Review: ‘The Great Gatsby’ at the Broadway Theatre. A Gatsby Without the ‘Great’
The reader might be surprised to learn that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby,” considered a literary masterpiece and contender for the Great American Novel, was a commercial failure when it was first published, back in 1925. It might be equally surprising to learn that the work entered the public domain on January 1, 2021, leading to what one could call a Great Gatsby Glut.
The story, which depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway’s interactions with the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and the latter’s obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan, who conveniently resides a stone’s throw away. “Gatsby, “ incidentally, was inspired by Fitzgerald’s youthful dalliance with socialite and heiress Ginvera King, who inspired numerous characters in his works. Notably, King’s father told him that “poor boys shouldn’t marry rich girls” and that may have led to the socio-economic ascent of social climber Jay Gatsby, a character inspired by a neighbor and veteran of the Great War, Max Gerlach.
Gerlach was a former bootlegger who, like Gatsby, fostered outlandish myths about himself, threw lavish parties, flaunted his nouveau riche status, claimed an Oxford education, and threw around the moniker “old sport.”
In “Gatsby,” Fitzgerald captures a distinct change in the American character, namely that merely being oneself wouldn’t suffice.
The waves of the bay and the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock that Gatsby watches from across the water.
Late last year, I attended Immersive Everywhere’s production of “The Great Gatsby,” the longest running immersive production in the United Kingdom. If anyone knows how to throw a party, it’s Jay Gatsby and attending the performance was like attending a party with a personal invitation from Mr. Gatsby himself.
It was therefore with great expectations (lower case, with nothing to do with Dickens) that I entered the Broadway theater to see a musical theater adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” with a book by Kait Kerrigan (making her Broadway debut), music by Jason Howland and lyrics by Nathan Tysen, both of recent “Paradise Square” fame. Once seated, I marveled at the waves of the bay and the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, that Gatsby (Jeremy Jordan) watches from across the water.
[Editor’s Note: There is a second high-profile “Gatsby” musical in the wings, which will likely play on Broadway sooner rather than later. “Gatsby,“ directed by Rachel Chavkin with a book by Martyna Majok and a score by Florence Welch (of “Florence and the Machine”) and Thomas Bartlett, opens in Cambridge, Massachusetts, next month.]
I liked the set by Paul Tate dePoo III. I liked the fireworks. I very much liked the sound effect of a golf ball that traveled through the theater.
But then I grew confused. Why, for example, is Nick Gatsby’s tenant? Why is Jordan written as more comic relief than cold WASP? Why, in heavens name, is the ever- and over-confident Jay Gatsby a basket case on stage at certain points?
Costumes by Linda Cho (Daisy’s in particular, as the men mostly looked like penguins) were stupendous and I wanted to run up to the stage and drive away with one of the autos in the show – Gatsby’s yellow Rolls Royce and Tom’s unbranded but gorgeous blue coupe (with Fitzgerald likely having chosen blue as representative of Tom’s belief in his own superiority as a blue blood) – but I nonetheless found the production unsatisfying. Did Kerrigan even read “Gatsby” in high school, I kept wondering.
Ultimately, as the euphoric songs and dancing (dance numbers including some pretty good tap dancing were choreographed by Dominique Kelley) continued, I recalled that “The Great Gatsby” (the novel) is, above all, a tragedy. The songs, which incidentally are largely pleasant but forgettable, fail to take into consideration that “Gatsby” takes place during the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, and instead rely on a more generic Broadway sound.
By the second act, a good deal of the Gatsby mystique was gone and the feel-good anodyne song-and-dance numbers were just that.
Eva Noblezada’s Daisy Fay Buchanan is at her best with her cousin, Nick Carraway (portrayed splendidly by Noah J. Ricketts), a Yale alumnus from the Midwest who just served in the army in the war, while John Zdrojeski plays Tom Buchanan, a Yale football player who knows Nick and has a “cruel body” with “enormous power” whose mental and physical hardness result in a brutish personality.
For me, the moment I came to truly recognize all of the show’s failings was when we first met Tom’s working-class girlfriend, Myrtle Wilson (Sara Chase), who is married to George (Paul Whitty), who owns a filling station in the Valley of Ashes (today’s Flushing Meadows Park and the site of two World’s Fairs). The Valley of Ashes symbolizes the poverty and hopelessness, yet Kerrigan gives short shrift to the setting and to uses it merely as a backdrop to this relationship. As a result, it comes off as ancillary to the action on stage as opposed to serving as a sharp critique of the wealthy, old-money class in 1920s New York. Nick uses it to reveal Tom’s ugliest behavior as well as the cruelty of class divisions in the decade.
Jay Gatsby was known for giving his guests a good time at his fabulous, over-the-top parties. Indeed, what made him as well-known as he became were the lavish spectacles he called parties he would throw every weekend at his mansion, leaving people longing to be invited and the musical seems intent on giving theatergoers that kind of good time, the life-changing ending be damned.
When Nick finally summarizes his experience in the novel’s last line – “’So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” – the meaning of his words is likely lost to the casual observer as they are waiting for the final dance spectacle to begin.
THE DETAILS
The Great Gatsby
Broadway Theatre
1681 Broadway
New York, N.Y. 10019
Running time : 2 hours and 30 minutes
www.broadwaygatsby.com
(Photos: Accura Media Group)
