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[0:00] Florence Rome: When we think of out-of-town tryouts, we think of Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, Detroit, Tokyo. Tokyo, yes, Tokyo. Tokyo in the 1970s had become the center of Japanese culture, and it was giving its citizens homegrown movies, literature, plays, paintings, but it had not given its public a musical that was cultivated in Japan. So why did they choose an eight-hour adaptation of Gone With The Wind for their first foray into musical theater? Well, what happened was, well, we're going to let Miss Scarlet herself, Lesley Ann Warren, tell you in this week's episode of Broadway Bound, the musicals that never got to New York, which explores Gone With The Wind, the musical. Well, fiddle-dee-dee.

[1:15] Robert W. Schneider: Hey, friends, it's Rob Schneider, and I'm welcoming you to Broadway Bound, the musicals that never came to Broadway, the podcast. Oh my gosh, for almost 90 years, the story of Gone With The Wind has been in the public consciousness. Even if you've never read Margaret Mitchell's novel or seen the Oscar-winning film, it would be hard pressed to find someone who's never heard of it. In recent years, a book and film that glorifies Southern life during and after the American Civil War has started to disappear from public view, but in the mid-20th century, the story of Gone With The Wind was not only one everyone knew, everyone worshipped it. In 1926, a Southern writer named Margaret Mitchell needed to do something while she was healing from a car injury.

Since there was no Netflix in 1926, you still watching or did you die from Spanish Flu? Mitchell began to write a novel, a long novel, an epic novel, a novel that told, in 1,037 pages over a 12-year span, the story of Scarlet O'Hara, a Southern belle who is madly in love with Ashley Wilkes, who chooses to marry Scarlet's friend Melanie, so Scarlet gets back at him by marrying Charles, who dies during the war. Now she's a widow and entrenched in a civil war, Scarlet will do anything to survive, including fighting through a war-torn country to get back home, killing a Union soldier, getting down into the dirt to clean and save her plantation known as Tara, she steals her sister's rich boyfriend Frank so he can pay off the taxes on Tara, she takes over Frank's business because Frank is too poor a businessman, and when Frank gets shot, Scarlet hooks up with Rhett Butler.

Now Rhett is a dashing Southern gent with a past who was weaved in and out of Scarlet's life, but now they can be together, he marries her, pays for everything, and when she finds out Ashley might still have feelings for her, she needs to drive Rhett away so she can be with Ashley, so she stops sleeping with Rhett, but not before they have a child named Bonnie who later dies in a horse riding accident. And speaking of dying, Melanie dies, which means Ashley can finally be with Scarlet, but they both realize they never really did love one another, so Scarlet, realizing the only man who has ever helped her was Rhett Butler, runs home to him to start anew, and he says he's leaving her, and she asks what happens to me, and he says, my dear, don't give a damn, but Scarlet is not perturbed because she will win him back, because after all, tomorrow is another day.

[4:44] Robert W. Schneider: Thank you, that was my line reading, I hope you liked it. It's a perfect novel, it has everything, and its center is a heroine who best represents the American spirit, optimistic, harsh, protective, sensual, and when the novel is published in June of 1936, it's an instant hit, which means the movies are going to want it, and the lucky rights winner is David O. Selznick. Selznick waits two years to begin filming, so his first choice for Rhett Butler, Clark Gable, can take on the role. You'd think you'd want Scarlet first, but whatever. Over 1,400 actresses are looked at, and the talk of the world, yes the world, is who will bring Scarlet to life. Miriam Hopkins, Tallulah Bankhead, did I ever tell you about the time I saw Tallulah Bankhead's book, never mind, Katherine Hepburn, Jean Arthur, Paulette Goddard, and the woman who won the role despite not really being well-known in America, the British Vivian Leigh.

Add in a gorgeous Max Steiner score, and in December 1939, Gone With The Wind, the 238-minute movie hit America. Not only does it still hold the record for being the highest-grossing film of all time, it won 10 Oscars, including Best Picture, and made history when Hattie McDaniel became the first black person to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as Scarlet's devoted confidant, Mammy.

[5:28] Robert W. Schneider: And if you've never seen the movie, it is a masterpiece. Yes, it's long, but it's beautiful, and it's long because the movie wanted to adhere faithfully to the book, which is something its musical creators might need to be reminded on. Now, how does this movie become a musical? In 1958, in the middle of the golden age of Broadway, David O. Selznick wanted to make it into a musical, and he approached Harold Rome about doing the score. Now, Rome is best known for the musicals Wish You Were Here, Fanny, Destry Rides Again, and I Can Get It For You Wholesale. They talked, and Selznick was very proud of the song titles that he created that he wanted Harold Rome to turn into hit songs, including these titles, The Land You Love Is Like Your Mother, There's No Getting Away From It If You're Irish, and Fiddle Dee Dee, which is one of Scarlet's go-to sayings.

Honestly, Harold Rome is not really the guy for this show. This is a Harold Arlen show. Harold Rome is urbane, political. One of his songs is entitled, Who's Gonna Investigate The Man Who Investigates Me? He's a blue-collar Union guy. I don't really see him down in the South, but David O. Selznick did. Then in 1967, Rome, whose last Broadway musical, The Zulu and the Zeta, wasn't a big old hit, can you imagine, gets a call from his agent who says, how'd you like to go out of town with a new musical? And he says, where? And the agent says, she says, Japan. Now, in all the episodes that we've covered so far, the writers for these pieces have been dying to get these movies adapted into a musical, or they were sought out because it would be a perfect use of their voice on this material.

In this case, Harold Rome got the job because it was easier for his agency to go in-house than out-house. Let me explain. In November of 1966, Japan's Toho Company opened its brand-new opulent theater, The Imperial, with a five-hour, non-musical adaptation of Gone With The Wind that only covered the first half of the novel. After five months, they realized it was such a hit that they should do the second half and created a four-hour second part. The mastermind behind this was a gentleman named Kuzu Kikuta, who wrote the script for Gone With The Wind and oversaw running Toho's theatrical department. He also loved musicals and was responsible for bringing Western shows into Japan. His contributions to Japan cannot be stressed enough.

