London recently saw the world premiere of the musical adaptation of the novel (and subsequent film) Gone with the Wind. Seventy-nine shows later, it’s been canceled.

Various reviews online pan it, saying it aims to condense too much into a play. As many of you probably know, the story focuses on a love story between some rich bratty Southern Belle, and a suave pro-slavery capitalist. The backdrop is the Civil War, and tied up in the setting of everything is the historical understanding of race and slavery, war, economic development and exploitation, and…well, isn’t that a lot already? We all know it’s risky business to set a love story against such ominous historical events, unless you can convey the gravity the situation and its effect on the people who lived it.

So the musical tried to do that by having actors playing slaves singing a happy jaunty song entitled “Negroes for Sale.” And that is astounding. That someone thought it would be acceptable to portray slaves as jazz-handsing their way into a lifetime of brutal torture and rape is beyond me.

Or it was at first, but then I realized that there’s a long history of playing up pain and suffering for ticket sales. It’s more than a little appalling to think an interpersonal love story could be so compelling as to turn slavery – slavery! – into just another fact of the day. A musical certainly could convey the dire conditions of an historical era and harsh realities of life in that time, but it appears that “Gone with the Wind” didn’t, so good riddance.

But it has to make you really wonder about the continued popularity of “Miss Saigon,” doesn’t it? More than 2 million Vietnamese killed, another 50,000+ American soldiers killed – not to mention the millions of casualties in other parts of Southeast Asia, the mentally ill and amputee veterans, the birth defect-causing chemical weapons, the exploitation of the Vietnamese people by American and European economic and military forces, which continue to this day? The perpetual state of poverty in Vietnam and in fact across much of Southeast Asia is directly and indirectly traceable back to one event more than any other, and that is the American War in Vietnam.

So you would think it didn’t make any sense to set a love story against this horrid horrid backdrop. (Plot refresher: American GI returns to Vietnam years later to find he fathered a son with a Vietnamese prostitute his friend bought him who for some fucking reason nobody knows fell in love with him and waited loyally for him – and killed her own evil Vietnamese boyfriend – only to find he had married his American girlfriend, then she conveniently kills herself so her son can have a better life in America. Everybody’s happy! Or you know, everybody white the audience can identify with.) For the “Gone with the Wind” musical to make slaves sing and dance, they made a conscious decision to ignore context of the original plotline – inexcusable to say the least. For “Miss Saigon,” partially based on the opera “Madam Butterfly,” they didn’t even make a conscious decision to ignore parts of the story. For them, there was no story to ignore; the story was simply and solely the “romance” between Thuy and Whateverhisname. Miss Saigon’s source material is not a 1,000 page novel, but essentially the Vietnam War itself. So that means anything that was written for the musical is written only to advance the story. The war is nothing more than backdrop, is perhaps the least important part of the story. It’s disgusting. No other way to say it.

When atrocities are reduced to plot devices, then it’s no longer outside the realm of imagination to create a world in which American soldiers and Vietnamese prostitutes are simultaneously having equal giving and taking relationships, and the only negative to arise from them is broken hearts and fatherless children, you know, “the living reminder of all the good we failed to do.” A world where the flashy colorful opening number features the line “Let me buy you a girl!” A world where all the Americans are good or at least redeemable, and all the Asians are conveniently dead, evil, or mute.

War? What’s that?

This all seems pretty goddamn common sense to me. But you wouldn’t believe the kind of support this stupid play receives, that for whatever reason didn’t materialize for “Gone with the Wind.” Back in 2004, we – meaning Boston Progress Arts Collective – put on an artistic response show entitled “Missed Sigh Gone” (thanks to Bao Phi for the title), which wow, just elicited the most cuckoo suckaducks out the woodwork. I mean, we got threats! And naysayers were using every mode of attack they could think of – even trying to convince us that our satirical design for the publicity materials was copyright infringement!

Anyway man, it’s plainly obvious to me, but it’s disturbing that I know more people in this country probably disagree than agree with me on this.

Tags: violence

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 2:15 PM and is filed under sorry, you suck. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.