The Great Gatsby: A crude, vulgar musical of Fitzgerald's dark masterpiece

Telegraph

24-04-2025

Shortly after F Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age-defining masterpiece was published, in 1925, the author complained to his friend Edmund Wilson that 'of all the reviews, not one had the slightest idea of what the book was about'. With hindsight, it now stands as the great novel of 20th century America, the dazzling wealth and impossible yearnings of its eponymous protagonist Jay Gatsby synonymous today with all the gaudy excess and treacherous delusions of the American dream.
Still, the book remains tricky. On a superficial level, it's undeniably ripe for musical theatre, thanks to all that lush 1920s glamour and a plot stuffed with enough tortured love affairs, abusive husbands, bootlegging gangsters and spectacular deaths to match the most garish melodrama. Yet the novel itself lives most vividly in the ineffable poetry of Fitzgerald's prose, which captures the glimmering surfaces of the era's fantasy and the spiritual vacuity beneath in ways that go far beyond mere narrative, and its essence is no more easy to pin down than a butterfly is to a wave.
A more ambitious creative team might have turned The Great Gatsby's keening lyricism, elusive spirit and sheer tragic beauty to its advantage. Instead, we get a screechy clodhopping musical that amps up the Roaring Twenties clichés at the expense of anything Fitzgerald had to say about class, money and the scissoring chasms between appearances and reality. Book writer Kait Kerrigan foregrounds the romance between Gatsby and Daisy in ways that make their cryptic love affair the routine stuff of a thousand Broadway power ballads – and in case we don't get the message, a deluxe bed is at one point rolled onto the stage.
Nick Carraway, the original narrator, and the golfer Jordan Baker, both sexually ambiguous presences in the novel, are here presented as a sidekick comedy double act. Jon Robyns's Tom Buchanan emanates a persuasively smooth blank cruelty but Frances Mayli McCann's Daisy – who symbolises above all the blithely rotten heart of this gilded world – is reduced to a stock dull socialite. And Jamie Muscato, so brilliant in Natasha and Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 at the Donmar, struggles to preserve Gatsby's evasive, essentially unknowable soul. The only character who comes out well is Rachel Tucker's vivacious Myrtle, whom Kerrigan gives a proper rounded story and who, in her final moments, strikes an unexpected poignant note.
A fair amount of Kerrigan's on-the-nose approach is an inevitable consequence of the particular demands of the art form. And credit is due to director Marc Bruni for imbuing that shrill Jazz Age party vibe with a certain degree of ugliness – Dominique Kelley's Bob Fosse-stye choreography radiates forced jollity. Moreover, Paul Tate DePoo III's almost-too-huge art deco sets really are fabulous, and glide from Long Island mansions to the Plaza hotel to George and Myrtle's weirdly dystopian-looking roadside garage with exquisite fluidity.
Yet the overall effect is excessive in all the wrong places, amplified by Jason Howland's hammer and tongs score that flattens out all possibility for nuance. Poor Fitzgerald would almost certainly have found yet more cause to grumble.