His first attempt, My Fair Lady, was greeted by disdain from the Toho board until it turned out to be a huge financial success. Then all they wanted was musicals. So Kikuta would buy them, remount them, and Toho would grow and grow. But now, Kikuta wanted an original musical, one that if it was globally successful would make millions for Toho. So he went to Kay Brown, the agent for the Margaret Mitchell estate, and she went to her colleague next door, Audrey Wood, and said, who do you have on your roster that we can give this to so we can keep all of this in-house to make it easier for contracts? And that is how Harold Rome got this assignment again. Rome was skeptical, but more so was his wife Florence.

Florence is the hero in this story because on a suggestion from publisher Bennett Cerf, if you ever watch What's My Line, he's one of the panelists on there, she kept a diary of this whole experience, as well as copies of letters she sent to friends like Richard Rogers, which was turned into a book called The Scarlet Letters. Now, this book is available for free on the Internet Archive, and I must say, it's a little uncomfortable to read because a lot of it is her making fun of the way she perceives Japanese individuals to speak. So for example, one of the first paragraphs includes the expression Ratsurak, with the Ls dropped for Rs. So that's what we're dealing with. But if you can skip past those passages and the passages about her endless shopping trips, it's intriguing to see how this project comes together.

[9:38] Robert W. Schneider: This is a reading from The Scarlet Letters. If not financial success, what is it they hope to achieve in the theater? Emotional satisfaction? Again, that happens sometimes, but not very often when you consider the staggering ratio of failure to success. Nor is a failure in the theater apt to evoke the sympathy it might in any other business. On the contrary, if you commit a play or a musical which doesn't come off, critics trot out their most razor-sharp stock of adjectives with which to humiliate you, and it takes a very tough hide indeed to survive this equivalent of a public flogging. Now, Harold Rome is trying to think of ways to get out of this. He says to Kikuta, I wish I could have seen the play, but the play closed.

Not a problem, Kikuta says. They'll remount it for him. He needs first-class accommodations for him and his wife to travel to Japan. Not a problem. Just because he's coming down doesn't mean he's going to do it. If he does, he gets to pick the U.S. staff to do the show with him. Of course! Now, before she gets there, Flo wonders why this wholly American book would have any interest to Japanese audiences.

[10:46] Florence Rome: Why Mr. Kikuta was determined to do Gone With The Wind, a story which most people consider to be indigenously American, is something I have been asked a hundred times. I can only guess at the answer. Perhaps there are excellent sociological reasons. Japan, after all, has 600 years of civil war in her own history. Furthermore, who better than the Japanese would understand the devastation of a country and a society laid waste by defeat in a war? And Japan is no stranger to the concepts of feudalism and slavery. Still, while all these things are patently true, I don't believe they constitute the answer. It's my belief that the Japanese love Gone With The Wind for the same reasons everyone else does. It's a whopping good book.

[11:36] Robert W. Schneider: The Rooms go back to New York, and they're waiting for news from Japan. And while they're waiting, Harold just starts to write.

[11:56] ♪ Musical number: "Gone With The Wind" — performed by Lesley Ann Warren ♪

[12:50] So you're bound to find your own.

[13:40] ♪ Musical number ♪

[14:24] Harold Rome: And Harold suggests some book writers to Kikuta, but Kikuta is very clear that he is the book writer. He will do an outline based on the adaptation that he did previously. It will be two parts, four hours. There will be no book writers. It is Kikuta. There will be translators who will translate the English lyrics into Japanese. So without a real book writer, Rome begins to write songs. You know, songs he thinks could go places. Moments that could be sung. He's just writing and writing and writing without any sort of guidance or direction. And this is what he says of his score. It's an entirely different medium. And the film and the musical can live side by side and be treasured side by side just like the film.

And the book live on together. We went back to the book and then into the period for the music and the lyrical feel. And that's what I hope I've written. A musical that could have existed in those times, but in modern times. It has to be in period. It has to capture the mood of the time and its people. I did a lot of research into Old English and Irish folk songs, which is what most of the contemporary American music was based on. And tried to write a fresh score in that idiom. Ballads, rounds, marches, quartets. They all sound as if they could have been written by, well, by Stephen Foster. But of course, they're not. That's the hardest thing to do, to write originals in style and period without making them simply a pastiche.

It's not the kind of thing that Julie Stein would do or Sondheim. But it's what's necessary to make this show work. There's a lot of music involved, a vast amount of incidental music. Even though we've taken out a lot of the stuff we had to use in Japan. And music hardly ever stops. But I think it's really fine. The best thing I've ever written. In fact, there are some musical sequences in the show that are the best that have ever been written. And, you know, I don't mind saying so myself.

[16:14] Harold Rome: Then, bad news from the agency. Toho Company is now objecting to the things they verbally agreed to. Why does it have to be American music directors and choreographers and conductors? Toho has them on staff. Why pay more? Do they really need an apartment, the Roams? Does Mr. Roam need to be paid so much? Apparently, there's a difference between what is said and what is signed. And if Roam backs out, he looks like the nasty person in the press. And eventually, Toho, they come around. But it will all come with a price. Because, with Roam getting everything that he wants, Kikuta looks a little diminished in the eyes of the Japanese press. Now, in the meantime, Joe Layton signs on to direct and choreograph this musical.

Layton is an incredibly inventive director. And the right person to bring this show to life. Wanting to do a ballet of it. His choreography from Tenderloin is still being talked about. And his visual sense in no strings was iconic. And he's scoring a nice little success with George M. Now, despite not having worked together before, Joe Layton, Harold Roam, they hit it off. And hopefully, they'll have the same luck with their book writer, Kikuta, who comes for a meeting in February of 1969 to discuss the show and to see the musical hair, where he falls asleep during the show.

