If you’re a fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original novel The Great Gatsby, the green light you’re reaching for is a faithful adaptation. Just like Jay Gatsby, however, it’s a broken hope. Novels are different than musicals, and we also tend to interpret the novel through the lens of events that happened after it was published. For a new generation to discover it — and hopefully love it — the story has to reflect a more modern lens that might drive them to read the novel. Or re-read, as I tend to every few years.
All that groundwork in the previous paragraph has to be laid so you can understand. If you’re that person who cherishes the novel, this review aims at you. The musical version by Kait Kerrigan, Jason Howland, and Nathan Tysen is good. To be good, it had to streamline or jettison characters and subplots that were largely internal narration.
Some of that works — it’s a clever idea to give Meyer Wolfsheim (Eric Andrews) round dark glasses to become a stand-in for the owl-eyed man that English teachers loved to highlight in class. To lose Klipspringer hurts a bit, but in the grand scheme of things, it makes sense.
Then there’s that modern lens, where the show loses some purists sight unseen. Because Pinay actress Eva Noblezada plays Daisy Buchanan, husband Tom Buchanan (John Zdrojesk) isn’t overtly a white supremacist. Though he may be, since we see “blind spots” develop when supremacists marry. He’s still clearly a jerk, treating everyone with a thinly veiled contempt.
The biggest change is that The Great Gatsby on stage will make you feel sorry for Daisy. In Jay Gatsby’s (Jeremy Jordan) fantasy world, we get scenes appropriate for a romantic comedy. His denial of passing time blinds him, and he may be treating Daisy as much as an object as Tom does.
In the novel, Nick Carraway ends up lumping Daisy together with Tom as terrible people. The creative team for the musical leavens that with “Beautiful Little Fool,” a song that makes it clear that Daisy knows she’s been terrible and feels that women have no choices but what men make for them. The best thing to do is act oblivious.
That comes near the end of the show, and though the lines are from the novel, hearing them with Noblezada’s heart breaking recasts her actions. If not in a sympathetic light, at least with understanding.
Then there’s Gatsby himself. Jordan plays the expected magnetism, using an accent that’s a little mid-Atlantic and obviously false. The only thing real about Gatsby is his love for Daisy, and even that’s more obsession. But it’s also clear that he really does like Nick (Noah J. Ricketts); he just doesn’t know how to be in a friendship that’s not transactional.
Ricketts has the hardest role, really. He has to stay likeable as our narrator but also offer sharp insight. With a rotten pack like this, at best he comes off as naïve. At worst, he’s as willfully blind through most of the show as Daisy pretends to be. Kerrigan takes his relationship with Jordan Baker (a vivacious Samantha Pauley) a bit further than Fitzgerald could. Nick’s heartbreak at the end resonates.
Is it too convenient that Kerrigan ties Wolfsheim and Gatsby both into a bootlegging operation with the woeful George Wilson (Paul Whitty)? Maybe, but it allows George to externalize the metaphorical judgment of the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg.
At times it’s frothy, hewing to a more classic Broadway style while still capturing the tragedy of the novel. But the opening and closing number “Roaring On” benefits from our jaundiced viewpoint; the chorus doesn’t see the Depression coming, but we do.
While in New York I stumbled across a new publication of the original 1926 stage adaptation, lost in Fitzgerald’s archives. Kerrigan does a much finer job of evoking the novel than the play does. Perhaps being in the public domain has also been good for the classic. By changing the lens, new meaning arises. In comics, AWA Publishing modernized it with Gatsby, which sort of works. My favorite derivation is Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful, a dark fantasy narrated by Jordan Baker. Heck, there’s even another fairly new musical adaptation.
We can look forward even as we’re borne ceaselessly into the past.
The Great Gatsby currently performs at The Broadway Theatre.
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