Blogging till I drop (if Gone with the Wind doesn’t get me first)….

And I take it seriously: I commit myself to a daily weekday update here, which I usually post well before 8am, often earlier; and mostly maintain even when I’m abroad. Since I had a very early morning start last Friday to return home from New York on the day flight, I actually posted the last entry here before I went to bed for 3 hours sleep before I was due up again to head to the airport!

At least I got some rest on the plane, but since we were an hour late leaving JFK owing to runway congestion (there were 40 planes ahead of us for take-off), we didn’t land at Heathrow till 10pm. And then, this being Heathrow (but not, at least, Terminal 5), it took 45 minutes to get our luggage, even though the rest of the baggage hall was entirely empty, and my flight had been pretty sparely occupied, too, so there weren’t many bags to deliver; and then, this being London Underground, I got to the Piccadilly Line tube at 10.45pm, my Oyster card had stopped working so I had to buy a single ticket, and the first train out finally arrived at 11.20pm! I only just managed to get the final Northern Line connection at Elephant and Castle to get me to Borough at 12.30am!

I only mention all of this because of the early start I was making on Saturday morning: I headed immediately to the National for a 10am start of one of the two Mark Ravenhill double-bills being presented there under the umbrella title Shoot/ Get Treasure/ Repeat, which could stand in for the title of my own life at the moment! And after seeing the 10am double bill in the Lyttelton, I also saw the 11am double-bill that immediately followed it in the Cottesloe; so before 12noon I had already seen four plays! I ran into Anna Mackmin, who had directed the superb Harriet Walter in her monologue Intolerance as part of the cycle, and she said how “barking” the whole enterprise was - but my being here immediately after such a transatlantic adventure was therefore true to that spirit.

I’d seen two of the cycle of 16 plays in Edinburgh last summer, but these four were all new to me; and converging on the National for a 10am start like this - and running into fellow critics Susannah Clapp, Charlie Spencer, Kate Bassett, Matt Wolf, Carole Woddis and Variety’s Karen Fricker as I did so - was as Edinburgh-like an experience as you can hope to get.

Then it was over to Waterloo to catch a train to Kingston to see the new touring production of Blackbird at the Rose; except that I didn’t get there. This being Network Rail (or whatever franchise is supposed to operate the trains), the departure boards indicated that all trains out were cancelled. So I surrendered - and took the afternoon off!

But that was just as well: I needed to recharge before the evening’s ordeal. Typically, of course, I don’t get to see shows before the first night, when critics attend at the invitation of the management; but there’s nothing to stop me buying a ticket earlier, and out of sheer curiosity I had done so to see an early preview of Trevor Nunn’s new production of Gone with the Wind at the New London. Since Friday’s first preview had been cancelled, I was now inadvertently seeing the first; so this was going to be as rough a cut as it would be possible to see. One thing I was curious about was how long it could possibly be: the copyright version of the 1939 film version, of course, runs for 3 hours 46 minutes, and Trevor Nunn productions are not noted for their brevity. Before Saturday’s performance began, a stage manager appeared and warned us that Nunn had obviously seen fit to trim a single minute from that length: stating that this was currently longer than they wanted it to be, he respectfully asked audiences to leave as discreetly as possible if they had to go early, to avoid distracting the actors.

In fact, the performance finally ended at 11.35pm - four hours and five minutes after it had begun. By then, great clusters of the audience had been frequently trickling away, presumably to make their last trains; those of us who had stayed to the end had the further delay of getting out of the New London, which is one of the hardest in London to leave since it is so entirely elevated from street level, and I didn’t get to the street till gone 11.45pm.

I’m sure cuts and changes will now be implemented - but I worry that, since the show officially opens two weeks tomorrow, they’ve not allowed themselves enough time to do so. While a previous stage musical version of Gone with the Wind at Drury Lane in 1971, which featured a 7-year-old Bonnie Langford in the cast and a live horse that defecated onstage, prompted Noel Coward to apparently say, “”If they’d stuffed the child’s head up the horse’s arse, they would have solved two problems at once, ” those options are not available here: the horse is mimed and the child’s dialogue is taped.

It will be fascinating to see what the final - or at least the first night - version is, and I’m glad that I’ll be able to see what progress is made. Of course, it would be even more fascinating to be a fly-on-the-wall backstage, and indeed there is: Turner Classic Movies (TCM) are tracking the offstage and onstage progress of the production for a documentary Gone With the Wind - The Making of a Musical which is due to air on the cable channel on April 20.

Yesterday I happened to see another fascinating backstage documentary - Show Business: The Road to Broadway, that tracked the progress of four musicals on their way to Broadway in the 2003-04 season, was screened yesterday afternoon as part of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Brian Robinson, the festival director, told the audience before the screening that he had received an e-mail from a disgruntled patron complaining that the festival had too many lesbian films and that he didn’t need to see any stupid documentaries about musicals; but in fact this was a canny choice, not just because a lot of gay men do like them, but also because the four shows featured were so high in either gay content and/or creative involvement. Thus we followed Avenue Q, which features gay puppets, from downtown to Broadway opening and Wicked,from troubled out-of-town try-out to triumphant New York premiere, despite some of the tepid reviews; Caroline, or Change from off-Broadway’s Public Theatre to upping the stakes on Broadway itself, where a group of investors agreed to each lose some money just so that it was seen there; and the ill-fated transfer of Boy George’s Taboo, produced by out lesbian Rosie O’Donnell, from London to Broadway.

This utterly compelling, and frequently moving, documentary lifted the curtain, in every sense, on the offstage drama that fuels the onstage one, with some wonderfully personal scenes like the ones with the parents of Avenue Q’s composer Jeff Marx - his dad, who always thought he was a “weird kid” (and his mum who said she never did!), but was magnificently proud of his success; or the painful personal odyssey that brought Tonya Pinkins back to Broadway in Caroline, or Change, after time as a woman living on welfare who had lost custody of her children to her former husband.

The documentary even rounded up a group of theatre critics and journalists to offer their opinions on how the season was shaping up; and even if the likes of the irretrievably smug Patrick Pacheco and the camp superiority of Charles Isherwood are hardly good advertisements for my tribe, it was good, too, to see us getting it completely wrong: Michael Riedel, the New York Post’s stir-it-up theatre gossip columnist (who at least serves the valuable function of keeping the theatre in the news), could be heard predicting of Avenue Q that it’ll “be gone by January”. Four years - and the surprise win of the Tony Award for Best Musical - later, it is still with us, both in New York and now London. Taboo, of course, didn’t have it so lucky; and even if Riedel waged a relentless campaign chronicling its many troubles, Boy George did the classic thing of blaming the messenger, rather than the show’s own problems, for its failure. “What is the point of people like Riedel?”, he asked (mispronouncing Riedel’s surname as if he came from Rydell High School, which of course is another musical entirely!); but the point of Broadway, as this documentary shows both so fondly and painfully, is that it is driven by love and passion.

Sitting behind me at the screening was playwright Martin Sherman, whose own contribution to the same season was writing the book to the Peter Allen biographical musical The Boy From Oz that starred Hugh Jackman as Allen; I asked Martin why his show wasn’t featured, and he said they turned it down, since they didn’t want to have their creative process put under the additional pressure of cameras watching them. But there was a lovely speech by Harvey Fierstein when he presented the Tony Award for Best Book that could have been addressed directly at Martin: “No one notices the book writer - unless you’re a flop, and then its all your fault!” Not that The Boy From Oz was a flop, I hasten to add - it recouped in its final weeks, thanks to Jackman; but book writers always get the blame for when shows don’t entirely work.

And from Broadway of 2003-4 to a possible Broadway ahead: last night I went to Notes in Heels, the latest in the invaluable Notes from New York series that introduces new American musical theatre composing voices to British ears, and last night took the unprecedented step of concentrating exclusively on the extremely under-represented band of female composers trying to make it in the field. Of course, of the four shows featured in the afternoon’s documentary, Caroline, or Change had a score by Jeanine Tesori; but though she is a poster girl for what female composers can achieve (and will next have Shrek - the Musical opening on Broadway later this year), I have a feature in the current issue of The Stage that points out, “Right now there are 22 musicals playing in the West End and 26 on Broadway; but if you look at their respective writing credits, there are just five apiece on each side of the Atlantic to which women have contributed towards the primary creation of. Most of them are for writing the books: Mamma Mia! and Wicked, with books by Catherine Johnson and Winnie Holzman respectively, are playing in both cities, so that actually reduces the number of musicals with female writing credits to just 8, out of 48 now running in London and New York. Of the rest, the only ones for which women have also contributed towards the scores are Passing Strange on Broadway, for which Heidi Rodewald is credited for co-writing it with key creator Stew; and The Lord of the Rings over here, of which Finnish new age music group Varttina, who co-created the score with AR Rahman and Christopher Nightingale, includes women members.”

I need to update the statistics now, though: the London tally has just doubled, since Gone with the Wind,with book, music and lyrics by Margaret Martin, has just started previewing as I noted earlier, but wasn’t on the boards yet when the piece was written and first published last week!