Pieter Toerien

Pieter Toerien (born 1945) is a South African producer and theatre manager, responsible for bringing many large scale musicals to South African stages, including Cats, Disney's Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Phantom of the Opera, as well as a number of original and play productions, often collaborating with others in the field.

Toerien's theatre career started while still at school, presenting puppet shows to schools in his home town of Cape Town. At age 17, he introduced the concept of bio-vaudeville – persuading cinema managements to have live entertainment before the feature film. Under the mentorship of Britain's theatre agent Herbert de Leon and in partnership with Basil Rubin, he brought British variety artists such as Alma Cogan and Dickie Valentine to South Africa, eventually adding Russ Conway (1964), Peter Nero (1966), Shelly Berman, Cyd Charisse, Tony Martin, Françoise Hardy and Maurice Chevalier (1967) to his list of luminaries.

At the age of 20 he sat on the street outside the apartment of German actress Marlene Dietrich, until curiosity compelled her to invite him in. He signed her to tour in 1965 and again in 1966, which he considered his "greatest coup", and they remained friends until her death in 1992.

In 1966 he tentatively shifted to the dramatic stage, often bringing entire productions from the West End to South Africa. Funding all his own productions, he famously claimed that he produced farce and comedy to subsidise less commercial theatre.

Continuing with the successful business formula of signing overseas box-office attractions, he brought names such as Hermione Gingold from New York for Noël Coward's Fallen Angels and Joan Fontaine for Fredrick Knott's thriller Dial M for Murder. Other names included Barbara Windsor, June Whitfield and Sir Michael Redgrave.

...
Wikipedia