It’s open season for The Great Gatsby, now that the copyright for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s beloved 1925 classic—30 million copies sold!— has expired. We got a rather tacky “immersive” version at the Park Central Hotel last summer. Rachel Chavkin (The Great Comet of 1812…) is cooking up a Broadway-bound contender about to premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge (with songs by Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine, and Thomas Bartlett, it looks promising). And meanwhile, we have an ambitious, flashy, but ill-conceived adaptation that has leaped—from all accounts, zhuzhed up a bit—from the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey.
“No one ever walks out of a theater humming the scenery,” Richard Rodgers is alleged to have said. In this instance they very well might: Set designer Paul Tate dePoo III has layered in all sorts of flats and furniture and props and projections that swoop in at the speed of light. The mechanics and special effects are a never-ending marvel. Cue the fireworks—for Gatsby’s over-the-top party designed to impress his never-forgotten flame, Daisy! A voluminous double bed—for the trysting Fitzgerald opted not to spell out so literally! An actual pool—for … well, you know what the pool is for.
The musicalization is off to a disconcerting start. As narrator/observer, Nick Carraway (Noah J. Ricketts), a recent Midwest transplant, is meant to serve as a classic outsider, ill at ease in the rarefied milieu of super-rich Long Island (East Egg for the to-the-manner-born and, across the sound, West Egg for shady parvenus and bootlegging racketeers). In this rendering, Ricketts is called upon to open the play with a surfeit of ambition and spunk, in the form of the song “Roaring On”—as in Roaring ’20s, nicely captured by a mixed-age bunch of actor-dancers costumed by Linda Cho and choreographed by Dominique Kelley.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★☆☆☆ review here.]
The crowd scenes, with flappers and gangsters cutting loose, are fun to watch. However, many of the twenty-odd songs (music by Jason Howland, lyrics by Nathan Tysen) have a been-there feel, adding to the over-stuffed gestalt of the show as a whole. As evidenced by the flashy stage effects, the creative team has apparently opted to override the clean lines and striking economy of the original text. A musical must of course be padded out with songs, and for the most part the ones assembled here are smart enough—with one peculiar exception, right at the outset.
It seems downright sadistic to require a fine baritone like Jeremy Jordan (as Gatsby) to hiccup up to a semi-falsetto in his opening paean “For Her”—the “her” being Daisy Buchanan, played to lazy patrician perfection by Eva Noblezada. Jordan survives the vocal trial to sing their duets at full force, and the effect—visual overload swept to dust—is transporting. Gatsby observes at one point in the novel that Daisy’s voice is “full of money,” a quality Noblezada captures effortlessly. Her voice shimmers like candlelight cast across glistening satin.
Oddly, though, the couple’s relationship doesn’t seem visceral—that king-and-then-some mattress notwithstanding. You’ll catch much more fire flashing between Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan (John Zdrojeski, acing the role of an insufferable snob and incorrigible bully), and his ambitious regular squeeze, Myrtle (Sara Chase). The scenes in the whorehouse where they carry out their assignations convey more heat—and humor—than anything going on back at the mansion. Ultimately, in Chase’s rendering, Myrtle’s cri de coeur when she realizes that Tom’s about to ditch her is the emotional spark point of the entire show. The audience, rapt, falls still.
It’s a mistake and a distraction to play up a superfluous romance between Daisy’s best friend, the tennis pro Jordan Baker (a nicely acerbic Samantha Pauly), and the improbably gung-ho Carraway. A modern reading, accelerating in recent decades if not assertively stated at the time of publication, would put them at some remove from the heterosexual midpoint. Forcing these two characters into a bumptious rom-com fling is a step too far, and in the wrong direction.
In any case, we don’t need a third couple providing presumable laughs. We’ve got two sets of tragic dyads to consider, set up by Fitzgerald as antipodes. One pair—Gatsby and Daisy, with Tom as a menacing third wheel—is grossly over-privileged. At the other end of the spectrum huddle Myrtle and her garage-mechanic husband, George (Paul Whitty, a banked fire), who live in an actual ash heap.
Fitzgerald was subject to the prejudices of his era. The text has been flagged for racist, anti-immigration, and antisemitic motifs, and it’s good to see these tendencies mostly suppressed here. At a minimum, he deserves credit for posing, in stark contrast, the advantages that come with “high” birth and the cost which that privilege exacts of those less fortunate.
That message comes through clearly here, despite the production team’s penchant for bells and whistles. If all you’re seeking is a spectacle, you will get one. For some real resonance and depth, though, you may just have to wait a while—or reread the book.
The Great Gatsby opened April 25, 2024, at the Broadway Theatre. Tickets and information: broadwaygatsby.com
