In theory, it’s possible to turn F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby into a great stage musical. (The theory will be tested again this spring when Pulitzer winner Martyna Majok debuts her adaptation, with a score by pop star Florence Welch and Thomas Bartlett, at Boston’s American Repertory Theater.) But the overproduced new version that just lumbered onto Broadway, from the songwriting team behind the recent Main Stem flop Paradise Square, is a mess, turning a beloved novel about class, morality, and exploding gender norms into a glossy Jazz Age love story with all the subtlety of a canary-yellow Rolls Royce.

The ambitions are clear from the eye-popping set and cinematic projections, Paul Tate dePoo III’s lush Art Deco nods to Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film, the concert-ready lighting by Cory Pattak and the over-the-top costumes (by Linda Cho) that too often scream sequin-heavy Vegas rather than period speakeasy. The show looks like a couple million bucks, with a fortune spent on two on-stage automobiles alone, and a handful 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.

There’s also a great deal of craft in Jason Howland’s very musical theatery score, which has been smartly scaled back since the show’s trial run at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse last fall. There’s some wit in Nathan Tysen’s lyrics that at one point rhyme glasses and molasses. And the Act 2 opener, an ode to moral ambiguity by a stock-villain-ish Meyer Wolfsheim (Eric Anderson), artfully packs in a lot of exposition in ways that modern theater composing teams seldom manage to achieve. The songs are also well sung — especially by Noah J Ricketts as the book’s genial narrator, Nick Carraway, and the incomparable Eva Noblezada as Daisy Buchanan. Noblezada has never met a high note that she can’t deliver with the clarity and precision of a brain surgeon, and she gets several opportunities here to open up those pipes.

But there’s a huge crack in the foundation – and it comes in Kait Kerrigan’s book, which has turned Fitzgerald’s classic into a mushy melodrama with characters twisted beyond all recognition from their well-known source material. Gatsby, that most enigmatic of American antiheroes, here becomes a lovesick schoolboy who literally bumps into a drinks carts trying to maintain his poise around his longtime crush, Daisy, who married the well-to-do Yalie Tom Buchanan (John Zdorjeski) after Gatsby shipped off to World War I. Jeremy Jordan’s Gatsby is such a simp that his attempts to seem cool, to brush off Tom as an “old sport,” become the most obvious of poses — made all the more ridiculous by Jordan’s put-on accent, his stiff onstage bearing, and his goofy attempts at winsomeness. (The actor, who’s developed a rabid following since his Newsies days, also seemed to be suffering from some vocal strain at the performance I attended.)

Worse, Kerrigan has shoehorned in a very conventional romantic B couple out of two figures who are anything but conventional on the page. Fitzgerald’s most notorious proto-queer characters, Nick and Jordan Baker (Samantha Pauly), a professional golfer and admitted “confirmed bachelor,” now mysteriously hooks up with the bookish naif Nick because, apparently, that’s how traditional musicals are meant to be structured. Even in the 21st century. (Paul Whitty and Sara Chase, meanwhile, make the most of their underwritten roles as the Wilsons, the doomed working-class couple undone by the shenanigans of the Buchanans and Gatsby.)

Nobody who’s read and admired the Fitzgerald novel wants to see a tap-dancing Gatsby. And what’s so great about this Gatsby anyway? He has no mystique, no sense of menace, so the reveal about his background is anticlimactic. Even his mobbed-up business partner, Meyer Wolfsheim, regards him as a dispensable pretty boy. And ultimately, that’s what he becomes — a man of mystery whose allure proves utterly superficial.

Daisy doesn’t fare any better, with the silky voiced Noblezada stuck with an 11 o’clock ballad describing herself as a “beautiful little fool” (a line that Fitzgerald’s character used ironically, not literally). What we get is a jazz-era romantic thriller that resembles the Fitzgerald book only if you squint really hard. Others will need the assistance of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, the eye doctor whose billboard looms over the Wilsons’ gas station. At least the sign looks spectacular (and far too expensive for its run-down setting).