Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy review. The subject is The Great Gatsby, the out-of-copyright F. Scott Fitzgerald classic now a musical(!), and, pssst, it’s not the one opening in May at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theater.
This is the one on Broadway right now with book by Kait Kerrigan, music by Jason Howland, lyrics by Nathan Tysen, directed by Marc Bruni, and choreographed by Dominique Kelley. It’s Fitzgerald’s bestseller forcibly brought to the stage by a self-appointed group of eager musicalizers, even if their enhancement(?) is hardly required of a book considered by many the great American novel — or one of the few great 20th-century American novels, a novel from which not a single word need be removed or added.
But whoa, credit deserves to be given where it’s due. Fitzgerald’s basic Great Gatsby plot has been retained — well, uh, most of it. Bookwriter Kerrigan, a first-rate lyricist herself, has lifted a large portion of the dialogue, and Tysen has appropriated dialogue and descriptions to develop as lyrics. Notably, Kerrigan includes Fitzgerald’s opening lines and the very last, which may be the most gasp-inducing closing utterance of any stateside novel ever.
[Read Sandy MacDonald’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
The year is 1922, and Midwestern-resettled-on-West-Egg-Long-Island Nick Carraway (Noah J. Ricketts), who serves as narrator, lives in a $80-per-month cottage belonging to mysteriously rich Jay Gatsby (Jeremy Jordan), who owns the adjacent mansion. (The shady source of the mogul’s wealth is revealed much later.) By luck, Carraway’s second-cousin-once-removed, Daisy Buchanan (Eva Noblezada), lives in nearby East Egg, and flamboyant party-giver Gatsby is intent on rekindling the romance he enjoyed with her in Louisville before he went to the Great War.
Impoverished then, he couldn’t expect to marry Daisy. Wallowing in wherewithal now, though, he aspires to undo her marriage to horse-owner and incorrigible philander Tom Buchanan (John Zdrojeski), who’s currently wooing Myrtle Wilson (Sara Chase). She’s the dissatisfied wife to oblivious car-service owner George Wilson (Paul Whitty). The ensuing disasters caused by the conflicting entangled relationships are seen through Carraway’s eyes, even as he begins a neither-here-nor-there romance with Daisy’s best friend, golf pro Jordan Baker (Samantha Pauly).
The surface plot is what Kerrigan, Howland, and Tysen give the audience, gussied up big time by Paul Tate dePoo III’s proscenium-bursting sets and production, Linda Cho’s gorgeous period three-piece suits and fashionable frocks, Cory Pattak’s blazing lights, and Brian Ronan’s resounding sound.
More than that, Bruni repeatedly places the principals downstage front and center to belt – is “whip” a more descriptive verb? — the many mediocre power-ballads Howland and Tysen unleash: “For Her,” “My Green Light,” “Past is Catching Up to Me,” “Beautiful Little Fool.” Like any numbers of this season’s loud tuners, they feature high notes strategized to cause audience response not just at their codas but at mid-point. The goal is regularly and successfully met. Choreographer Kelley does the same goal-reaching without too many surprises.
As a result, what’s dished out from this Great Gatsby appropriation is more than enough to give many audiences what they came to see, mainly perhaps audience members who’ve never read the novel and reasonably assume that what’s being presented them on a silver Tiffany platter is Fitzgerald.
It isn’t. The Great Gatsby — published in 1925 when Princeton-educated Fitzgerald was 29 and steeped in the pluses and minuses of The Roaring Twenties — is his somber take on the superficial, even destructive behavior of his contemporaries. It’s a serious commentary about his own going along with it. Indeed, it’s nothing less than a tragedy in the long-defined sense. Now, it’s definitely permissible to reshape material as long as the adapters retain the author’s intent. What’s impermissible is betraying the author’s intent.
Which this team commits. In the novel, Carraway talks of disliking all the prominent figures he’s been observing. Bookwriter Kerrigan does repeat his description of Daisy and Tom as “careless people.” (Tom’s outspoken bigotry is ignored.) But toward the denouement, the increasingly aware Nick shouts to Gatsby, “They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” What the bookwriter overlooks is Nick’s immediately thinking to himself that he indeed ranks Gatsby among them: “It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him beginning to end.” Not so incidentally, Nick isn’t quite Fitzgerald’s character, either. Instead, Jordan and he are start-to-finish retooled as that staple of 1950s musical standbys: the weightless secondary romantic team.
Furthermore, what Kerrigan and cohorts crucially leave out is arriviste’s Gatsby’s background, what he tragically thought would be his path to a truly good life in the optimistic, wrong-headed post-war decade. This Great Gatsby chooses to skip over Jay Gatsby’s being born and raised as James Gatz, a poor boy with not much more than a desire to better himself however he might, a fellow primed to associate with shady businessmen as his ticket to make the millions that’ll finally win him properly trained but insubstantial debutante Daisy.
This musical take on The Great Gatsby presents Jay Gatsby and Daisy Fay Buchanan as a sympathetic couple caught in unfortunate Jazz Age circumstances. In other words, the transfiguration of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is, sorry to report, a travesty.
The Great Gatsby opened April 25, 2024, at the Broadway Theatre. Tickets and information: broadwaygatsby.com
