The show looks like a couple million bucks, with a fortune spent on two on-stage automobiles alone, and some energetic group dance numbers (choreographed by Dominique Kelley) that have an appealing showmanship. Director Marc Bruni delivers the kind of high-gloss, new-money production that Gatsby himself might have built for himself on Long Island’s North Shore. But there’s a huge crack in the foundation: Kait Kerrigan’s book, which has turned Fitzgerald’s classic into a mushy melodrama with characters twisted beyond all recognition. Gatsby (Jeremy Jordan), that most enigmatic of American antiheroes, here becomes a lovesick schoolboy who literally bumps into drinks carts trying to maintain his poise around his erstwhile crush, Daisy (Eva Noblezada), who’s stuck with an 11 o’clock ballad describing herself as a “beautiful little fool.”
Read my full review in the December/January issue of Musicals magazine.
Culture Sauce 