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In Scarlett’s shoes

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 9th April 2008

Lloyd Evans on the extraordinary story behind Trevor Nunn’s ‘Gone with the Wind’

With a musical based on a film you need no such shock tactics because you already have a rich profusion of tempting journalistic angles. Will the show do justice to the book? Could it possibly be better than the film? Will the stars fall short of/equal/surpass their predecessors? Can they sing? Will their throats survive the opening night? Is the music any good? Can the design fulfil our expectations? Will the director end up with a career-endorsing triumph on his hands or an embarrassing turkey? And will the show overreach itself and implode financially? This is a particularly juicy question. Since it costs at least three times as much to mount a musical as to mount a stage play, the possibility of complete commercial and artistic meltdown can be dangled before the heartless public like a bleeding goat strung up to tempt a hungry lion. ‘Trevor Nunn homeless after West End fiasco’ would shift truckloads of copies of Hello!. ‘The bankrupt director shows us around his tarpaulin bivouac under Charing Cross Bridge.’

So inevitably the backers of Gone with the Wind have sought to protect their investment by attracting the best talent available. Executive producer Aldo Scrofani is a Broadway veteran whose company Columbia Artists Theatricals has been producing hits for 50 years. He praises Nunn as a director who can ‘make a complete experience for the patron’. Translated from corporate-speak, that means Nunn is the most bankable director of musicals in the world. Designer John Napier is equally distinguished. His CV includes Cats, Starlight Express, Miss Saigon, Les Misérables and Sunset Boulevard. Nevertheless he claims this is the biggest design job he’s ever taken on. Scarlett O’Hara is played by Jill Paice, who originated the role of Laura Fairlie in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Woman in White. And Rhett Butler will be played by Darius Danesh, one of the few singers with the charisma to carry a big musical who is also instantly recognisable to the under-30s. Danesh leapt to fame during the infancy of talent-search telly when the format enjoyed a brief heyday of innocence and novelty. In the closing round of a contest he had effortlessly dominated he crashed out in spectacular fashion when he chose to sing, or rather screech, a weird unaccompanied version of Britney Spears’s ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’. It was more painful to watch than a seal cull on a Canadian ice floe. Yet in one of those bizarre reversals of fortune that TV specialises in, his doomed display of glissando-ing ululations secured him a lasting place in the hearts of young Britons. He has since become a platinum-selling singer-songwriter in his own right and is the youngest performer ever to play Billy in Chicago. So he completes the galaxy of trusted talent.