| abstract | - Based on Margaret Mitchell's bestseller Gone With the Wind, it traces the fate of vain, self-centered Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara and dashing blockade runner Rhett Butler, who share a passionately turbulent relationship, from the days prior to the American Civil War through the war itself and the period of Reconstruction that follows it. Image:GWTW London.jpg The original Tokyo production ran four hours, and the show underwent severe trimming when it was translated into English. Ninety minutes shorter, with a new book adapted by Horton Foote and rechristened Gone with the Wind, the West End version, produced by Harold Fielding and again directed by Joe Layton, opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1972, with a cast headed by June Ritchie, Harve Presnell, Patricia Michael, and Robert Swann. The majority of reviews praised Ritchie's Scarlett and were duly impressed by Layton's staging, but criticized Foote's treatment, which relied heavily on the audience's prior knowledge of the characters and plot and as a result was sketchy in its presentation of both. Still, Fielding was encouraged enough to schedule a Broadway opening for April 7, 1974. In August 1973, a revised version of the London production was mounted at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles by the city's Civic Light Opera Association, with Lesley Ann Warren, Pernell Roberts, Udana Power and Terence Monk in the leads. The strongly negative reviews prompted Layton to make numerous changes throughout the Los Angeles and subsequent San Francisco runs, but Fielding cancelled his plan to move the show to Broadway. In 1976, Lucia Victor staged a production in Dallas that travelled to three other cities, but that was the last time the musical was produced.
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