Here’s a low-level cosmic injustice: Fifteen years ago, Elevator Repair Service had to pay royalties to create its unforgettable opus Gatz out of (every word of) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, but thanks to the novel’s entry into the public domain in 2021, the two Broadway Gatsbys that we’ll see this year got it for free. I’m all for the commons, but the point — as Fitzgerald knew and his narrator Nick Carraway learns to his cost — is that the high rollers never have to pay. Nick says as much to his cousin, the languid, sparkling, willingly caged bird Daisy Buchanan, as 2024’s first new musical of The Great Gatsby (with music by Jason Howland, lyrics by Nathan Tysen, and book by Kait Kerrigan) draws to a close. “You and Tom smash up things and creatures,” he tells her, angry tears in his eyes, “and then — you retreat back into your money or carelessness or whatever it is that keeps you two together.” Here and throughout, Kerrigan’s book sticks close to Fitzgerald’s — but sentences are one thing. Spirit is another.
Under Marc Bruni’s jazz-hands-happy direction, this Gatsby feels like it belongs on a cruise or in a theme park. It would make a good fit if Epcot’s pavilions expanded to include time periods as well as countries. Poor James Gatz, victim of his own disguise. A century on, retellers of his story, like his hordes of party guests, remain distracted by the spectacle. Here, Bruni and his designers lean into the roaring garishness almost to the point of cartoon. Linda Cho’s costumes for the ensemble — all Technicolor sequins and swishy, modern prom-dress fabrics — look like what would happen if you took the prepackaged flapper getups at Party City and injected lots of money. And Paul Tate dePoo III’s set and projections are a Deco-meets-digital monstrosity. Heavy gilded panels never stop sliding back and forth and up and down (pieces were still clunking into place as the show’s leads, Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada as Gatsby and Daisy, started into the delicate opening of their big first-act closer), and the glut of overwrought background video quickly becomes absurd. Broadway producers, please, this video thing is out of control. It’s the theatrical equivalent of motion smoothing — a novelty and a technological deadener. Yes, you can, but should you? As Nick (Noah J. Ricketts) sat center stage in one of the production’s two huge cars, driving from Long Island into the city with the Ivy League “brute” Tom Buchanan (John Zdrojeski, absolutely walking away with the show) and his peroxide-blonde mistress, Myrtle Wilson (Sara Chase), I watched dePoo’s enormous screensaver roll by in the background, and I suffered for the actors. So much bling to disguise the fundamentally static, silly picture in which they were trapped.
It’s wild to think which stories we keep telling purely because they are — or have become, via however circuitous a path — famous. This Gatsby got started at Paper Mill Playhouse and made more money there than any show in the venue’s history — but if, in a parallel Fitzgerald-less universe, a young, unknown writer pitched a story with a similar arc for a new musical today, how far would it get? “Multiple people die, including the hero, the heroine flees back to her horrible husband, the narrator stumbles away to nurse his rude awakening. It’s about America.” It’s that last bit that too often gets lost. Ricketts (who’s game throughout the show) does a solid enough job of winding things up here — as a narrator with some of the world’s most well-known closing lines, he’s got to. But the tragedy that Bruni and his writing team focus on is personal and romantic, not national and allegorical. The lush, doomed love of it all is the selling point. In that vein, Noblezada genuinely sounds like a Disney princess, and Jordan does his best to plant his feet, face us, and nobly empty his heart from moment one. His voice is 100 percent golden leading man — from soap-bubble-light upper register to clamorous belt — but there’s something strange about meeting the enigmatic Gatsby and immediately listening to him launch into a lilting, swelling confession: “I’ve done it all for her / Put up each wall for her / All the plans I laid / All the options weighed / Every price I paid for her … / Daisy.” Fitzgerald’s novel is immaculately concise, and part of the terrible pathos of its title character is just how long he remains a mysterious, smooth surface. Eventually, of course, all surfaces are cracked and eviscerated, but some essential part of Gatsby is lost in the character’s collision with musical theater’s tradition of earnestly laying out what you feel in song from the jump.
Perhaps that’s part of why Zdrojeski’s Tom Buchanan stands out in this production like, to quote Daisy, “an absolute rose” among plastic flowers. He does very little of the show’s demonstrative singing, and when he does break out in a withering dismissal of Gatsby in the shared having-it-all-out number “Made to Last,” he sings as an extension of his acting. The performance remains specific and fierce, sent toward a living target and not toward some fuzzy space above the balcony. The character might be despicable (“If I wondered whether Tom’s an asshole,” Nick sings to us in a wide detour from Fitzgerald, “Tom’s an asshole”), but Zdrojeski is turning in a mesmerizing performance — menacing, vain, subtle when it needs to be, its contours defined by precisely the right kind of insidious class snobbery. For a tall, distinctive actor, he transforms remarkably: In Heroes of the Fourth Turning, he was a cringing disaster, eaten from the inside out with doubt and lust. In this season’s Jonah, he was sweet and self-effacing, a nerdy type who ended up having real compassion and integrity. Here, he’s a kind of cruel Jimmy Stewart — lanky and unconventionally charismatic, with vowels that belong to another time and a core of childish selfishness beneath all that alpha disdain.
It’s not that the rest of the cast isn’t showing up. They’re just all in a vapid musical-shaped-musical while Zdrojeski is in The Great Gatsby. As the fixer Meyer Wolfsheim, Eric Anderson has to open Act Two with “Shady,” a song that winks at Wolfsheim and Gatsby’s illegal business dealings, and the various affairs going on in the plot, by having the chorus join him in a kickline of black trench coats and fedoras. It’s the silhouette you’d get if you were to search for clip art for “spy.” Meanwhile, Nick’s fling with the aloof golfer Jordan Baker (Samantha Pauly) feels like the cute, straightforward romance of two smart outsider types — complete with playful duets and kisses that get applause. When it falls apart, it does so because of Nick’s clear moral repulsion. He’s been a good guy throughout, lacking the novel’s feeling of spellbound irresolution (Fitzgerald’s Nick is morally repulsed but rarely clear about it), and the dense, cool complexity of currents that run between him and Jordan is here streamlined into something simple and singable. Somewhere, Scott must be cackling. How fitting that we should remain obsessed with the glamour of his great book; how perfect that we should still avoid encountering its grieving, ambivalent soul.
The Great Gatsby is at the Broadway Theatre.
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