See you outside - then I'm going home again.

Looking forward to saying hello :) thanks Meg Are you sure you can't see the show?

Found this and thought it was interesting.

 

 

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/node/957

I was just about to post it, BT. It's an interesting read, isn't it?

 

HOW TO MAKE A MUSICAL

TREVOR NUNN DOESN'T GIVE A DAMN | April 2nd 2008

 

Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With The Wind"

Why on earth is Trevor Nunn remaking "Gone with the Wind"? Robert Butler thinks he knows. He learns the famed director's recipe for a show-stopping, heart-thumping, edge-of-your-seat-musical ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE MAGAZINE, Spring 2008

 

In "The Last Tycoon", his novel about the 1930s film industry, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that "not half a dozen people have ever been able to keep hold of the whole equation of movies in their heads." It's the same with stage musicals. Not half a dozen people are able to keep the whole equation in their heads, but one who can is Trevor Nunn.

 

This spring, the director of "Les Miserables", the longest-running musical ever, and the director of "Cats", the second-longest-running musical ever, and the director of more than a dozen other hit musicals--from "Porgy and Bess" to "The Woman in White"--opens his latest production in London. Nearly everything about "Gone with the Wind" suggests it shouldn't work.

 

First, there's its fame. The movie of Margaret Mitchell's bestseller, "Gone with the Wind", released in 1939, won ten Academy Awards and became the then highest-grossing movie of all time. Most musical-goers have surely seen it, know it, and love it as a spectacular frankly-I-don't-give-a-damn experience starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. It's there, it's great, don't mess with it.

 

Secondly, you can see the money up there on screen. The city of Atlanta was the largest set that Hollywood had ever built. More than 1,000 horses were used in making the movie. Vivien Leigh had 40 costume changes (if this had been a stage show, she would never have had time to leave her dressing room). In one of the most dramatic moments, a camera cranes high to show hundreds of Confederate soldiers lying on the ground, wounded or dead. When Margaret Mitchell's husband saw the movie, he is reported to have said, "If we'd had that many soldiers, we wouldn't have lost the war." Any attempt to turn it into a musical looks, depressingly, like cashing in.

 

So why is Nunn doing "Gone with the Wind"? The question is best answered by going back to a project that never got off the ground. In 1992 Nunn wrote to the playwright Robert Bolt, asking for permission to turn his screenplay of "Ryan's Daughter" into a stage musical. "Ryan's Daughter" is about a young woman married to a schoolteacher in Ireland in 1916 who falls in love with an English officer. The critics' reaction to David Lean's 1970 movie, starring Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles, had been so hostile that Lean didn't make another movie till "A Passage to India" in 1984.

 

This didn't bother Nunn. In his letter to Bolt, he discusses the screenplay's qualities and how those qualities would lend themselves (were "vital" indeed) to a musical. Itemise the qualities he discusses and you come away with a handy how-to-guide for aspiring directors of musicals.

 

This is what the world's most successful director of musicals saw in a movie that had been panned:

 

a location which demands a particular musical idiom

a Romeo and Juliet-like forbidden love story

an epic environment of a political and racial struggle

a constantly thrilling contrast between the public and the private

a perfect range of characters who suggest the complete gamut of vocal demands

local ritual around which to build major set pieces

huge emotional crises

optimism

Hire the DVD of "Ryan's Daughter" and see how wrong the critics were; then hire the DVD of "Gone with the Wind", and see how two movies with very dissimilar fortunes tick the same boxes:

 

location and musical idiom: the 1860s South offers Dixie tunes, gospel songs, society waltzes, military fife and drums and Irish folk tunes

forbidden love story: Scarlett passionately loves Ashley, but Ashley is a decent chap and married to Melanie

political and racial struggle: the North destroys the South in the war that abolishes slavery

thrilling contrast between public and private: two central characters are black slaves, Mammie and Prissy, doing their best to look after the prosperous Southern white owners

gamut of vocal demands: Scarlett-soprano; Melanie-mezzo; Ashley-tenor, Rhett-baritone. Chorus of soldiers, cotton pickers, waltzers

local ritual for major set-pieces: from black children waving peacock feathers to cool the sleeping southern belles in the hot afternoon to the fleeing of Atlanta as it burns

huge emotional crises: a rollercoaster of marriages, miscarriages, deaths, rejection and forbidden love, coupled with the devastation of a way of life

optimism: a story about survival and why some people survive and others don't. Scarlett had what her creator called "gumption"

The screenplay for "Gone with the Wind" was mainly written by the American playwright Sidney Howard. (Others who worked on it include Jo Swerling, who wrote "Guys and Dolls"; John Van Druten, who wrote "I Am a Camera"; and--briefly--F. Scott Fitzgerald.) Howard had written more than 70 plays and many of the scenes in the movie look as if they would have worked just fine in one of his Broadway plays.

