This is a very twenty-first century take on Gatsby. We seem to demand more from musical theatre than just the telling of a story, memorable songs and competent “appropriate” staging. We want glitz, and glamour and pizzazz in spades. And we certainly get it in the Broadway Theatre’s “The Great Gatsby”.
The quite young audience seemed to love it when I went this week and that has to be good. With so many other claims on their attention to bring the millennials to live theatre is terrific.
Scott Fitzgerald, however, is about more than storytelling however well he does it. “The Great Gatsby” is a deeply cynical novel about the haves and the have nots. – about the loaded and the struggling. To stop struggling and advance in that world you can’t be overburdened with a social conscience. Clear echoes of today in that reality !
The new staging of Gatsby gave us the sex and booze and drugs and privilege. But it also gave us the rock and roll, at least the interwar years version of it. It was loud and brash and almost entirely unmemorable. Nobody left the theatre humming the songs – Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Loewe it wasn’t!
R&H tackled difficult subjects, placed ballet in their works and gave us melody after melody. Stephen Sondheim did the same as did Andrew Lloyd Webber. “ The Great Gatsby did none of this – it resembled a Juke Box Musical with no songs we knew in the Juke Box.
So entertainment in the modern style with panache, special effects, superb dance and staging. The youthful audience stood screaming at the end. I wonder how many of them will now buy the novel?
Paddy’s Blogs in a crazy world 