[17:27] Joe Layton: Layton explains to Kikuta his idea for the musical. The concept is a free-flowing one. It's a choreographic idea. Everything's constantly in motion. Nothing stops for anything. This is a long-ass show, so it can't lose momentum. So he's going to stage the entire piece with music and dialogue as a story in perpetual motion. It will never stop. Not even for applause. Which is fine, because the Japanese don't applaud. It's one grand sweep of history, and the upstage area will always be a living show. Nothing stops. Kikuta nods and smiles. Harold Roam plays a few songs. Kikuta nods and smiles. And then Kikuta gives them his outline, and he leaves. This will be the one and only creative meeting for Gone with the Wind, now called Scarlet, that will happen between the creatives.

[18:22] Harold Rome: As Harold and Joe are packing up bad news from the agents, the Mitchell estate has pulled the world rights to the musical. It can only be done in Japan. The shows are supposed to start in a few weeks. What are they going to do? Harold and Joe are too far in at this point, so they say, fuck it, we're going to Japan. And they all head to Japan for ten weeks. When the Roams get off the plane, unlike the last time, there is no meeting party for them. No flowers, no car, no photographers. They get to their lodging, which is incredibly run down, not like the palatial suite they had last time. There are no treats and goodies, so Flo asks someone, where are all the treats like last time? And they say, last time Roams here, it was for business opportunity.

Now it's business. Get to work. And work, it's not going so well, because Japan and America have two different ways of putting shows on. Harold and Joe just assume that the things they always did would be the same anywhere theater was produced, like auditions. Toho doesn't have auditions. They have their own company of actors. Why would you use actors from other companies and auditioning? It's embarrassing. Kikuta says this is what Toho wants, but Roams says actors won't be embarrassed. They'd be honored to take part in a musical audition. Once they threaten to walk, Toho changes his mind, and they have auditions.

[20:01] Harold Rome: At the casting meeting, Toho's box office people come in, and they come in with charts and graphs to show everyone who will sell better and who won't. Joe and Harold nod politely, and they say that for Scarlet they want Sakugu Zinguzi, but Kikuta vetoes that on the spot. You see, Sakura was part of the highly prestigious all-female Takarazuka acting company where she essayed the role of the male characters. The rule in this company is you cannot marry, but Sakura did just that and is now out of the company and is looking for work. Kikuta says the public will only think of her as a male, and he wants them to go with his choice for the role. Joe says he just can't do this and says that he's leaving, and this time it's for real.

So Kikuta acquiesces, but it comes out why Kikuta was objecting. You see, he promised the role of Scarlet to his mistress. At least that American concept is international. Once the casting conversation happens, suddenly Joe and Harold notice the entire temperature changes. Suddenly Toho Company is not very amenable as they promised to be. Now, despite promising Rome his own staff, they now refuse it, and they are refusing Layman Engel as conductor and Trudy Rittman as arranger, even though they are already there in Japan and they're working. Why does there need to be an arranger? Also, Toho has its own conductors. Why is there a conductor?

[22:01] Harold Rome: Harold is no sooner out of that meeting when he gets a call from Trudy Rittman saying the paper they gave her is crap and they won't help her because any request for something has to come from Harold to Toho. And who is Toho? Who is the exact person who's making these rules? So Harold has to go to a paper store, buy his own paper. Just as he sits down to write, another phone call comes from T-Music. Toho won't give T-Music a piano even though there are two open rooms with piano. Why? Toho says only Mr. Rome can have rooms with pianos in it. Oh, boy. Now, the music staff they have, all locals, cannot work out of order. So if the director says, I need us to chart the Act 2 finale first as opposed to the Act 1 finale, the Toho music staff refuses as the request for the Act 1 finale came in first.

And if that is it, the director needs to submit a request to Toho. Florence Rome at this point is feeling pretty pissed, nothing like a wife scorned. So she decides to find out who the hell is this person at the top of the Toho pyramid and she's going to give them a piece of her mind. So while she's playing detective, Harold and Joe are trying to put out fires everywhere and what makes it worse is Kikuta, their book writer and the person responsible for all of this, is nowhere to be seen.

[23:29] Harold Rome: They discover that there is no union in Japan for actors. No understudies. Only principals get paid for rehearsals, which means ensemble members can show up whenever because they need jobs to support themselves during this nine-week process. The ensemble doesn't act, they just do steps. The stage manager on the first day is demanding an exact lighting plot and the exact orchestrations. It's a madhouse and Lehman and Trudy are still not even on a contract. Then Harold asks an innocent question, which turns into World War III on day one of rehearsal. Who's publishing the music for the show and who's doing the cast album? Well, Toho is publishing the music, which means Toho now controls everything.

Here's the issue with the cast album. Because you all didn't want to use Toho people in the show, we can't use this cast as they are under contract with other groups, so we will use our own Toho singers. Harold wants to know why Toho is producing it and not Columbia or Victor, and Toho says, quote, no other group was interested. The album is essential to the selling of this show. How can no one be interested? No matter. It's time for the first day and the first day always begins, as you know, with a meet and greet, which takes at most ten minutes. Not in Japan. It's two and a half hours as everyone's credits are listed and applauded. Joe gives the cast scarlet sweatshirts with their name on them. Hello, Merrily, we roll along. And then they begin, but still, no Kikuta in sight for nine weeks.

[24:10] Harold Rome: Except on press day. On press day, Kikuta's there. The rest of the time, nobody ever sees this guy. How do you have a book writer on a musical? Nobody sees him. Now, the rehearsals are going well, except for the fact the ensemble leaves a lot to make money, or as Flo calls it in her book, quite offensively, noodle money. And the actors fall madly in love with Joe and Harold. They are loving this American way of making art. And clearly the star of the show is the man playing Rhett Butler. He is sexy, smart, charismatic, not the most confident of singers, but Harold gets it out of him. Everyone is in love. And maybe this show will become something quite special in those few weeks, assuming no tragedy befalls it.

