I did like the music though. It wasn't standalone but fitted the play and the time the play was based in so well. I . It woulkd work as a straight play but I'd be sad to lose them.loved the women's song 'Can This Be All', 'Alone', ' Lullaby',Nobody Loves You', 'Just Two' and the final version ot GWTW

opinion/review found a year late but worth a look?

 

http://travelsintown.livejournal.com/172063.html

Thanks Baytree, someone who saw it exactly as I did but I did find the songs stuck after a second listen so it wasnt given a chance but I cant understand why D after that performance hasnt commanded more leads. Is it his choice do you think.

Tbh, I don't know.

 

However Darius quite clearly told fans that the album would be his next priority and I can't see him breaking his word by considering any takeover roles, tour leads or shows of a lesser challenge than he has achieved, which would take him away from the studio(s) and his family in the States for months on end.

 

He's still only 28/29 - that's young in terms of West End leads.

 

Then of course there's the more worrying thing Darius has been heard to say a few times - that some of the most successful people he knows ( I'm sure Robert Duval was one) had never made any plans and took or dismissed opportunities as they presented themselves. I do wonder if the way he got his role in Chicago through Devil In You and the beneficial and coincidental flow from those performances leading to the role of Rhett Butler have only confirmed it in his mind.

 

My view is show business is not a polite "after you" society and if Darius is not actively pursuing his own best interests, his management/agents should be doing it for him. Then again he can really dig his heels in if he thinks he's right about something, and maybe they've butted heads with him a few times and decided to let him have it his way.

 

Incidentally, when I booked theatre tickets last week at an Ambassador theatre , I was put on hold at least 3 times and left listening to songs from Legally Blonde which doesn't open until next January.

 

That was one of GWTW's fatal flaws, no-one heard a note of the music until they went to the show. The recordings didn't need to be high quality to put a few clips on the website.

Edited June 15, 200916 yr by Baytree

I was travelling back from Dartmouth today and stopped in at Morrisons for a cup of tea and a little shopping. My ear pricked up when I heard a voice singing and it was Darius singing Dive in, it was on for a while whilst I did a bit of shopping and it made my day. It also made me think at the moment what a waste of talent and time marching on.

I was travelling back from Dartmouth today and stopped in at Morrisons for a cup of tea and a little shopping. My ear pricked up when I heard a voice singing and it was Darius singing Dive in, it was on for a while whilst I did a bit of shopping and it made my day. It also made me think at the moment what a waste of talent and time marching on.

 

 

I'll have to keep my ears pricked at my Morrisons. It's ages since I've heard Darius played anywhere like that. Yes, times marching on and still we wait!! Sue

It was good to read that review. I loved the show though, except for the first preview which was Ok at best. I still find myself singing the womens's song 'Can this be All'

One of the articles about Jill was saying how hard it was for her when the show she loved was panned by the critics. I'm with her, I thought it was great.

She must have felt absolutely dreadful.I should think it must have taken her a while to get over it. Sue

Lots of tears and much frustration a holiday - then straight back to the US and acting in a show off broadway

I've been looking for this online for ages because the colossus remark stuck in my mind as appropriate for Darius's stature. It came back into my mind when I was watching the scene in Hotel Babylon where Darius shakes on the deal with Nigel Harman.

 

I've checked the GWTW review thread and this one definitely isn't there. The Sunday Times is still one of the best known UK's broadsheets. It's very negative but praises both Jill and Darius

 

From The Sunday Times April 27, 2008

 

Gone with the Wind, New London - the Sunday Times review

Gone with the Wind is nothing more than a flatulent raspberryChristopher Hart Recommend?

 

The siege of Atlanta lasted four months. This new musical extravaganza, directed by Trevor Nunn, lasts four hours. Oddly, though, the musical feels longer. I suspect the siege of Atlanta had better jokes, too, and surely better music.

 

Margaret Mitchell’s squillion-selling American civil-war block-buster, so famously filmed with Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, has been turned into a show by Dr Margaret Martin, a Californian expert in maternal, child and family health. Which can only prompt the response: don’t give up the day job, honey. Because this Gone with the Wind is one big, windy, flatulent raspberry.

