Leanne Robinson and the cast of The Great Gatsby.Evan Zimmerman/Supplied
- Title: The Great Gatsby
- Music and lyrics by: Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen
- Book by: Kait Kerrigan
- Director: Marc Bruni
- Actors: Jake David Smith, Senzel Ahmady, Joshua Grosso, Leanne Robinson, Lila Coogan, Will Branner, Justin Scott Brown, Edward Staudenmayer
- Company: Mirvish Productions
- Venue: CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: Runs until Aug. 23
In Nick Carraway’s younger and more vulnerable years, The Great Gatsby narrator was the recipient of a now-famous tip: to think twice before criticizing the actions of others.
That’s good advice, usually, and as a critic, I try to follow it. But in the case of The Great Gatsby’s vapid musical adaptation, playing at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre through Aug. 23, ruminating hasn’t changed much: Even on second thought, the show is dreadful.
For one, Kait Kerrigan’s stage adaptation couldn’t have less in common with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magnificent source material. The musical demonstrates little interest in the pitfalls of the American Dream, and overwhelmingly fails to capture the book’s aching sense of ennui. Jason Howland’s score, meanwhile, pulls from a generic palette of fizzy pop hooks, while Nathan Tysen’s lyrics hardly attempt to approximate Fitzgerald’s sense of poetry.
Joshua Grosso, Lila Coogan, and Will Branner in The Great Gatsby.Evan Zimmerman/Supplied
Even the story beats are made strange in Kerrigan’s script: While the show opens and closes with Nick Carraway (Joshua Grosso) as he reminisces on his former neighbour Jay Gatsby (Jake David Smith), the similarities just about end there. Themes of class disparity are fleeting and underexplored; Gatsby’s harrowing backstory, which, in the source material, so carefully reveals his meteoric rise to the upper crust, is glossed over in its entirety.
Instead, Kerrigan focuses on romance, choosing to sweep the audience up in Gatsby’s obsession with his long-lost lover, Daisy Buchanan (Senzel Ahmady). Their tragic love story is one of the most wrenching of the English canon – but, crucially, it’s not the focal point of The Great Gatsby as written by Fitzgerald.
Even so, in Kerrigan’s care, infatuation prevails. Schmaltzy key changes replace meaningful commentary on the state of New York in the 1920s; googly-eyed duets relentlessly underline the impossibility of Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship, but seldom zoom out to look at the world writ large.
At its best, the writing is bland and a bit naive. At its worst, it’s downright insulting to Fitzgerald’s masterwork.
Senzel Ahmady in The Great Gatsby.OD Company/Supplied
If director Marc Bruni’s production were prettier – if the spangles were spanglier, the champagne sparklier – perhaps The Great Gatsby could coast on its looks. But Paul Tate dePoo III’s set relies on garish video projections to demonstrate the scale of Gatsby’s wealth. As mediated through a screen, Gatsby’s opulent world never feels fully immersive; neither does the poverty-stricken Valley of Ashes.
On the other hand, Linda Cho’s fringed costumes shimmer just as beautifully as you’d expect – indeed, her work, along with Dominique Kelley’s choreography, is exemplary.
But on the whole, the visual vocabulary of the show struggles to compensate for Kerrigan’s script.
Best known for her work with composer Bree Lowdermilk, Kerrigan has co-written some of the most gorgeous musical theatre ballads of this century: Run Away With Me and Anyway are enduring cabaret standards, thanks to their shared ability to evoke competing emotions in a single song.
But The Great Gatsby struggles to replicate that sense of duality. Tysen’s lyrics, in particular, cling to superficiality without much room for metaphor or subtext. Rhymes are obvious; syllables fit awkwardly into their prescribed melodies.
While a few cast members manage to scaffold their lyrics with depth – Lila Coogan as Myrtle Wilson is perhaps the company’s strongest link – the songs neither advance the plot nor offer a new look into a given character’s inner psyche. For the most part, the songs are mere window-dressing, and aside from My Green Light, the first act’s soaring closer, they’re not particularly memorable, even when they stuff the book’s most famous quotes in their margins.
Jake David Smith in The Great Gatsby.Evan Zimmerman/Supplied
That said, a few performances aside from Coogan’s stand out: Smith’s take on Gatsby is about as layered as it can be, given the circumstances. While Kerrigan’s script regularly lets him down, Smith’s voice is like liquid gold, luxurious and smooth even as the songs creep to the top of the actor’s range. Grosso makes a lovely Carraway; Leanne Robinson, too, has a few nice moments as amateur golfer Jordan Baker.
Ahmady’s take on Daisy is another story. Unfortunately, at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre, she’s inaudible much of the time, chewing her words and mumbling her lyrics such that it’s surprisingly difficult to hear her. Her crystal-clear voice is nicely suited to the pop sensibilities of Howland’s score, but the diction issue is significant: Many, many lines get lost in her delivery.
After two-and-a-half hours of pseudo-romantic fluff, you’d be forgiven for thinking the theatrical adaptation of The Great Gatsby had done its worst.
But the production’s final moment is perhaps its most bizarre. As Carraway narrates that haunting final line from the book – the famous one, about “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” – Bruni upstages the monologue with a dancing ensemble. Carraway opines; the dancers sing a reprise of Roaring On in full voice.
In that final, biting sequence, the musical once again overpowers Fitzgerald’s prose with cheap theatrical excess – and a fundamental misreading of the story at hand.