[25:00] Harold Rome: Well, you know it was coming. Tragedy is befalling. The man playing Scarlet's father has a heart attack and has to be replaced. Remember, there's no understudies. Toho tells Joe, oh, we need your rehearsal studio for a show that opens before you so you can rehearse in the freezing basement. Oh, and we just rented the Imperial Theater for a New Year's Eve broadcast, so you can be on set five days before opening, first time, five days before opening. Then we have to lose a day while we strike the entire set of the New Year's Eve show, then put everything back in for Gone with the Wind on opening day. Yes, on opening day, they're going to attempt to put the entire Burning of Atlanta back onto the stage.

Then Harold finds out from Columbia and RCA that no one ever contacted them about recording an album, and if had they been asked, they would have loved to have done it. Florence also finds out that only Harold gets a comp for opening, but they finally decide to give Florence one just to shut her up. She finds out that Toho sells the house to parties, so opening night is going to be randos, and the critics sort of come whenever they like and sometimes don't post their reviews until after a show closes. She is pissed, and even pissier, when she finds out that the local embassies get unlimited tickets to opening. She doesn't, but the embassies do. Now she wants to know who the head of Toho is, and in addition to giving out free tickets, why didn't he book the show into the Osaka Expo? Hell hath no fury like a composer's wife scorned.

[26:15] Harold Rome: The American costume designer, he comes back to find that they haven't made any costumes because the New Year's Eve show is taking priority, so he has to farm out the costumes, and they go to an old woman who designs them to be worn once, so they have to start all over with a new company who thinks the low bodice designs are a mistake, who would show that much skin, so they fix it by adding more material. The set designer asks for something, and they put him through a test to see if he knows what he's actually talking about. When he asks for a change, and the staff is arguing if it can be done, he finally just climbs up onto the stage and fixes it himself. The conductor's translator, the associate, hates Layman Engel, the conductor, and when Layman makes a joke, the translator says, I won't translate it because I don't like your sense of humor.

Oh, if life were only that easy. But it all comes to a halt when two weeks before opening, the actor playing Rhett is injured on a film set. He has to leave the show. They find a replacement, and in the midst of all this anger and bitterness and fury and things just not going well,

[27:22] Lesley Ann Warren: The actor playing Rhett, who was injured, writes a letter to the company, and it's read to them on the next day of rehearsal. It is rather confusing to me to write this letter and express my feelings about the accident. I am aware that the cast of Scarlet is in a mess now that I am no longer playing the role. As I am recovering from the shock of the accident and now have a normal sense about me, I've come to understand how serious and merciless the result of the accident has been. I would like to express my deepest apologies. I cannot find the proper words to write this apology. Mr. Leighton, from the first moment when you said to me, "The musical Scarlet requires patience. Please trust me and follow my guidance without any hesitation."

I could feel an energetic vitality amongst the cast. During rehearsals, my heart was full of joy. You taught me the most important thing about acting, and that is singing from the heart. Your sharp eyes guided me. I am very thankful for you. You were so kind to me when I made mistakes. Mr. Leighton, what you taught me will help me deeply in the next stages of my career. I miss you dearly. I have no other words to say except I'm sorry. To you, to Mr. Rome, Mr. Engle, Mr. Kupferman, Ms. Rittman, and Mr. Baker. And to Ms. Jinjuji, I give you my deepest apologies as well. I truly believe that you will be the best Scarlet in the whole world. To Mr. Kataoji, if it is possible, I would like to visit you and show you my apologies and thank you for your collaboration.

However, at this time, it is impossible. Mr. Kataoji, what I can say to you now must only be this. Please follow the guidance of Mr. Leighton. Trust him at all times. Wishing you much success. Sincerely yours, Akira Takarada.

[29:54] Lesley Ann Warren: And this letter rallies the troops. They have to go on for Akira, and so they do, even though Scarlet now comes down with pneumonia during dress rehearsal. And Flo is determined to go on because her snooping has paid off. Who is this person at Toho that is being an asshole, fucking everything up, embarrassing her in front of her friends, she can't give them comps, making her husband play errand boy? Maybe you guessed it already. It's Kikuta. Every time he would say I need to check with the higher ups, he was the higher ups. All of this trouble was him, either flexing his muscle or not realizing business was different, or getting back for his mistress, but Flo does not forget. Finally, on January 2nd, 1970, after ending rehearsal at 4 o'clock and a go time of 5:30, Scarlet, the musical, opened. Flo best describes opening night.

[31:17] Lesley Ann Warren: And I'm sickeningly cordial to people I scarcely know. I don't know what I expect to accomplish by all that, but it keeps me from going out of my mind with anxiety until the curtain goes up. When that happens, I settle into a clean cut case of leaping paranoia. I hate the audience, it's hostile. I hate my friends, who really have come only to laugh at my suffering. I hate the critics, who have already written their reviews based on a clever pun they thought of last week. And above all, I hate everyone, because they're so relaxed. But who cares, because another producer is waiting in the wings. And he was the Ziegfeld of the West End. He convinced the Margaret Mitchell Estate to allow for this show to continue on.

His name was Harold Fielding, the King of Kitsch. He was the impresario behind Theatre Royale Drury Lane, a massive theatrical space that was ripe for extravaganza, and what would be better than seeing those nasty colonists burning down what they created? Well, in 1972, he held his own press conference at Theatre Royale, and announced to the press he had just gotten back from New York and made the deal with Joe Layton to bring Scarlet, now called Gone with the Wind, to London, and it would open on May 3, 1972, then off to Broadway.