 

The key to any good musical is the music, and, though Dr Martin studied music theory at the Colburn School of Performing Arts,LA, it doesn’t show. This is depthless pap, boasting every cliché. The live band reaches an identical brassy climax every time Rhett and Scarlett kiss. Or a telegram arrives. Or a child dies. Or at any other point when the audience apparently needs to be told: “This bit’s dramatic, okay, dumb bums?”

 

Only occasionally are there hints of gospel or good ol’ cotton-field blues. Most of the songs hint at nothing but other bad musicals. When you think what influences Martin might have been open to - when you consider that the same period in the South produced the sublime soundtrack for the film Cold Mountain, with its astonishing sacred-harp songs - it’s an abysmal disappointment.

 

Then there are the lyrics. These have been “adapted” by Nunn, which only makes you wonder what they must have sounded like before. At one point, I think my ears deceived me. Rhett Butler apparently sang: “The fog was thicker than pasta, just inches from disaster.” Maybe the fog was thicker than plaster, I’m not sure. Either way, you feel embarrassed for all concerned. The reprises don’t help, when the first time was more than enough. Every number bulges with earnest, depressingly aspirational sentiments. People kneel on the ground, gazing heavenward, vowing to be strong: “I will survive. I will go on. I will spread my wings and fly.” That kind of thing. “All men fight for freedom, from the moment of their birth.” Eh? No, they don’t. The emancipated blacks? They sing “Now we are freeeee! Free to live our lives, the way we want to beeeeee!”, or something like that. My ears kept tuning out.

 

The performers cannot be blamed. They bawl along with genre-appropriate quavering emotion and end-of-line whispers, and always pronounce it “Gone with the Hwind”. An intriguing array of accents suggests everywhere from Bantry Bay to Santa Fe.

 

Jill Paice is a perfectly credible Scarlett. In other words, you frequently want to slap her. In the movie, she slaps her slaves. That’s cleaned up here, even though portraying racism is not, duh, racist, and its excision only adds to the pervading blandness.

 

Bestriding this shallow world like a colossus, and the only reason this gets two stars rather than one, is Darius Danesh, commanding and charismatic as that “insufferable peacock” Rhett Butler. Left hand in his pocket, right hand sweeping wide in manly gestures, eyebrows tauntingly cocky, voice like molasses, he perfectly suggests a cavalier (and possibly clap-ridden) Southern gent.

 

Nunn seems to have directed sleepwalking. John Napier’s design has grandeur, encircling the auditorium with picket fences, trees that, on closer inspection, turn out to be made of stacks of old muskets, and vast flags of Old Glory and Bonnie Blue. Yet it’s curiously static, allowing for no changes, and, after four hours, your eyes are as bored as your ears.

 

This epic of love and war is reduced to a series of interminable tiffs and tantrums between Rhett and Scarlett, expressed in limp, forgettable songs, the aural equivalent of chewing cotton. Will they, won’t they? Will she recapture him? Will he stay with her? Frankly, I fear, you won’t give a damn.

 

As I've said before, I really enjoyed GWTW. Thart night the cast got a standing ovation but the critics had probably gone by then. They were imn huddles writing their reports in the interval. What a shame they had to do that to the best bit of theatre I've seen for a long time.

 

Only a few could critisize Darius and Jill an the were absolutely brilliant. All the cast were and the music fitted into the story really well. Can you tell that it still rankles? I'd have gone to see that a couple of times a year if it had stayed.

I bought the Sunday Times that week so I don't know why I didn't post it here. I wonder if I did on .net and forgot to bring it over.

There were so many - I wasn't aware that this hadn't gone into the pinned thread either.

I thought that one had, I know it was noted at the time

I'd thought I'd pur it in the thread open to non mods but there were just so many at the time, one or two could easily be missed.

I've added it to the closed pinned review thread.......thanks BT

I hadn't seen these ones

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v614/megham/2008/GWTW/GWTWlaughing4.jpg

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v614/megham/2008/GWTW/GWTWlaughing3.jpg

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v614/megham/2008/GWTW/GWTWlaughing2.jpg

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v614/megham/2008/GWTW/GWTWlaughing.jpg

What wonderful 'warm' photos

I've added them to the closed 'sticky' thread.

 

Thanks meg