Scarlett O’Hara: Single mom

LONDON — To most, Scarlett O’Hara is a Southern spitfire who always wants what she can’t have.

But to Margaret Martin, Scarlett is representative of all the world’s stressed-out single moms who have been forced to go it alone.

To most, the 1939 film “Gone With the Wind” is an epic love story set against the backdrop of America’s Civil War.

But to Miss Martin, a first-time American playwright who has adapted the story as a musical for the stage, romance is just the tip of the iceberg. Miss Martin’s interpretation of the classic — she penned the book, music and lyrics — begins previews on London’s West End next week and formally opens April 22.

“There’s also the status of women and the impact of war on women and families,” says Miss Martin, 54. “There are race issues. There are occupied people resorting to terrorism to achieve a sense of control.

“And there are reconstruction efforts and fortunes made at the expense of the projects that were supposed to have been undertaken,”she says.

Toward that end, Miss Martin said audiences would definitely recognize in her play the people at Halliburton, the oil giant once run by Vice President Dick Cheney that later won lucrative contracts in Iraq. “They even have their own song,” she says.

If Miss Martin’s retelling of the story sounds infused with contemporary themes, she credits none other than the original author, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Mitchell. The success of the film, she says, overshadowed the deeper, darker elements of war and its effects found in Miss Mitchell’s book.

But make no mistake — Miss Martin has invested plenty of herself in the production, starting with the fact that she dared to add singing to a perfectly good story.

The Los Angeles resident toiled four years to win the rights to the book from Miss Mitchell’s Atlanta-based estate.

Then with pit-bull tenacity, she lured director Trevor Nunn — of “Cats” fame — to the project after reading an interview with the British director in which he expressed a passion for Civil War history and civil rights.

Although she grew up on the Hawaiian island of Oahu as the daughter of a choral conductor, Miss Martin knows something of racial tensions in the South. In the summer of 1965 she accompanied her mother to Greenville, Miss., to help register black children for the then-new federal Head Start program.

“We stayed there in the home of a single black grandmother raising a few grandchildren and a few other children as well,” she says. “Seeing my mother working alongside her to help clean up a mess that wasn’t of their own making has been a touchstone for me.”

Miss Martin says she was drawn to the similarly strong female characters in Miss Mitchell’s book.

In particular, Miss Martin sees a lot of Scarlett in herself.

“The other thing that brought me to the project is that, like Scarlett, I have three children,” she says. “I had my first child at 17. I was a battered teenage mom married to an abusive man. He left me, and I had to take care of my family.

“I felt I had walked inside Scarlett’s shoes,” she adds.

While in her 20s, Miss Martin lifted herself out of poverty by working at a nonprofit organization before going on to purchase and renovate distressed properties in Los Angeles.

Never one to shy away from a challenge, she enrolled in college at age 33. She went on to earn a doctorate in public health from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1998 before deciding that what she really wanted to do was write a musical.

Miss Martin has lived the American dream in such spectacular fashion that she’s even named her middle child “America.”

She says her aim is not just to entertain, but also to send a powerful message.

” ’Showboat’ was the first of its kind, a real book musical,” Miss Martin says. “This production is the same. It’s a story that digs deeper than surface entertainment. A production in which songs actually forward the dramatic story.

“I’m hoping that this production reminds Americans that we’ve lived through more bitterly polarized periods in the past and we’ve learned then the value of coming together and toning down the incendiary rhetoric,” she says. “I’m hoping it reminds Americans to focus on all that unites us rather than all that divides us.”

It’s a tall order for a show that’s likely to be seen by a lot more Britons than Americans. However, if successful, Miss Martin says it would move to New York within 18 to 24 months.

“Previously, I haven’t been that religious, but more recently I’ve learned to be a person of deep faith,” she said.

“I’ve come to really depend on a higher power and feel that I’ve been called to do this production.”

Production notes:

• “Gone With the Wind: The Musical” will be staged at the New London Theater, the same theater where “Cats” played for 21 years.

• Scarlett will be played by American Jill Paice, who appeared as Laura Fairlie in Trevor Nunn’s production of “The Woman in White” and whose credits also include “Les Miserables” and “Mamma Mia.”

• Rhett will be played by the Glasgow-born singer and stage actor Darius Danesh, a former finalist of Britain’s “Pop Idol,” singing competition, the forerunner to “American Idol.”

• Miss Martin says one of her favorite parts of the show is when the character Mammy — played by American actress and gospel singer NaTasha Yvette Williams, whose Broadway credits include “The Color Purple” — sings a song called “Every Child Wants to Be Wanted.”

• In all, a cast of 32 actors will be playing about 100 roles.

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