[32:37] Lesley Ann Warren: Kikuta was replaced with Horton Foote, a Southerner who had won an Oscar for adapting To Kill a Mockingbird for the big screen, and this would be the only musical he ever worked on. But at least he'd be in the room with the team, and he had already convinced the team to drop an hour and a half worth of material, and to add a few moments of applause, so this seemed to be going on the right track. Seven songs from Japan are dropped, including the title song, Scarlet. And in London, they added 17 songs. Yes, they added 17 songs. The most bizarre is, quote, "Marrying for Fun." Bizarre for it's after her husband is killed. Very bizarre. The spectacle of it all would be on full display. More horses, more locomotives, more fire. Why did this not just go straight to the United States? Well, the team felt it would be better to iron out the kinks away from audiences that had such attachment to the material.

[34:44] Lesley Ann Warren: Fielding, now no slouch in self-promotion, realized the best way to garner interest in the show was to do what Selznick did and tantalize them with who would be Scarlet and who would be Rhett. Suddenly, the press was flooded with possible Scarlets, most of them provided by Fielding. From Barbara Harris to Barbara Streisand, two productions I would not want to see if you paid me, and it was finally announced that it would be the non-singing Leigh Remick. And just as the press got that onto the wires, Fielding called another press conference to the theater to reveal the true Scarlet O'Hara. No, no, no. Not Leigh Remick. June Ritchie. She was one of those angry young men actresses from John Osborne plays that didn't gather enough wattage to light the West End like the other names, so Fielding had to pretend he was debuting a brilliant talent in the world of musical theater. And, according to Harold Rome, she was.

[36:56] Lesley Ann Warren: Before we even got there. But we took one look at her and said, no, if she stays, we go and you can put on your own goddamn musical. She was too old, must have been 40 at least. And Scarlet starts out about 16 years old. No matter how much soft lighting you use, no actress of 40 is going to look, act and sound like she's under 20. The same way with Leigh Remick. I mean, she's fine, but she would have been ridiculous as Scarlet. But this little gal, she's just splendid. So good for June. Even Layden likes her. As soon as she got on that stage, we knew she had all the qualities for Scarlet. It just hits you over the head. Small, beautiful and vulnerable. But underneath, there's a tough, resilient core. And you can sense that if she's in trouble, she can be a bitch. And that's Scarlet. Not evil, but willful and unbelievably strong. A very special creature.

[37:50] ♪ Musical number: "Somewhere Far From the Storm" — performed by Lesley Ann Warren ♪

[38:42] Lesley Ann Warren: Now, if you think Rome had issues with Kikuro, wait until he begins working with the notoriously cheap Fielding, who would pay actors so little they could not afford bus fare home. But he was spending $500,000 for this one, which is $4 million today. Here's what Rome has to say about Fielding. Don't ask. The things I could tell you about that man... Cheap? When I say cheap, let me just put it this way. As part of my contract, he has to pay our fare from New York to London, right? So what does his office send me? A 35-day round-trip tourist class excursion that expires 10 days before the show opens. That's going a bit far, no? But it's the kind of thing that makes him a financially successful producer, and it's just that he shouldn't try it on me.

But I'll say this for him, I've never seen an organization run so smoothly. The costumes, sets, orchestrations, everything you can think of is here, on time, before time, round the clock, and in perfect working order. Never seen anything like it? We could never do that in the States.

[39:45] Lesley Ann Warren: The show opens, and it's well-received by audiences and critics, except Milt Coward, who says they need to cut two things, the horse and Bonnie Langford's throat. The Evening Standard says, "Choreography and music are brilliantly blended in a storytelling exercise that never stops for breath. There are no artificially set numbers to halt the momentum of the tale, and every precise dance number propels the action forward." The Daily Express says, "What a musical! Singing Scarlet is here to stay." And it seems what people are actually more attracted to is this British idea of technical wizardry. People are very impressed with the actual burning of Atlanta on stage. They are impressed with all the people, all the horses, all the trains.

But when they start to really look at the book and the score, it's not getting the best reviews. The book and the score, some call it plodding, some call it humorless. Even though they are not being praised necessarily for the book and the score, it does run over 400 performances, which was a pretty big deal. So hopes are very high for the United States debut. Until Rex Reed, a very sassy critic who is read in every newspaper in America, goes over to London, sees the show, and pens his review of Gone with the Wind, the musical. Take it away, Rex Reed.

[41:02] Robert W. Schneider: To see it, to believe it. Darkness fell over the narrow stone street crammed with a traffic jam of Rolls Royces, American Cadillacs, taxis, and vegetable trucks in front of Covent Garden. Fruit peddlers and flower vendors in shirtsleeves sipped ale in front of the pubs, people pointed from upper windows, and crowds milled aimlessly in front of the old Drury Lane, where a mighty cannon pointed toward the sky, Cockney actors sang Dixie in Confederate war uniforms, and British debutantes in hoop skirts greeted the arriving celebrities and critics by passing out Confederate flags while a Dixieland band played Old Black Joe. It was the opening night of Gone With The Wind, and the single biggest night in London since the end of the Blitz.

You also had to see Gone With The Wind to believe it. Certainly, I can remember nothing in my theatre-going history I consider a bigger disaster. Champagne flowed freely in all the bars, flashbulbs popped, and Noel Coward said it was a return to the fabulous old days of the Drury Lane when Yvor Novello sank a ship on stage. Gone With The Wind sank, too, like the Hindenburg. The London critics, who are less demanding in their musical tastes than Americans who have seen everything, hailed the visual aspects of Joe Layton's production. Let me tell you about that. The curtain rises on the barbecue at Terra. You know it is Terra because there are two white shutters at the corner of the stage that suggest a plantation stands somewhere in the wings.

