well the phrase is in the book so they had the rights to that. - just not the frankly..

I am looking forward to the documentary - not long to go!

 

I may watch the film as I am curious now as to how the film and book differ

Edited April 17, 200817 yr by prettyinpink

Oh. maybe BT is correct then!

I love things that dare to be different.

The Daily Mail obviously doesn't.

 

Pop Idol loser! as if it's the most important thing he's ever done.

 

How they turned a leading man (twice over) into an iconic leading man maybe doesn't have the same ring to it but at least it's the truth..

Edited April 17, 200817 yr by Baytree

that sort of thing really gets to me -

it's in the Mail today - with the first title

I'm wondering if it'll be in the Mail on Sunday as well with the 'loser' title.

They don't call those who get onto the podium in sports events losers, so why should 3rd place in another competition be always termed loser or reject?

totally agree, it enfuriates me

I don't remember Duncan James being called DOI loser when he was in Chicago, although they referred to it in many articles.

 

Lengthy 'Wind' blows into West End

Opera mixes it up with legit

By DAVID BENEDICTMore Articles:

Donmar unveils 2008-09 slate

'Spamalot' leaving Las Vegas

Broadway looks to Odets

St. Ann's rep grows in Brooklyn

'Lion King' roars; 'Jersey' scores

'Pacific' pumps Broadway

Special Report:

Jimmy Kimmel Live: 1,000th Episode You can say something a helluva lot faster than you can sing it. That's just one reason tuners aren't exactly famous for their brevity. And brevity, it turns out, is the last word anyone is using to describe London's soon-to-open musical "Gone With The Wind."

Trevor Nunn's production left the famous 3 hour and 45 minute Toronto premiere of "The Lord of the Rings" in the dust. Nunn's first preview on April 4 had to be canceled due to an ankle injury sustained by Natasha Yvette Williams, who plays Mammy. But the following night, the curtain went up at 7:30 p.m. and came down at 11:40 p.m.: That's 4 hours and 10 minutes.

 

It's hardly a surprise. The current hardcover edition of Margaret Mitchell's one and only novel is 1,064 pages long, and on its initial release, the movie ran 3 hours and 46 minutes.

 

The upshot is that the show's production team has taken the scissors to it. By April 14, it was down to 3 hours, 40 minutes, with the following night's preview canceled in order to put further cuts in place.

 

However, the clock is ticking in more ways than one. Unlike Broadway, where a show can preview for up to eight weeks, London works on tighter schedules. Nunn and company have to lock the production by press night, April 22.

 

Has Nunn bitten off more than he -- and auds -- can chew? Well, bear in mind his success staging a musical from a novel that weighed in at 1,488 pages: "Les Miserables."

 

 

 

And the answer is, no, Nunn didn't bite of more than he can chew.

Aldo Scrofani must be pretty pleased with the amount of unpaid publicity generated by GWTW on both sides of the Atlantic.

There are two opposing camps arguing the toss in both countries.

 

In America there are those who think it's time, but don't understand why it's not opening on Broadway or having a press night in Atlanta and the opponents think the film is sacred and no-one should revisit the story and definitely not a 'musical'.

 

In Britain we don't have the same emotional attachment to the book and the film. It's the involvement of Darius which has caused the public squabbling.

They found Darius and then went back to NY to look for someone as good. They couldn't find anyone. Speaks volumes.

Several record companies are interested in the cast album. It's just a case of waiting.

Waiting is something Darius fans are well practised in. We know the drill.

 

We wait and hope and wait and wait and wait, then we grumble and wait a bit more, then we resign ourselves to the fact that it's going to be a very very long wait and then kapow! something much much better than we'd imagined comes along.

 

 

 

 

Well, I hope it isn't too long. I'd like this in my collection.

There really hasn't been recording time anyway....once the show opens and everyone settles down...perhaps then :D

 

Thanks again to .net

 

20/04/2008 Telegraph

Review(of preview)

 

Frankly, my dear this is worth a damn

Gone with the Wind is so deeply etched in the public imagination that only sheer artistic chutzpah could carry off a stage version.

