Who hasn't adapted F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: several films exist with famous leads, stage, television, radio, video games, ballet and four musicals to date (tonight’s is the third in chronological order). And I read that Pitlochry Festival Theatre in conjunction with Derby Theatre is producing a new adaptation for the summer.
It’s irresistible material. Hard to believe this Broadway musical is celebrating the novel’s centenary, and that it didn't sell well when first published, considered “a commercial failure”. It took till the forties for its fortunes to be revived—sadly, Fitzgerald died (in 1940) before it took off—on a wave of nostalgia, some say. Now it’s selling in the millions.
Nostalgia is what it is about. Was Fitzgerald referencing Le Grand Meaulnes? I read somewhere he was. Looking back at lost time, beating against the current, like Gatsby, looking at that green beckoning light across the bay of what was and could be if only... it wasn’t so far out of reach.
Jay Gatsby has come to Long Island post-First World War service to seek out, and impress, his former love Daisy Buchanan, who has married into old wealth. To pick up where they left off—as if time had stood still. She would never have married him. Wrong background. He thinks it’s a transactional world.
But it’s about social divide, old money versus new money. Old money resides in East Egg, new in West Egg across the bay, where Gatsby now has a vast mansion. Couldn't be more explicit than that. In between is the literal and metaphorical “valley of ashes” on the outskirts of New York, where Daisy’s boorish husband Tom’s mistress Myrtle lives with struggling garage mechanic husband George. I love the oculist all-seeing ‘Orwellian’ poster that looks down on him, but is it borrowed from one of the Gatsby films? I’ve seen it before.
A sad tale of complicated love affairs, idealistic if hopeless dreams and tragic outcome, where some are more entitled than others. I won’t say more, for the less you know of the story in advance the bigger the surprises in this production (director Marc Bruni, choreography Dominique Kelley), which follows the novel pretty closely. I see some empty seats (disappointed Scott Fitzgerald fans no doubt, with whom I sympathise) after the interval, though the production hits its stride in the eventful second half after a slack first.
The era of bootlegging, 1920s flappers and jazz lends itself so easily to a showy musical. If it lacks subtlety, it has dazzle (Cory Pattak’s lighting design is stunning). Production values are out of this world. Having the vast wide stage of the Coliseum to play with—and drive two flashy cars across—the set and projection design by Paul Tate de Poo III is jaw-dropping. Trumpian gold and art deco glitter—there is a swimming pool (for a crucial dramatic ending), fireworks, tap dancing and Gatsby’s mansion with its epic ballroom, bedroom and library.
The design (all that glitters isn’t… you know that saying) is the story, Gatsby’s story to win Daisy with obscene nouveau riche wealth, to swamp her with mind-boggling displays. She says she loves him, but she is shallow and her husband an entitled brute who avoided war service (Trump again), who breaks his mistress’s nose. They get away with murder. The poor and the deluded suffer. But, hey, dance and drink whilst you can, freeload off the hollow man.
Nick Carraway is the objective narrator, a distant cousin of Daisy’s, and the go-between foil to them all. Corbin Bleu is perfect, with no skin in the game. Jamie Muscato is a repressed diffident (so unlike his outrageous Anatole in Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 ) Gatsby, playing him needy and nervous, but what a voice. No need for amplification, but amplification we have.
Staying with the men, John Owen-Jones rumbles aggressively as mafia-style Meyer Wolfsheim, and Jon Robyns is a repellent Tom Buchanan. Point made—it’s a man’s world. Though Joel Montague makes a sympathetic sad case George Wilson.
Frances Mayli McCann’s two-dimensional Daisy Buchanan is suitably shrill. The other two lead women are her tough-talking, golf-playing independent friend Jordan Baker (Amber Davies in fine voice) and working class Myrtle Wilson (Rachel Tucker) hoping to climb the ladder as Tom’s mistress. What folly.
The ensemble delivers the goods, dancing girls and boys, waiters, servants, who keep the show on a roll, tableaux vivants (costume design Linda Cho). And what a slick show, scene changes so smooth. Video projection is cinemascopic, but the generic filmic score music doesn't stay with me, loud and insistent though it is.
Two and a half hours of tedious hoofing and banal glamour, a band and singer entertaining the freeloaders all the way to hell, a foghorn the metaphor that opens the show.