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)