Jenny McCartney reports from Drury Lane

 

It doesn't get much braver than this: an attempt to recreate David O Selznick’s 1939 epic film, Gone with the Wind, as a 3½-hour musical on the stage. The stakes at the New London Theatre on Drury Lane are high: the many passionate fans of the film, and Margaret Mitchell’s original novel, are likely to be merciless in their appraisals of the stage version.

 

Cinema is at once an intimate and grand medium. The camera could depict the burning of Atlanta in all its terrible majesty, and then dip in to catch a sly, sidelong glance from Vivien Leigh’s emerald eyes as she transmitted the delicious selfishness of the restless Southern belle, Scarlett O’Hara, to the wider world.

 

Such realism is not available to Trevor Nunn, the director of the musical: he must make do with a range of alternative devices, from narrators poised on the balcony to imaginary props mimed by hard-working actors, in order to keep this tumultuous, complicated story on the road.

 

The towering drama of Gone with the Wind, of course, has been often and fondly parodied, and I found myself almost expecting French and Saunders to bowl up in crinolines. The racial politics of the antebellum South, too, are still capable of causing a frisson of discomfort on a preview night in London, as when the black slaves discuss conditions on Gerald O’Hara’s plantation: “He treats his darkies right,” says Mammy, the beloved black housekeeper, played by Natasha Yvette Williams, even as that possessive pronoun sticks sharply in the craw of a modern multiracial audience.

 

Although Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy in the film, was the first black American to win an Oscar, the film came under attack in later years for its perceived caricaturing of black slaves, in particular the light-headed servant Prissy, played by Butterfly McQueen. Malcolm X, the black activist, later wrote: “I was the only Negro in the [film] theatre, and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act I felt like crawling under the rug.”

 

To be fair to Nunn’s musical, he neither shirks the complexities of racism in the story nor allows them to dominate. The black members of the cast have a noticeably stronger and more dignified voice than they had in the film, but then one might expect attitudes to have moved on a little since 1939.

 

The songs do not have unforgettable melodies but they are diverting and engaging: still, perhaps they should think again before allowing Melanie, the saintly wife of Ashley Wilkes, to burst into song on her deathbed.

 

Sometimes, the stage make-believe that fills in for complicated film set works beautifully, as it does during the tragic death of Rhett Butler and Scarlett’s daughter, Bonnie. At other moments, we would have been better off with sound alone or silhouettes glimpsed behind a screen: Melanie’s desperate childbirth, with only Scarlett in attendance, is not improved by the emergence of a symbolic infant that closely resembles a cloth doll.

 

The great draw for any theatre crowd, however, remains the romance between Rhett and Scarlett, as enduring a literary couple in their own way as Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy. The physical presences of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in the roles are so firmly etched on the collective consciousness that it would be folly indeed to attempt to erase them. Wisely, Nunn does not try.

 

Jill Paice, as Scarlett, has Leigh’s delicately feline bone structure, a waist as tiny as her voice is big, and a gruelling live performance to carry off. I wished at the start that she would relax and set the b*tchy, witty, ruthlessly flirtatious Scarlett free to strut the stage, but these are early days and, by the second half, she hits her stride.

 

The surprise of the show, however, is Darius Danesh, a Glaswegian who came to popular attention as a losing contestant on Pop Idol, the television talent show, but who plays Rhett with a masterly combination of dash and pathos.

 

Thank God they’ve got Rhett right, I thought. You don’t mess with him: it is the prospect of darkly roguish Rhett, the blast of pure masculine force, that will have the ladies urgently booking tickets for themselves and their friends. No woman who watches Selznick’s film has ever really seen the point of Ashley, the drippy blond for whom Scarlett carries a torch even after the South turns to ash.

 

The crowd at Drury Lane seemed stoic about the length of the production, although there was a bad-mannered taxi dash from a significant minority even before the cast had taken their bows.

 

The pace and slickness of the musical will, it is hoped, be tightened up, like one of Scarlett’s celebrated corsets, before the official opening. But by the time the curtain fell this gargantuan story had none the less worked its mysterious magic.

 

One is condemned to begin by sniggering a little at Gone with the Wind, and end by crying. Just at the point where Rhett said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” – the famous words echoed faithfully by the expectant audience – I suddenly found that I did.

I haven't had any time today and I'm going out in 5 minutes but I've got a copy of the Sunday Post. It's a long interview. If no-one else posts it, I'll type it up tonight late on or early tomorrow.