But what you actually see is a mass of swamp moss made of hanging ropes and what looks like shreds of green toilet paper, under which dancers stumble through some poor man's Agnes de Mille choreography on a lawn of Woolworth grass, beyond which stands a covered bridge used for each character to make an entrance. There's Ashley Wilkes. Who's that? His name is Rhett Butler, etc. Scarlett O'Hara must not only sing while being strapped into her corset but is also forced to raise the curtain as well. There is never enough time in a show's three and a half hours for her to change so she is always being dressed on stage, a trick that makes it impossible to concentrate on the song she sings. The biggest problem, of course, was how to get the passion and scope of Margaret Mitchell's book on stage to capture the sweep and energy of the Civil War and to include all the plots and subplots of a famous movie everybody in the world has seen without making the audience wish they were at the movies instead.

It was a problem of condensing and it was solved. General Lee declares war in the middle of Mr. O'Hara's song about how he built Terra. The whole war is symbolized in a tableau played against a backdrop of an enormous Confederate flag as a line of silhouetted soldiers falls each time a bugle plays. If you could see the fragile Cockney chorus boy who plays the Confederate soldiers, you'd stop wondering why the South lost the war. There isn't a genuine Southern accent on stage. For some unexplainable reason, Melanie trims her Christmas tree at the Atlanta train station while a locomotive puffs on stage, blowing real smoke into the coughing, wheezing audience, then backs off stage backward. All the dying wounded soldiers rise up from their stretchers and sing, we're just passing through, in one of the show's more hilarious accidental moments.

As Prissy runs away to fetch a doctor for Melanie's baby, Bell Watling's whores do a dance number and sing, this is the time boys, your time for love, while Melanie writhes with labor pains. Kiss me farewell like you mean it, I'm off to war now, sings Rhett Butler as Atlanta goes up in flames. The biggest show-stopping moment on opening night occurred as Scarlett tried to drag a horse with stage fright across the swamps back to Terra in the wake of war. I will go, she kept shouting, but only the horse did. The audience screamed with laughter and applause as the poor nag filled the stage with fresh manure. Then the mad soldier who tried to attack Scarlett from behind a tree fell dead from her gunfire under the curtain line.

I'll never go hungry again, wept the brave actress who played Scarlett, mostly from embarrassment, as the corpse, seeing the first act curtain falling, rolled over to keep from being killed. Naturally, he rolled right into the horse's major contribution to the evening amidst a holocaust of hysteria and chaos among the stagehands. That was only the first act. This is a Gone With The Wind that never seems to end. Harve Presnell, the Hollywood actor who plays Rhett, is a good singer, but his acting is so flat and wooden, one London critic said during the burning of Atlanta he expected Rhett Butler to go up in flames too. The only real performance in the show is given by June Ritchie as Scarlett.

Her acting comprises many elements of contrasting excitement from cold fortitude to sensual gaiety to unquenchable survival power. Scarlett is one of the most demanding roles ever written for a woman, and even in this truncated form it shines and keeps the audience from falling asleep. Miss Ritchie does an admirable and intelligent impersonation of Vivien Leigh. They're talking about bringing Gone With The Wind to Broadway. They must be kidding. Even if they rewrite it, recast it, restage it, rescore it, and stop feeding the horse before he goes on stage, they'll still be bringing it awake. And a few American critics see it and they review it, and a lot of them have some pretty racist things to say about it.

This is a quote from one of the critics from America who went over to review it, specifically talking about Marion Ramsey, who played the role of Prissy. And if you remember Marion Ramsey, she's probably best known for the Police Academy movie series. And he says, quote, Marion Ramsey does Prissy as though she has not yet heard that black is beautiful. If Leighton Brinks has Gone With The Wind to this country and Miss Ramsey comes with it, I wouldn't want to be responsible for the theater in which it is done, not after sensitive blacks get a look at Miss Ramsey. Oh boy. Another critic says, I may know, I may not know nothing about birth and babies, but I do know a staggeringly insulting performance when I see one.

The number Bonnie Gone, which is sung after Scarlett and Rhett's daughter Bonnie dies, was a recycled version of Rome's Like the Breeze Blows from his 1965 play with music The Zulu and The Zeta. And Bonnie Gone was a song that made audiences laugh when they were supposed to cry. This is a little bit of Bonnie Gone.

[48:23] ♪ Musical number: "Bonnie Gone" — performed by Lesley Ann Warren ♪

[49:20] But nevertheless, like Scarlett O'Hara, they persisted. Fielding would take the show to Los Angeles for eight weeks, and San Francisco, because Edwin Lester, who ran the San Francisco Theater up there, put pressure on him. Then Toronto, then Washington, then it would open on Broadway April 7th, 1974. And boy, did that season need it. Over here, The Magic Show, Raisin, Molly, Gigi, Lorelei, mostly to get something on a marquee that was longer than one name. Geez, what an economy. But had this been a success, it would have changed the business model because the United Kingdom wants to now use United States provinces to tour their musicals because the United Kingdom didn't really have those anymore.

So instead of taking them all over England, they were now going to take them all over America, hence boosting business in the United States. And it was time for even more changes on stage before an opening of August 28th, 1973. Starting with a new cast, led by an actress closer to Scarlett's sensibilities, and a Rhett that was… well, interesting. For Rhett, they would now use Purnell Roberts from TV's Bonanza, and you just need to Google him to see why he's an interesting choice for the dashingly beautiful Rhett Butler. But for Scarlett, it would be someone Leighton knew very well. The wonderful Miss Lesley-Ann Warren.

[50:34] Lesley Ann Warren: Joe Layton, excuse me, who directed and choreographed a musical I did on Broadway called Drown the Cat several years before Gone With The Wind. And I think we had such a fabulous relationship during the making of Drown the Cat. That was Elliot Gould and myself. And I think he just thought I'd be a great Scarlett and just really brought it to my attention and, you know, asked me if I wanted to do it. He never said, say, a display. Never. And that's something that I actually don't like with directors. That's constraining. You know, it feels like you're just a robot, you know? But he was… I mean, I think I knew her, knew this character intuitively on some level. I just understood her and understood, you know, her needs and wants and desires and, oh, self-willed, fiery, passionate, petulant, childlike in many ways, but assertive and singularly directed in terms of her own mind and what she thought she wanted and needed.

