If I had to pick one and only one book that is my favorite, it would be The Great Gatsby. It’s not really fair to do that because my favorite book is really about a ten-way tie, but Gatsby wins through seniority and through being the first novel that I close-read and enjoyed rather than just normal reading, or close-reading that I despised (I’m looking at you, Catcher in the Rye and As I Lay Dying, although the latter is actually a good book, just a tad advanced for a fourteen-year-old to be close reading.)
So when the musical version of Gatsby announced it would be coming to Cleveland the weekend directly after my birthday, I bought tickets on pre-sale and told my wife she’d bought my birthday gift six months early. Gift buying for me is easy for her, as you can see in my post from last year, My Literary Valentine’s Day.
This means that the musical had a high bar to clear and based on the short trailer, I wasn’t sure it was going to. I didn’t let that bother me going in; after all, Baz Luhrmann’s movie version was by the far the best and its trailers made it look like it was only going to be about the parties, too. I was very pleasantly surprised with both that they appreciated their source material and let it tell its story.
When I walked into the theater and saw the curtain had an image of the green light on Daisy’s dock, I knew they were going to tell an actual story, not throw a two-hour party. Bonus points for the light because it was an actual light, not a painted dot. (Note: this is the only picture. I don’t take pictures while the show is going on not just because it’s prohibited, but because when I’m seeing an event in person, I want to actually be in the moment. Knowing I can’t fall back on the crutch of my phone recording everything forces one to watch, not spectate.)
I liked the set design already because of the Art Deco touches around the edges, but it only got better from there. The set designer did an amazing job, and one of the best parts of the show was that even though this is the after-Broadway tour phase, they didn’t strip it down for the road. The set is basically the same set from Broadway, just as complex and just as intricate. I would go so far as to say that this was the best set design I’ve ever seen; somewhat better than Les Misérables and substantially better than Hamilton.
The music itself was solid. While it didn’t send me running to the merch table to buy the CD like I did with Les Misérables and I don’t think there was a song that I’ll still be listening to long afterward the way I still listen to “You’ll be Back” from Hamilton, it complemented the story well and did its job in delivering both the story and the emotion.
Although the title is The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway (Joshua Grosso) is just as critical because this is the story of Gatsby (Jake David Smith) as told through Nick’s eyes. Both roles were cast well, especially Nick, and Tom (Will Branner) was done well, too.
The musical does take some liberties with the book. They are ones I would say expand the book without stretching it, and I can understand them, even if I don’t agree with all of them. Jordan Baker (Leanne Robinson) has a bigger part in the musical than in the book, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing here. It gives her a chance to be a much bigger foil for Nick than she was in the novel and helps deliver the point of why Nick ends up leaving New York after Gatsby dies. Meyer Wolfsheim (Edward Staudenmayer) is given a bigger role in this than he was in the book and while I agree with Jordan’s expansion, Wolfsheim did not need one here. Jordan’s role enhanced Nick and the story and its message, while Wolfsheim’s detracted from Gatsby, shading him heavily with the taint of hard-edged gangster that Fitzgerald was careful to only hint at, not emphasize. This removes a lot of the pathos from Gatsby’s death because Wolfsheim’s unnecessarily-increased presence makes Gatsby appear incorrigible rather than who he was: a naive man who believed love could overpower the vacuousness of the rich. This is why Nick’s last words to Gatsby are “They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” They included those lines in the musical, but I’m not sure they understood their purpose.
But that said, the material was still treated with respect and general understanding, and one of the biggest problems with any adaptation is deciding what to emphasize and what to leave out. One of the things they practically left out was how almost no one went to Gatsby’s funeral. It was a short scene and handled so clumsily here, as if it were an afterthought instead of one of the most powerful scenes in the book: everyone loved Gatsby’s parties, but no one loved Gatsby enough to show up to his funeral. That’s a very hard message to get across, especially in the form of a musical, but the ham-handed way it was done made it into a joke instead of the heartbreaker it was supposed to be.
Again, though, this is my own interpretation, and what’s important to me won’t necessarily be important to the ones doing the adaptation. To me, it was a miscue that left a small hole, but not one that ruined it all. They squeezed a lot out of the source material and created a good musical out of a great book. It did enough other things well to make me enjoy it despite some flaws, almost all of which are differences in interpretation, not execution. In fact, there were a couple of things that I thought came across better in the musical than they did in the book.
Verdict: Even if Gatsby isn’t your favorite book, this is still a great story well told, both on the page and on the stage.
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