Gatsby—An American Myth
American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, MA, August 2, 2024
Reviewed by John Amodeo
From the moment I entered the theater, I felt a clear sense of impending doom while I waited for the show to begin. On the curtainless stage was a heap of chromated junkyard cars piled atop one another like a barricade against some unknown menace. Through it an elegant, curved grand staircase emerged, introducing the theme of haves versus have nots even before the musical began.
Yes, this is a musical. Gatsby—An American Myth, which opened at the A.R.T. in Cambridge, MA on May 26 and closed on August 2 with Broadway aspirations, is a new adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1924 great American novel, The Great Gatsby. It is not to be confused with the current Broadway production The Great Gatsby, which has still managed to run despite having had to dig itself out from under an avalanche of bad reviews. Critics slammed the glitzy Broadway production for eschewing the novel’s grit, whereas the A.R.T.’s production was all grit with no glitz and no heart. Since 2021, the novel has been in the public domain, and both high-profile productions arrived simultaneously, and neither seemed to have struck the right balance in portraying the glamorous and romantic 1920s Jazz Age hedonism of Long Island’s affluent Gold Coast and the plight of the downtrodden working class struggling just to make ends meet.
That’s too bad, because this is an ideal time for Fitzgerald’s novel to re-enter the public consciousness. The story takes place just after the end of World War I and the ensuing Spanish Flu pandemic, and there is so much that resonates for us now as we struggle with domestic volatility and wars on three continents after emerging from a devastating pandemic ourselves. The novel, despite its current relevance, is an enigmatic work of art that cannot be easily adapted to stage or screen.
The book’s story was told by narrator Nick Carraway, a 29-year-old writer who moved from the Midwest to a quiet West Egg, Long Island bungalow next door to the luxurious mansion of the mysterious playboy Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire who throws lavish parties with his ill-gotten fortune. Nick, enamored with the glamour, is drawn into Gatsby’s orbit. At Gatsby’s instigation, Nick sets him up with his distant cousin from the well-heeled East Egg, the married Daisy Buchanan, with whom Gatsby had an affair before the war but had since lost track of. Gatsby then gets embroiled with Daisy’s millionaire husband Tom, who has been having an affair with Myrtle Wilson, the unhappy wife of car mechanic George Wilson The two live modestly in the Valley of the Ashes, a slum in Queens, New York. If you got all that, you’re doing better than most of the show’s audience. Daisy’s dilemma is her having to choose between Gatsby, a nouveau-riche rapscallion, and her brutish but highborn husband Tom which becomes the underlying theme of the story.
The contrast between the effervescent post-war fizz of high society’s music, dancing, drinking, flapper skirts, and newly found freedom from gender and sexual mores and the hard-scrabble lives of the working-class people is the theme that provided the story’s context. Nick was swept from one world into the other as he helplessly watched his new friends’ hedonism pull them toward inevitable tragedy.
The A.R.T.’s production of Gatsby made every attempt to honor the source in a striking production that nevertheless left the audience in a despondent melancholy. That was not for the lack of talent on stage or behind the scenes. The production values were impressive, but they never managed to pull the production out of its gloom-and-doom quagmire.
What elevated this musical out of the mud was the score, which had music by Florence Welch (of Florence and the Machine) and “Doveman” Thomas Bartlett with lyrics by Welch. Rather than mimic the sound of the Roaring ’20s, Welch and Bartlett did what they do best—they created a beautiful pop score with some thrilling ensemble numbers and several glorious romantic and dramatic ballads, all of which owe serious debt to Hamilton and Hadestown. The musical sprang to life with each song, even though their mostly minor keys cast a pall on the proceedings.
The uniformly talented cast made hay with the score, using their gorgeous voices to make the songs soar. Isaac Powell (who played the romantic lead in recent Broadway revivals of Once on This Island and West Side Story) and relative newcomer Charlotte MacInnes had palpable chemistry as the star-crossed lovers Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan that infused their affair with plausible desire. Their mellifluous voices made their winsome duets, such as “Month of Love” and “Deathless Song,” float on air. Powell was especially affecting in the brooding Hamilton-esque “Pouring Down” and the dramatic Act I closer “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere.” MacInness began Act I strongly with “Golden Girl,” in which she revealed being a bird in a gilded cage.
