The career that went right

Kenny Wax (Image: Alastair Muir)

If you have a show that you’re hoping Wax will be interested in, and he doesn’t invest, don’t be too disappointed. He can only really get involved in one or two new productions a year. But he’s unlikely to forget you. He’s built his career on what is clearly a phenomenal gift for making connections with people. 

Showbusiness is a relatively small world, and he’s popular. Two years ago he was appointed president of the Society of London Theatre, SOLT. The pride he takes in this recognition from his peers is rather touching; he clearly can still hardly believe that his name is right at the top of a list of distinguished colleagues.  

“I find it incredible,” he tells me, pointing out the OBEs, CBEs and other titles and honours garnered by fellow board members. “Why me?” 

Sure, he has shows on in the West End and on Broadway, but he hopes his appointment was because the society’s members saw him as “a good, honest person”.  

The walls of his office are a patchwork of framed posters. Each one — and there are many — represents a show that he’s produced. The only problem is that now, after nearly 25 years as a producer, I suspect he’s running out of wall space.  

His current productions alone need a wall of their own. He lists them for me. First there’s the hugely popular slapstick comedy The Play That Goes Wrong, which has been at the Duchess Theatre for five years, and has spawned an entire brand of spin-offs, one of which, Peter Pan Goes Wrong starts a UK tour in October, ending up at the newly refurbished theatre in Alexandra Palace in December. 

The Play That Goes Wrong is playing off Broadway, and in 15 other cities around the world… Budapest, Paris, Moscow, he reels them off. Oh, and stand by for a TV series based on the Goes Wrong theme, coming to our screens this autumn.

The same theatre company — Mischief — has a new play, Groan Ups, which has just started a run of 12 weeks at the Vaudeville Theatre. There’s also a Magic Goes Wrong show, which starts in Manchester and comes to the Vaudeville in December.  

Wax hardly draws breath as he continues on to Six the Musical, the smash hit about the wives of Henry VIII that is playing to packed houses at the Arts Theatre, where it “looks set for a long, long run”. It’s also just starting a UK tour, and is heading for Broadway, just two years after students Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow wrote it during their Cambridge finals, as a show for the Edinburgh Fringe.

Then there’s The Worst Witch, based on Jill Murphy’s children’s books, which was at the Vaudeville during the summer, and a production of The Gruffalo. Other shows are in development.  

It’s a very impressive list for a company that employs around 20 people — and the space beyond Wax’s own office is so cramped that he’s had to make the desks smaller.  His wife, Daniella, who does the payroll for every one of his shows, works from home because there’s no longer room in the office.  

One of his employees is an apprentice, a scheme encouraged by SOLT to help new entrants to the industry. There was no such scheme for the young Kenny Wax. Brought up in Manchester, he went to the Jewish boarding school Carmel College for sixth form, which was “fabulous”, he says. He loved sport there, made lots of friends and enjoyed the individual attention that came from being part of a small community. 

He developed his taste for theatre in those days, and as a business studies student at the then Polytechnic of Central London, a course that included a year working in industry. He spent that year working for Dixons, an experience that confirmed that he wasn’t going to follow a career in retail. But he’d been for an interview for a backroom job in theatre and regretted not getting it.  

The family business beckoned. Wax’s father, like his father before him, ran a company that helped taxi drivers finance buying their vehicles. He knew his older son, Derek, wouldn’t take it on. Having graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, Derek was trying to make it as a theatre director (he is now a multi-award-winning television producer).  

“Derek was always brilliant, with a strong interest in high-end art,” recalls Wax. “I wasn’t the brilliant one, I was more one for sport. When I said I think I’m going into the theatre… inevitably there was some disappointment.”  

Wax said to his father: “Give me a year, let’s do it for a year and see how we go. I could always go back. I was quite young. He and my mum supported me to do that.”  

And Wax made the most of his year, starting out as an usher for the West End production of Miss Saigon, and continuing through a series of jobs which, although junior, brought him into contact with producers, theatre owners and creatives. He did everything, from running messages and conducting theatre tours, to operating the lighting and running the box office.  

His first show as a producer came at the King’s Head, a pub theatre in Islington. He finds a tiny playbill in a clip frame on his wall of posters and brings it to show me. It advertised a cabaret show of songs from rarely staged musicals.

“Really good casts to sing songs, quite unknown material. Of course, in the theatre world there was great interest in this.”

The first song of the first show was called Doors, which Wax thought was appropriate, as he hoped this was the start of his new career. And so it proved. The audience was enthusiastic and he was ecstatic. “I thought, I’m doing it, I’m producing this show and it’s amazing… listen to everyone!”  

It hasn’t all been plain sailing of course. He points out some posters of shows that failed — “this is our wall of shame” — shows for which he raised tens of thousands of pounds that lost every penny. But for the hits, like The Play That Goes Wrong, the returns for investors are extraordinary.  

“We’ve given phenomenal returns, 200 or 300 per cent a year. It’s just turning its money over.”  

The same will happen for Six, he believes. “I have people saying, ‘I’ll write you a cheque for a million dollars to invest in the show’. We can’t take it because we’ve given commitments to all the people who took the risk.” 

He’s not the sort to laugh out loud at the theatre, “but I can sit in an audience of people, all laughing, thinking, ‘that’s really funny’. The first time I saw The Play That Goes Wrong, around me people were shrieking, they were crying with laughter, and I was watching, thinking, ‘this is very funny’.” 

The Play That Goes Wrong (Image: Helen Murray)

He went to see a student version of Six after a tip-off from George Stiles, one half of the theatre writing team Stiles and Drewe (who created the Mary Poppins and Peter Pan musicals), a long-term friend and collaborator.  

“George said: ‘I have just seen this show — you’ve got to get to see it’. It’s ‘whip smart’ was the phrase he used. ‘Whip smart, and it’s for the Netflix generation’.”

So, after a long day at work, Wax went to Cambridge with his teenage daughter, Jemima, to see the show at 11pm. They both loved it. “It felt like we’d unwrapped the golden ticket,” he says.

Jemima, now 17, is one of three children, and the only one to show an interest in a showbusiness career, so far. She wants to be a singer-songwriter. Wax’s oldest son, Joseph, is a personal trainer, and Jasper, 14, is working hard at school. 

The family are members of Hadley Wood Synagogue, where Wax has played an active role on the shul board, helping raise the money for the new building and to develop the cheder. 

“It’s a great little shul,” he says fondly, talking about the challenge in bringing in new families when most of the regulars are older. 

His Judaism is important to him, as it has been since his days at Carmel College, and until recently he managed to get to shul three weeks out of four. “We’d like to get more younger theatre-goers,” he muses, meaning shul-goers.  

With that, our time is up, and he’s off to a lunch appointment at a gentleman’s club. It’s all a far cry from his days as a messenger and usher. But I have the feeling that there will be many more posters to add to that wall.