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Catherine AshmoreDarius Danesh as Rhett Butler and Jill Paice as Scarlett O'Hara performing in the musical stage version of "Gone With the Wind."

 

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The musical 'Gone With the Wind' rarely comes to life

 

By Matt Wolf

Published: April 24, 2008

 

LONDON: Some musicals leave you with the "wow" factor: that sense of upsurge and release that the stage musical at its best affords. Others leave an audience asking, "Why?" Last year's song-and-aerial-acrobatics West End version of "The Lord of the Rings" comes to mind, pole-vaulting Orcs having to compete with playgoers' memories of Peter Jackson's nine-hour-plus Oscar-winning films. That production closes in July at a huge loss, but fear not. Bemused memories of stage Elvish have now been displaced by this week's opening at the New London Theatre of "Gone With the Wind," in which Civil War Atlanta doesn't so much burn as it does flicker briefly to life and then fade away again.

 

That more or less describes the overall effect of this latest musical from that indefatigable practitioner of the genre, the director Trevor Nunn, who attempted the impossible at this same playhouse over a quarter-century ago with "Cats" - T.S. Eliot felines singing? How insane is that! - only to watch an eccentric idea hit international paydirt. Maybe if "Gone With the Wind" had given Scarlett O'Hara a household pet or two, lightning might have struck twice.

 

Instead, Tuesday night's opening unfolded across 3 hours and 40 minutes like some classroom exercise in adaptation that would have been better left at the starting gate. Are there two more iconic screen lovers than Clark Gable's Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh's Scarlett, she of the multiple husbands? (Rhett is in fact her third.) It's all well and good when a brand name of the stature of "Gone With the Wind" attempts to make it in a different medium: I actually liked Mel Brooks's Broadway musical of "The Producers" quite a bit better than the film that spawned it. But some ventures, I fear, feel doomed from the get-go, in which case "Gone With the Wind" signals less the title of a show than something close to a prophesy.

 

Nunn is both director and adapter, and his imprint is evident in the story's theater-style of narration that slogs through a decade-plus of 19th-century American war, emancipation and reconstruction, remarks like "the South had lost" clueing in those who presumably don't arrive at the theater primed to repeat the screenplay's most famous lines - "frankly my dear I don't give a damn," most pre-eminently - in unison with the cast. It's not easy telescoping history on stage, though Nunn (and co-director John Caird) managed it to considerable effect in "Les Misérables," carried along by the pop operatics of a score that had its own decisive sweep.

 

"Gone With the Wind," by contrast, is more a musical play than an entirely sung rabble-rouser, which actually leads one to ask whether the material might have been better served without music at all. The American newcomer Margaret Martin's score achieves little beyond annotating a narrative that as it is has to struggle to take hold, the nadir arriving at the end of the first act with Jill Paice's hapless Scarlett bleating that her once easy life is "gone, gone, gone with the wind."

 

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To be fair, it's been some while since I've seen the 1939 film, but I don't recall Vivien Leigh being quite as resistible as the Scarlett offered up by the hard-working Paice, the pretty if colorless young American with whom Nunn first collaborated 3 ½ years ago on Andrew Lloyd Webber's "The Woman In White" in London and then on Broadway. Indeed, there's more than a trace of that show's decidedly English miasma late in "Gone With the Wind" when Scarlett, buffeted this way and that by fate and by her own romantic singlemindedness, is glimpsed frightened and alone while "the misty night swirled around her." That she would have made life a lot easier for herself - and allowed us to go home several hours earlier - is clear enough had Scarlett only responded initially to the sexually profligate Rhett, instead of saving herself for Ashley Wilkes (Edward Baker-Duly), husband to Melanie (Madeleine Worrall), who for a while is Scarlett's sister-in-law.

 

For all that Scarlett spins from one incident to another, going so far as to turn Yankee killer in the process, she rarely engages our sympathies and seems not to begin to deserve the boundless attention of that bounder, Rhett. At least this show's male lead doesn't have to carry its burdensome weight and gets much of what scant humor exists along the way. Cutting a dashing profile in the part, Darius Danesh makes a likable impression from our first sight of him alone on the balcony of John Napier's dully environmental set, and his height in itself allows for wittier effect than the overearnest book or lyrics generally allow.

