Review: The Great Gatsby Reflects the Excesses of the Roaring Twenties in All the Wrong Ways

The Great Gatsby entered the public domain on January 1, 2023, and stage adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age masterpiece began proliferating faster than you could say Dr. T.J. Eckleberg. The most high-profile to date, which opens the season at Paper Mill Playhouse, is a maximalist musicalization with a starry cast and clear Broadway aspirations. Well Old Sports, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the finished product ultimately lays an East Egg.

Few admirers of the source material would cite the plot as its chief virtue, yet plot is all that remains in this tawdry treatment. Librettist Kait Kerrigan flattens the tragic dimensions of Jay Gatsby (Jeremy Jordan) and his doomed pursuit of Daisy Buchanan (Eva Noblezada) into a cheap affair, turning a tale of obsessive passion into a gaudy love triangle with Daisy’s stiff husband, Tom (John Zdrojeski). The result retains all the depth of a Harlequin romance novel, due largely to the minimization of Nick Carraway (Noah J. Ricketts), the wry outsider narrator, to the role of amiable second banana.

The production, under the flashy direction of Marc Bruni, reduces the ravishing, imagistic quality of Fitzgerald’s prose to a pageant of gaudy spectacle. The hulking sets by Paul Tate dePoo III, meant to emblemize the clash of old and new money in post-war society, look gauche and generic across the board. They’re augmented by shockingly tacky projection designs and a parade of vintage cars that elicit oohs and aahs from the audience. Brief character scenes are overtaken by an endless stream of party numbers that become indistinguishable, with the cranked-up ensemble performing choreography by Dominique Kelley that has little connection to the era. The musical revels in the vapid excesses that the novel excoriates.

The score, by Jason Howland (music) and Nathan Tysen (lyrics), offers the barest suggestion of pastiche before giving way to an onslaught of bland, placeless melodies. Instead of representing a time period where new musical forms gave voice to a restless generation, the majority of songs here lack any specificity or sense of grounding in a particular epoch. You would have to reach back to the heyday of Frank Wildhorn on Broadway to find so many power ballads crammed into two-and-a-half hours, all performed at an ear-splitting decibel that obscures at least half the lyrics.

The material leaves little opportunity for depth in the performances, but it becomes quickly clear that the two leads are miscast. Jordan lacks the enigmatic quality that makes Gatsby a legend in his own time and masks the questionable provenance of his place in society. Some questionable choices are not his fault — why do the creators have the famously elusive character open the musical front-and-center with an upbeat song about the pleasures of the Roaring Twenties? — but throughout, Jordan remains too likable and guileless to truly convey Gatsby’s fatal flaws. And although he gets a few opportunities to belt to the rafters in the second act, the score occasionally pushes his voice into an uncomfortable falsetto.

Noblezada’s Daisy lacks the spark that made her a memorable presence in Hadestown and Miss Saigon. She also fails to capture the wry acceptance of her gilded cage, the complicity that ultimately turns Carraway’s stomach and sends him back to St. Paul. Other personalities from the novel are minimized: the golfer Jordan Baker becomes a sullen socialite (Samantha Pauly plays her with as much dimension), the gangster Wolfsheim a standard-issue villain (Stanley Wayne Mathis does his best with the score’s most memorable number, “Shady”).

Only Sara Chase as Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan’s coarse mistress, comes close to capturing the right style and tone. Despite being saddled with a series of unfortunate frocks by costume designer Linda Cho (and an equally frumpy wig by Charles G. LaPointe & Rachael Geier), Chase communicates Myrtle’s social striving and her pathetic belief that Tom actually loves her. Paul Whitty turns in a gritty performance as her cuckolded husband, although the character is underdeveloped.

Paper Mill Playhouse has expended considerable resources on this production, but as it stands, any hope of a direct transfer to the Main Stem seems about as faint as a green light across Long Island Sound. Now that The Great Gatsby is fair game for all comers, others will continue trying to get it right, and surely someone will succeed. (The next big attempt, written by pop star Florence Welch and Pulitzer Prize winner Martyna Majok, will debut at A.R.T. in May 2024.) Whatever ends up happening, this Gatsby, like the man himself, will likely be remembered as a cautionary tale.