I just understood that personality type, you know? And there were definitely some aspects of her that were very similar to me and, you know, some that maybe weren't, but I understood it. The way that Joe Layton staged it was that I'm on stage and as the curtain comes up, my back is to the audience, I'm dancing in the hills of the plantation. So I don't even have a minute to get myself, you know, sort of acclimated to being on stage, but the score was beautiful. And, you know, moving and romantic and I just, I loved it. But it was definitely overwhelming. The truth of the matter is, and I did a Broadway show about 25 years ago and I had the same experience and that was, I'm always scared. I'm always nervous.

The nerves don't go away, you know? It's not like I'm just always nervous. And so I was able to lose myself and my nerves. She's still fighting against everything that's happened to her and everything that's around her and trying to move forward with strength and kind of personal power. And so, you know, it gave me, even though I was acting that, it gave me that sense of that reality.

[53:30] Robert W. Schneider: And tell us a little bit about who your Rhett Butler was.

[53:33] Lesley Ann Warren: Well, that, Pernell Roberts was Rhett Butler and he was, we didn't get along. So we rehearsed in two separate rooms because he was, yeah, we did. We rehearsed in two separate rooms. And Joe's wife, Vivian, was always involved in everything we ever did and very closely attached to what he was, you know, his ideas. And so she was always present. And so she would come with me into my room. He would go with Rhett, Joe would go with Rhett, Rhett, Rhett, Rhett. What am I saying? That's a Rhett. We got you, Rhett Butler. Yeah. Rhett in the other room with Pernell. And we would do our separate, separate rehearsals. And then we would come together. And, you know, obviously, it's not always the same that we'd be together, but he and I were like, we just weren't compatible. Quite a bit older. I don't remember how old he was, but he was definitely older. And he had,

[54:44] Lesley Ann Warren: You know, I'd already worked with Joe Layton very closely, and I worked with him again after Gone With The Wind and something else. But we understood each other. We had a similar sensibility and personality. You know, we loved to laugh, and we were very, you know… And Purnell was different. He was not that. He was much more… He was very serious. I think he's probably now, looking back, I think he was probably very scared. You know, and sometimes that comes out as kind of grumpiness.

[55:22] Oh, of course. Of course. Of course. It just didn't work for us to be in the same room working things out. So they moved, you know, so we had two separate rehearsal rooms, which was fine. Once we were solidified in our characters and our staging and our, you know, interaction on the stage, we were great together on the stage. I mean, that didn't affect what we were doing. It was more a personality issue in rehearsal, you know, that made it not as pleasant as it could have been. But we found a way to… He found a way to work with me that didn't… You know, that worked. Whereas Purnell would get angry, you know, and that didn't… That was not good for me.

[56:09] Did you re-watch the film prior to beginning rehearsals, or did you intentionally avoid?

[56:15] I didn't watch it before we started, mainly because I had just started, you know.

[56:20] Oh yeah, you jump in. I don't have time to do anything else.

[56:23] Yeah, yeah. And I was creating my Scarlet, you know. I know enough and knew enough. I'd already been studying with Denise Strasberg since I was 17, and I knew that that was what my work was, was to create my Scarlet, you know. And obviously, she, Scarlet O'Hara, is an iconic character, so there are going to be, you know, attitudes and behaviors that are inherent to that character.

[56:58] But I didn't watch it, and I didn't feel… I didn't feel any pressure about it either. I didn't feel like, oh, I have… You know, I'm worried about being like… You know, I didn't think of it, to be truthful.

[57:13] I love that. That is a fabulous and healthy answer to say the least.

[57:17] Yeah, yeah. It's the truth.

[57:19] You talked about this opening that Mr. Layden created. Are there any other iconic visual moments or staging moments that you remember throughout this that you wish people that had not seen the show were able to go get into a time machine and go observe?

[57:34] Well, the insanity was that we burned Atlanta on the stage.

[57:39] Yes, how do you do that, by the way?

[57:41] Well, it was all visual. You know, it was all the visual… I guess in those days, because we don't… You know, we had… It was so long ago. We certainly didn't have the technology that we have today, but it was part of the production design, part of the lighting, part of, you know, to indicate fire. But we did have a horse on the stage, and that was… Yeah, we had an actual horse on the stage, but it was so challenging because one of the nights that I was singing, and the horse wasn't on the stage at the time. The horse was on the stage at the end of the first act, I think. The horse was on the stage behind me, and I'm singing. Tomorrow is another day, and the audience started laughing, and I was like, holy God, what's going on, you know? And I sort of glanced behind me, and the horse was pooping on the stage.

[58:42] Oh, boy.

[58:44] You know, what are you going to do? You have a horse on the stage? He's going to go to the bathroom sometimes.

[58:49] Oh, my gosh.

[58:51] That was a crazy, crazy, you know, tricky thing to work with.

[58:56] Oh, I can't even imagine. Okay.

[58:59] But that horse was on the stage. We had Bernie Valenta, the opening number, which was a wonderful way to open it. And the woman that played Melanie became one of my best friends and is still one of my best friends.

[59:13] I saw that. It's something where you take a photograph with each other every year or something?

[59:18] Every year in the same position, basically, yeah.

[59:21] Her name is Udonna Power, and that's her real name.

[59:28] And she went on to do other musical theater, and she was an incredible singer, just incredible. She was just a couple of years older than me at the time, but before the curtain came up, before we were all getting ready, she would go and stand in the middle of the stage, and she'd just raise her arms, and she would, I think, just be doing some kind of connection with the theater and the audience.

[1:00:00] I was always so, so impressed and, you know, entranced with what she was doing, because I was just a bundle of nerves and, you know, trying to get ready to do this dance number, you know, by myself on that stage.

[1:00:16] And the stage was raked, which was also scary.

[1:00:19] Oh, boy.