 

Nunn has staged two 1,000-page novels for the stage before: "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Les Miserables". For "Gone with the Wind", he has gone back and adapted the novel with the show's composer and co-writer Margaret Martin. The key decision for this production was picking the New London Theatre as the venue. ("Cats" opened there too, 27 years ago.) The seating has been redesigned so that action spills off the stage and all round the auditorium. The actors will be out in front of the audience, telling this story, drawing them in, inviting them to imagine certain things. As the producer, Aldo Scrofani says, "this is not about scenery coming in and scenery going out."

 

Large novels have far more scenes than plays. The momentum builds through seamless transitions, the stuff you see on the way from A to B that tells the story too. Instead of "scene, curtain, scene", you get "action, action, action". Nunn once pointed out to me how effectively the life of the military hospital was sketched in by Robert Altman in M*A*S*H, as the bits between the scenes become scenes in themselves. In a stage adaptation of a novel, this story-telling on the move--pioneered by Nunn in "Nicholas Nickleby"--gives a show a kinetic quality. The stage version of "Gone with the Wind" may even be less stagey than the movie.

 

"Gone with the Wind": previews from April 5th, opens April 22nd.

 

(Robert Butler is a theatre writer and a regular contributor to Intelligent Life magazine. He blogs about the arts and the environment at ashdenizen.blogspot.com)

 

Hi Paul, I need to be back before 9pm so Dave can go out. I'll put his Dad to bed about 10pm. It's a tie but, we try and work things around. I get to visit and he still gets to go out.

"Large novels have far more scenes than plays. The momentum builds through seamless transitions, the stuff you see on the way from A to B that tells the story too. Instead of "scene, curtain, scene", you get "action, action, action"."

 

Put that way, the lay-out of the theatre makes more sense.

And it sounds more and more exciting. If they don't get the length down, it'll probably have two intervals like Lord of the rings.

I'm sure Darius has the ability to talk faster. He's a Glaswegian after all.

Yes, but can we listen faster? Can you imagine it being done as a 30 min piece? All the cast talking as fast as they can - and at the same time.

2 pounds per minute? Too steep, if all of the minutes aren't Darius filled.

Interesting comment here

 

 

 

http://wickedstageact2.typepad.com/life_on...with_the_w.html

 

of course we don't know if any of the "demo"songs have survived.

Edited April 2, 200817 yr by Baytree

'I love America'!

My guess was 'Tomorrow is another day'

I'm just slightly more interested in the ones that Darius takes part in. I know we need them all good for the show but, those are the ones I can't wait to hear.

 

As a surprise they are

 

COMING SOON

Dunno why they bothered......just to tantalise?

Frustrate more like it.

I'm not sure that Darius will sing many songs. I remember reading an interview with Jill where she said Scarlett's part was more speaking.

 

We do know they duet at least once and that at one point Margaret Martin had written a lullaby for Rhett to sing.

 

Other than that we have allegedly Mammy singing "Children Need To Be Loved", Melanie singing "These Terrible Times (?)" and now " We love America" which I personally think would be sung by the ensemble of Scallywags and Yankee carpetbaggers during the occupation and/or reconstruction.

 

I think it's heartening that those who've heard the songs in their demo state think they're really good.

I would like D to sing a number of songs, not least because it would let lots of people who haven't heard him before, know how good he is.

 

If he does only sing a few numbers, he should get a very good opportunity to show his acting capabilities. God I hope he does well in this!

I do hope Darius has more than one song - but as long as he ahs at least one and that one is so good it gets played - I recall Music of the Night being a big hit - wouldnt it be grand if Darius had a hit with a song as fantastic - I would like people to sit up and take notice of his voice and not be able to dismiss him so easily, I often catch the musicals slot on Radio two and wonder if one day I would hear darius featured....

Edited April 3, 200817 yr by prettyinpink

We know that Darius has at least one solo and one duet. I'm really hoping he has more but both have been mentioned as being very, very good.

According to Reuters the Tube strike has been called off. It was planned for 72 hours from some time on Sunday.