with the new Theatregoround project instigated by Terry Hands, taking the shows – new plays and Shakespeare digests – into schools, factories, and arts and community centres.
This carefully plotted progress culminated in his appointment as production manager at the Royal Court where, for several years in the early 70s, he was the calm centre in a storm of exciting, controversial new plays and the high-pressure creativity of the directors William Gaskill, Anthony Page and Lindsay Anderson, and the combustible, revelatory mixture of senior actors – Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Paul Scofield – with such new talents as Helen Mirren, Bob Hoskins, Diana Quick and Kenneth Cranham.
Technically, the work was pioneering, too, with the designers Jocelyn Herbert, John Napier and Hayden Griffin; set builders Terry Murphy and Jack Raby; and lighting designers Andy Phillips, Rory Dempster and John Simpson, then the Court’s general manager. One of Andrew’s minor appointments was that of Fox as a student stage manager (£5 a week), though he thought Fox was “too posh” for the job.
Fox returned the compliment a few years later when he took his old boss on to co-general manage A Chorus Line, though the weekly remuneration was slightly more than £5.
Treagus was definitely “a man of the people” and he put this innate disposition into practice by standing up for any stagehands or stage managers who felt the lash of a temperamental director’s tongue. To one such director he declared: “You may treat your actors how you wish, but don’t you dare speak to my staff like that.”
By the time he was fully immersed in the rollout of Mamma Mia! around the world – now, as an executive producer, he was particularly successful in taking the show into new territories, such as Japan, Korea and China – he and Sandra could live comfortably and indulge his passion for the sea by running, and messing around in, a motorised pleasure boat.
He did not enjoy the best of health in recent years. He is survived by Sandra and his sister, Veronica.
• Andrew Walter Treagus, theatrical manager and producer, born 22 November 1944; died 4 June 2023