It was difficult to appreciate Cory Jaecoma’s Tom and Matthew Amira’s George, despite their strong acting and vocal talents; their parts had been reduced to macho caricatures of vengeful husbands whose wives had strayed. Eleri Ward’s considerable vocal chops were wasted on the underwritten part of Jordan Baker, Daisy’s best friend; she was relegated to providing vocal support for the lead characters even though she deserved her own moment in the spotlight. Broadway veteran Adam Grupper, who played Gatsby’s bootlegging enabler Wolfsheim, provided the only real upbeat moment in the show with his scene-stealing and slightly comic turn, “Feels Like Hell,” a raucous production number that momentarily revived Act I.
The strongest performances, however, came from Ben Levi Ross as Nick and Solea Pfeiffer as the tragic Myrtle. Ross, who replaced Ben Platt as the lead in Broadway’s Dear Evan Hansen, hit just the right sympathetic chord as the narrator and audience surrogate. He was instantly likeable, and we easily identified with his attraction to Long Island’s high society but were equally repulsed along with him by the moral corruption of his new circle of affluent friends. He wasn’t given a chance to showcase his beautiful tenor, but he nevertheless impressed in “New York Symphony” and in “Vigil,” Nick’s Act II duet with Gatsby. Pfeiffer, who was Eliza in the first national tour of Hamilton and who replaced Eva Noblezada (Broadway’s Daisy) as Eurydice in Hadestown on Broadway, was right at home in this score; she imbued each of her four songs with stunning vocal pyrotechnics and real grit, especially in Act I’s “Shakin’ Off the Dust” and Act II’s “Out of the Ashes.” It was no wonder she got the biggest ovation during the final bows.
The visuals were well crafted but relentlessly monochrome. The stage featured a backdrop lighting scrim by lighting designer Alan C. Edwards that exploded with fireworks, poured with rain, and formed disembodied eyes in the night sky that recalled the artwork of the novel’s original dust jacket entitled “Celestial Eyes.” Edward’s lighting wonderfully set the tone and supported the action, including a pair of headlights in the pivotal tragic scene. Those headlights might have been more effective had the set designer Mimi Lien not hit us over the head at the outset with foreshadowing by piling junkyard cars into a monstrous heap that never left the stage. Lien’s set design never gave us more than a glimpse of glamour; her sculptural junkyard sang its one dark note throughout the whole show.
Hair and wig designer Matthew Amentoute and costume designer Sandy Powell provided a minimalist look that gave just enough of a hint of the Jazz Age, with tasseled flapper dresses, blunt cut page boys, and wavey platinum-blonde wigs. Powell’s black-and-white costumes were visually striking; in several scenes she cleverly clothed the ensemble in costumes of the working classes or servants that with the pull of a snap converted before our eyes into the party outfits of Gatsby’s self-indulgent sycophants, instantly highlighting the story’s upstairs/downstairs class struggle.
Sonya Tayeh’s choreography was handsome and even artful, as one might expect from the So You Think You Can Dance veteran. Most of the dancing was performed by the talented ensemble who executed Tayeh’s synchronized moves with laudable precision. In a few scenes Tayeh pulled the ensemble into a tight cluster and had them move across the stage as a unit, which nicely paraphrased the late choreographer Bob Fosse’s signature move in Sweet Charity’s “Rich Man’s Frug” and “Hey, Big Spender!” referencing both the haves and the have-nots. As good as it was, the dancing did little to move the story forward and could have easily been omitted without being missed.
Clearly, each member of the creative team provided strong production values, but they fell into the unrelenting gloom of book writer Martyna Majok’s and director Rachel Chavkin’s insistently dark vision. Majok (Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright for her Off-Broadway play Cost of Living) and Chavkin (Tony-nominated director of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 and Tony-winning director of Hadestown) both had a penchant for dark drama that served their earlier works very well, but here it went awry.
While a cadre of unlikable and irredeemable characters populated this story, we could still look to narrator Nick for hope. His character’s journey went from smitten lost boy to disillusioned outsider whose epiphany finally sent him away from the corruption of the East Coast back to what he perceived as his morally upstanding Midwest. But this was breezed past so quickly that the point and its emotional impact was lost.
We may have to wait for a perfect stage adaptation of The Great Gatsby that strikes the right balance. Broadway’s The Great Gatsby downplayed the class struggle to celebrate the sparkle of high society, while Majok’s and Chavkin’s Gatsby at the A.R.T. showed us very little of this seductive high society and viewed the proceedings only through smoke-colored glasses.