[1:00:20] Totally scary. Wonderful, loving spirit with an incredible talent.

[1:00:26] What was the original intention for this show?

[1:00:29] It was in Los Angeles and then San Francisco and then, ideally, New York?

[1:00:33] Do you remember what the trip took?

[1:00:35] Yeah.

[1:00:36] We were at the Dorothy Chandler for two months, and we went to San Francisco for two months, and the idea was to bring it to New York.

[1:00:44] But it became unwieldy to travel this show.

[1:00:48] It was a big, big pageantry kind of show. It had an enormous cast. It had a horse. It had all the technical aspects of, you know, burning Atlanta and all of that. And I think the investors just pulled the plug on it and just said, you know, this is too much.

[1:01:05] It costs too much to take it. And, you know, so that was, you know, it was a four-month fund, basically. You know, I'm sure I was disappointed, but not in a, you know, I was also exhausted. It was a huge crime, you know, to do that show every night and to be as young as I was and to be away from home and all that stuff. So I think I was okay with the decision, even though I would have loved to have taken it to New York.

[1:01:39] But, you know, it was not a huge disappointment for me. It certainly was an enormous compliment to me to be chosen to play Scarlett O'Hara, you know, and to have been given that opportunity to do it in what was now my new hometown, L.A., at the door of the Chamber at the beginning, which is a gorgeous, gorgeous theater.

[1:02:07] So I felt so, you know, so excited and so blessed to have had that opportunity. And, you know, I look back on it only with love.

[1:02:17] And the reviews come out.

[1:02:20] The Los Angeles Times Reviews headline, The Confederacy Falls at the Pavilion, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where it played.

[1:02:26] This is from the Times. Gone with the Wind had its American premiere at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Tuesday night.

[1:02:32] And frankly, my dear, frankly, it is a bust. Their approach is stupefyingly literal, which probably has something to do with the fact that the show was originally commissioned for a Japanese theater.

[1:02:43] The show offers a real whore skittish enough on opening night to make your reporter and Miss Leslie Ann Warren nervous. It offers a real choo-choo train, the funniest since the one in Hello, Dolly! But there you were supposed to laugh.

[1:02:55] Ay yi yi.

[1:02:56] Variety said the long evening resulted in boredom. Rome's score was unmemorable and forgettable, and his lyrics even worse. They found Leslie Ann Warren to be a disappointing scarlet, and the dashing Roberts wasn't up to the demands of the score. They even said that the supporting performers were more interesting, and they should have just called the show Ashley and Melanie.

[1:03:16] So, work has to be done. They added three new songs, plus a title song, and they put back in the song Scarlet from Japan. They took it up to San Francisco, where it's going to run there October 23rd to November 24th, 1973.

[1:03:31] And the reviews are not that different. The San Francisco Examiner says, Gone with the wind goes nowhere. Having seen the show a second time, I failed to understand why Joe Layden ever strapped himself with the project, or why a Broadway director-choreographer of his talent can't see when it's licked.

[1:03:43] Hortic foot's book is a mere digest of the novel, sometimes racing through a hundred pages in a single scene, like the one showing Scarlet and Rhett's unhappy home life in counterpoint to a tango number. Joe Layden realizes he has to focus more on the characters and less on the amazing special effects, so he gets rid of the burning of Atlanta, and that scares Fielding, because Fielding was like, well, we're not going to go to Broadway anymore. This is too big for Broadway. It should be at the Met, or it should be at Radio City. Broadway is too small for this.

[1:04:18] Fielding, much like Rhett, eventually ends up abandoning Scarlet in San Francisco, and the show lays dormant. Flash forward, June 14th, 1976, Dallas Summer Musicals. Lucia Victor decides to direct a new version of it on a cross-country tour before it would eventually go to Broadway.

[1:04:39] In this, it's going to be Sherry Mathis as Scarlet, Bonanza's David Canary as Rhett, and Lee Berry and Laurence Guitard as Melanie and Ashley, and once again, the critics found that the songs were getting in the way of the plot.

[1:04:53] A review. To its further disadvantage, Gone With the Wind has songs by Harold Rome that are not only non-memorable with their run-together melodies and long expository lyrics, but totally devoid of period flavor. A few are blandly pretty, one of the ballads, Home Again, comes to mind, but none really capture the nostalgic romanticism, energy, or tensions of the Civil War and its aftermath.

[1:05:15] All in all, I'm afraid, Gone With the Wind will be better remembered from the book and the movie than from this earnest, hard-trying, but lumpy stage version. Horton Foote never went back to a musical, Joe Layden realized his magic could make money, and he began creating shows for Bette Midler and Diana Ross, and he did the hit musical Barnum.

[1:05:34] Lesley-Ann Warren got an Oscar nomination for Victor Victoria and became a camp classic as, ironically, Miss Scarlet in Clue, returning back to Broadway in the musical Dream, which is a whole other story. And Harold Rome, the man who had been with this project since 1958, ended up being, I think, the person who contributed to the downfall of this particular piece being adapted into a musical.

[1:05:59] Maybe Gone With the Wind could be an opera, maybe it could be a ballet, but it couldn't be a musical. You could not stop this action for people to sing and express their thoughts, and if you did want to do that, then Harold Rome is not the person for this particular show.

[1:06:16] Like I said before, maybe Harold Arlen, maybe Duke Ellington, Vernon Duke. Harold Rome was a songwriter who was brilliant when he was looking at social situations, contemporary political social situations, a nostalgia for the past, a way of glorifying the South. This was not in Harold Rome's wheelhouse.

[1:06:40] But sometimes, the amount of money that is being offered to you is something that you cannot look away from, and I find interesting that with each incarnation of this show, Harold Rome thought this was going to be the version that propelled him back to Broadway. That optimism, much like Scarlet O'Hara's, makes me think that Harold Rome should have really, really leaned into the idea that tomorrow is another day.

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[1:08:19] See you next episode!