The first national tour of The Great Gatsby, now onstage at Broadway in Chicago’s Cadillac Palace, delivers Jazz Age glitz and glamor galore, from the sumptuous sets to the beaded dresses and shiny suits of the swells who inhabit the hard-partying world of Jay Gatsby’s new-money West Egg mansion on the shore outside of New York City.
The vocal talent on display is also impressive, especially Leanne Robinson as amateur golfer Jordan Baker, reluctant love interest of Nick Carraway (Joshua Grosso), the Minnesota bond salesman who has come East to escape his World War I nightmares and caught what he thinks was a break in the form of a cheap guest cottage rental on the estate of the enigmatic Gatsby (Jake David Smith).
Turns out the situation’s more complicated than all that. Gatsby has bestowed his hospitality on Carraway because Nick is not only a fellow veteran of The Great War, but also the cousin of Daisy Buchanan (Senzel Ahmady), Gatsby’s true love, who married the unsavory lout Tom Buchanan (Will Branner) while he was fighting overseas. The Buchanans live directly across the bay in East Egg, and Gatsby wants Nick to invite Daisy to tea so that he can “accidentally” reconnect with her.
Nick is reluctant (“She’s a married woman,” he exclaims) until he discovers Tom is having an affair with Myrtle Wilson (Lila Coogan), wife of gas station owner George (Tally Sessions). From there, a great many nasty events unspool, closely following the plot of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel.
And that, aside from an energetic but not particularly memorable score by Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen, is the core issue with this show. Over the course of two and a half hours, it hews so closely to Fitzgerald’s story that it feels a bit straitjacketed.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the extended denouement that feels more obligatory than revelatory. Cut the show at the climax (and judging by the gasps on Wednesday’s opening night, not that many members of the audience have read the book) and you’d have a much more powerful piece of theater. The shocking moment of violence gives us all the ending we need. There is absolutely nothing surprising about how the surviving characters react, and it all seems designed to give Nick the opportunity to deliver the iconic line about “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Musical theater is a radically different art form than the literary novel. There was a better adaptation available for a production that didn’t focus so ceaselessly on the past work it’s based on.
Up to the climax, though, even this faithful rendering delivers a lushly entertaining experience under the direction of Marc Bruni, with Dominique Kelley’s choreography and the voices of Robinson, Smith and Ahmady proving to be the most crowd-pleasing highlights. As a spectacular feast for the eyes and ears, it’s a party worth attending.
The Great Gatsby runs through May 3 at Broadway in Chicago’s Cadillac Palace Theatre.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
Photo by Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade
