The news that tonight’s preview of Gone with the Wind has been cancelled — just a week before the official first night — to apparently provide more time for technical rehearsals onstage suggests there are serious problems to be addressed, and that radical steps need to be taken. That follows the earlier cancellation of the first scheduled preview two Fridays ago; and when performances began the next day, of course, the first preview ran for over four hours (as I know from personal experience). So we know the show needs serious pruning, or audiences won’t be able to get their trains; but can this particular train change tracks now?
It always seemed an ambitious idea to condense the massive novel Gone with the Wind for the musical stage; but never say anything is impossible. Trevor Nunn famously successfully helmed the transfer of Les Miserables into London’s longest-ever running musical (but that was a novel of roughly 500 pages, against Gone with the Wind’s 1000-plus). And Nicholas Nickleby, too, became a hit stage show under his watch - but then that one stretched to a two-part, seven hour performance.
What does, however, seem puzzling is how little time the producers gave themselves to run their project in.
Musicals typically only find their feet and rhythm once in front of an audience, and to allow a preview period of just over two weeks to do so here seems naive, to say the least. On Broadway, they typically allow at least a month of previews, sometimes more, for major musicals; and that, too, often after an out-of-town try-out first. Wicked, for instance, did a run in San Francisco first; then (as I recently saw in the documentary Show Business: The Road to Broadway), they went back into rehearsal for New York to make changes they found necessary, which was in turn followed by an extensive preview period. When Disney’s Tarzan didn’t do an out-of-town try-out, they hit upon a good idea to help them use their preview period constructively to be able to make changes as they went along: they gave themselves built-in breathing time, playing a reduced schedule of three days a week to begin with, rising to four, then five, before they finally played a full six day week. Trying to fix a musical on the run, while performing a full schedule of eight shows a week, is like trying to turn a ship around in the middle of a stormy sea: its slow, dangerous work.
It might, however, be easier to fix than some critical attitudes to musicals: at least the ship is on the move, whereas one critic has recently declared his hand that his views are already set in stone about them. “I don’t want to sound like a snob, but I have never really understood why theatre critics are supposed to go to musicals. I don’t see what on earth they have got to do with theatre”, this particular critic wrote. “We may be able to tell a good ‘quality of mercy’ speech from an indifferent one and we may well know, too, about such recondite aspects of the actor’s craft as ‘end-stopping’.” (We may, however, be less sure about which character Laurence Olivier once blacked up to play in Othello) He goes on, “But, honestly, what on earth can we reasonably be expected to tell you about Hairspray or Rent? What is more, it is inhumane to make us go. Nicholas Hytner was right about critics: we are mostly white middle-class males, and that means we look awfully out of place among all the yelping teeny boppers who attend these garish extravaganzas”. Maybe that’s why he took his friend Rupert Everett to the opening of Hairspray: yes, step forward Tim Walker, theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph.
While Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph last week deservedly won the Critic of the Year award for the second time in the British Press Awards, his Sunday counterpart merely wins my prize for most wilfully ignorant. Those comments - made in his review of Jersey Boys — show that he betrays, and even rejoices in, his utter ignorance and contempt for what is a large part of the job. The reason why Charlie is a terrific critic is that he is equally at home with Shakespeare as he is with popular musicals (particularly, of course, pop ones, given his personal passion for pop).
Tim Walker: yes, quite. What more can usefully be said?
But let's just stop and marvel at the phenomenon of Trevor Nunn being questioned for allowing too *little* preview time :-)