Gone with the Wind Blows into New Musical???
Date: 9 December 2004
He did it for Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby and, most recently, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. Can director Trevor Nunn achieve the same kind of success with the novel that has reportedly sold more copies worldwide than any other book except The Bible? On the cards is a new musical version of Margaret Mitchell’s 20th-century classic Gone with the Wind, directed by none other than Nunn. The musical, which has a book by American Mary Martin, was workshopped in London last week and is slated for a West End premiere in late 2005. It took Mitchell a decade to write the epic about the indomitable Scarlett O’Hara in an American Deep South ravaged by civil war and wooed by the rascal Rhett Butler. Published in 1936, the novel went on to win Mitchell the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1937 and, in 1939, to be made into the classic, multi award-winning film starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, which, according to a list recently compiled by the British Film Institute (BFI), has been seen by more cinemagoers (35 million) than any other in UK movie history. Harold Rome and Horton Foote’s previous musical version of Gone with the Wind had a West End run at the West End’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1972.
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