F Scott Fitzgerald’s estate seems pretty chill. Over the years they’ve licensed innumerable adaptations of his magnum opus The Great Gatsby, from the blockbuster Baz Luhrmann film (itself the fourth major screen adaption) to that immersive version that did the rounds a while back, to GATZ, Elevator Repair Service’s legendary eight-hour unexpurgated theatrical reading of the entire novella.
Never at any point during the 1925 book’s near century in copyright did Fitzgerald or his heirs allow a musical adaptation and you have to hand it to them: they were right.
However the copyright expired in America two years ago and suddenly there are two big US musical adaptations hovering around: Florence Welch’s Gatsby and this, from Kait Kerrigan, Jason Howland and Nathan Tyson, with direction from Marc Bruni.
Transferring over in double quick time (possibly to head off Welch), The Great Gatsby looks absolutely ravishing and will doubtless cater to those who see the book as a bling-encrusted parable of how being rich is awesome but also sometimes sad.
Let’s not get all lit crit though. The biggest problem here is not so much how the creatives have gone about making a Great Gatsby musical, but rather that it only takes a few minutes to conclude that the very idea of a Great Gatsby musical is inherently flawed.
On the one hand, the book is inevitably so heavy on Fitzgerald’s own perfectly weighted prose that it feels asinine when we lurch into vaguely jazzy showtunes with lyrics clearly by Tysen, not Fitzgerald.
But more to the point The Great Gatsby is a story about distant, superficial rich people, in which principled everyman protagonist Nick Carraway (Corbin Bleu) finds himself increasingly jaded as he gets caught in the entanglement between the new money of his self-invented neighbour Jay Gatsby and the old money of his self-interested cousin Daisy Buchanan.
The very worst thing you could do to it is give the characters songs that expand on their inner lives at length and make them easier to empathise with. You can probably guess where this is going.
In particular, Frances Mayli McCann’s Daisy is given a series of heartfelt ballads that explore her love of Gatsby and her reasons for putting up with her ghastly husband Tom. It makes her more sympathetic, a borderline Girl Boss - but she’s not meant to be sympathetic, or certainly not to this degree. The whole point of its most famous line – ‘they were careless people, Tom and Daisy’ – is that the couple are sundered from their humanity by their privilege. Jon Robyns’s Tom is pretty much left as a monster. But the musical’s efforts to vindicate Daisy speak of a general drive to prod and poke Fitzgerald’s story into a conventional tragic romance, something that leaves it sapped, confused and lacking edge.
Did I say it looked nice? From the heartstoppingly beautiful opening projection of the West Egg lighthouse blinking balefully across the water, to the lavish, pyro-enhanced party scenes and the two vintage cars that trundle across the stage, it’s ravishing, one of those Broadway shows that really looks like a Broadway show. Enormous credit to the fabulously named Paul Tate DePoo III, responsible for sets and projections. Post-Lurman ‘Great Gatsby’ has become even more of a byword for decadent sumptuousness – if that’s what you’re here for, you won’t be disappointed.
But beyond that, everything just feels a bit… off. In the title role, Jamie Muscato gives by far the most engaging performance in the show. But his twitchy, neurotic Gatsby comes across more like an autistic tech bro than a working-class guy who sacrificed everything to reinvent himself as a rich guy. Bleu’s Nick is likeable – as he should be – but the problem is so is everyone else. McCann’s sob-story touting Daisy is winsome, Nick’s acerbic squeeze Jordan – charismatically played by Amber Davies – is charming. Only Tom is really a dick, but in its attempts to conventionalise the narrative, the musical seeks to force him into a pantomime-villain role. The plot as it plays out here places too much of the blame for the ensuing tragedy on Tom’s shoulders.
Maybe it’s so absurd to think Fitzgerald’s masterpiece could be better served as a musical than a book that it’s overthinking it to treat this show as anything more than a bit of fluff. If you’re after piecing insights into the dark side of capitalism and the American Dream, read the novel. If you’re in the market for a generic but gorgeous-looking musical romance with a Great Gatsby theme… then this will do, I suppose.
