The musical currently playing at the Broadway Theatre, twirling drunkenly in 1920s opulence, is The Great Gatsby.
Though, perhaps, the latest revival of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel should be renamed The Gimmicky Gatsby. An attempt to evoke awe through hyper-extended dance intervals and flaccid sets, this remount prioritizes a good time over any purposeful recreation of the American classic.
This Gatsby, directed by Marc Bruni, still follows veteran Nick Carraway (Noah J Ricketts) as he moves near Long Island, New York, to chase the post-Great War high. It’s a chance to “misbehave” as the musical’s punchy opening number lays bare with music by Jason Howland.
Nick happens upon the Gatsby (a talented Jeremy Jordan), who has his sights set on Daisy (Eva Noblezada), his unrequited love. But Daisy is already married to Tom (John Zdrojeski), a hot-tempered brute drowning in old money.
The production splashes in excess, but of the Las Vegas residency kind. Golden-lacquered set pieces and a dizzying projection screen recreate the Gatsby mansion (and a bevy of other locations). The “nouveau riche” mansion isn’t as opulent or lush as one might imagine, feeling closer in spirit to a mega-church.
The book by Kait Kerrigan swings for laughs, which begin to thin by the musical’s second act. “Who knew Manhattan was so expensive,” Carraway says, slapstick-style. Kerrigan is also more interested in the Gatsby-Daisy love story than any rigorous analysis of class or the American dream, with songs bookending the colliding romances.
Nathan Tysen’s lyrics are mostly expositional, trying to fill gaps in the story. Gatsby’s ballad For Her about building his wealth to inevitably net Daisy doesn’t evoke love so much as justification.
All of Howland’s songs, a cascading list featuring the brassy fixtures of 20s jazz, are sung beautifully by Gatsby’s talented cast. Noblezada, fresh off a starring role in Hadestown, is a delicate Daisy, bringing powerhouse vocals when describing her commitment to marriage in For Better or Worse. But ultimately, much of Howland’s music melts together, not quite framing emotional hilltops.
Choreography by Dominique Kelley is apt, capturing the era’s giddy nature with the occasional Charleston. Missteps in story and direction would be more or less fine if the show itself was entertaining. But it’s only tepidly so.
Kerrigan’s book tries to capture all of Gatsby with a thudding recall. There’s the billboard featuring spectacles, the infamous Green Light, and, of course, the old v new money divide. There’s also a pointed underlining of Gatsby’s tango with the black market, set to a matrix-style, trench coat dance number titled Shady. But it all never quite blends together.
Under Bruni’s direction, Kerrigan jerks us through a rotary of locations and corresponding plot events, often leaving dead air as characters zoom away in their on-stage sports cars.
Hyper-fixation on the love story also doesn’t work in a world where Gatsby’s central characters are underdeveloped and rife with cliches. Kerrigan’s Gatsby punctuates every sentence with an “old sport”, a grating tagline.
Tom is an abusive antagonist through and through. But moments of his physical violence toward Daisy and his mistress Myrtle (Sara Chase) are sped through due to issues in Bruni’s pacing. When Myrtle’s nose is broken by Tom in a seedy uptown apartment, humor immediately plops in, a tonal bust.
Of course, the flatness of these characters could signal towards their glibness in Scott’s original text. They are vapidly bourgeois after all. But this revival doesn’t seem to be in on the joke, attempting to carve out a genuine spark and interest in Nick and Jordan (Samantha Pauly plays an old money golfer who waves off marriage). We know so little about either of them, it’s hard to truly care when their relationship veers off-course.
As the musical wraps with a flurry of the novel’s best quotes and the inevitable lesson that the rich are callous and horrible, it’s clear this Gatsby attempts to throw it all at the wall, indulge in more of everything.
Too bad none of it quite sticks.