 

Co-creators Nunn and Martin have the advantage of a 21st-century perspective unavailable to Margaret Mitchell, author of the 1936 novel on which the subsequent film, not to mention this show, is based. And it's not that surprising that they should have directed their attentions to shoring up the black presence in a piece that encompasses the liberation of the slaves; scarcely has the first act begun before we hear a bluesy number for the black cast members about "all God's children born to be free." Still, one doubts race relations at any point surrounding the Civil War were half as even-tempered as is suggested in a show that saves its one standout performance for the visiting American actress NaTasha Yvette Williams, who inherits Hattie McDaniel's Oscar-winning screen role as the O'Hara family's tirelessly good-hearted Mammy.

 

You return from intermission waiting for Williams to cut loose, and when she does, singing a hymn to the right of children to be cherished, the temperature level in the audience goes up a degree or two. You could argue that the music patronizes its black characters, defining them in essence as nothing but pious. But Williams's solo actually represents one of the few moments when Scarlett leaves the stage and the sodden endeavor that is this "Gone With the Wind" is, however briefly, allowed to sing.

 

 

 

Thanks, megham. Another half thumbs up for Darius.

I thought Jill sounded wonderful in all of her songs on the 22nd. For me she hit every note and I was shocked to hear she had been criticised for her singing :o

 

Some pics :)

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/1.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/2.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/3.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/11.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/12.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/14.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/16.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/17.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/18.jpg

 

 

thanks, BP and meg, have put the review in the review thread, Darius is getting good reviews all in all

Great photos BP

 

Enjoy the show PiP and Preston :D

thanks, I hope the weather is dry

Great, Paul. Getting the train home means that I don't get D pics. We're relying on you.

Thanks B.P. I love the wavy hair ones. He suits the moustache much better.

 

If Sir Trevor Nunn wants to break from the Clark Gable look , Darius would make a great Rhett going on stage like that.

 

Mind you , it would be harder to understand Scarlett rebuffing him.

Great photos BP

 

 

Vido news report from CBS

 

http://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=1521060738

Thanks, megham.

Darius seems to come out really well in the vast majority of these things. At least they got that right.

Beaudarius has just posted this on .net. I hope she doesn't mind me bringing it over

 

 

Metro review this morning

'Against the odds, the true star of the show is Darius Danesh, who banishes all memories of his ludicrous Pop Idol buffoonery with a performance of subtlety and roguish charm as Rhett Butler. His deep, velvety voice is ideally suited to Nobody Knows You, one of the rare moments when Gone With The Wind transcends musical cliche'.

 

 

 

I liked him in Pop Idol as well. He's just grown up.

I thnk they meant Pop Stars perhaops..I knwo this much after years of scorn and ridicule..doesn tit make it so much sweeter when these reviews praise D! this is a first for Metro?

Here's a few more pics :)

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/19.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/20.jpg

 

 

 

Did I mention I kissed Jill :wub:

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/4.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/5.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/6.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/29.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/28.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/30.jpg

 

 

 

I spoke briefly with Ben Elton after the world premier, and asked him what he thought of Darius' performance. He said he thought Darius was a brilliant actor and said he sounded absolutely great

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/7.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/26.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/23.jpg

 

 

 

Did I mention I got another kiss, and a nice hug this time from Natasha :wub:

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b252/PaulHardy/GWTW/21.jpg

 

The Metro has always been horrible to Darius, as far as I recall.

 

 

You did an amazing job as D's fanbase's roving reporter on the red carpet, B.P. :kiss:

Edited April 26, 200817 yr by Baytree

The Metro has always been horrible to Darius, as far as I recall.

You did an amazing job as D's fanbase's roving reporter on the red carpet, B.P. :kiss:

Thanks BT :)

 

If only I could get official credentials as such, access all areas and all that :w00t:

 

 

You know what the good book says "Ask!"

And add the buttons to the request.