How entertaining? ★★☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★★☆☆☆ 27 May 2013
This a theatre review of THE GREAT GATSBY. |
Based on the American novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Music and lyrics by Joe Evans
Adapted by Linnie Reedman
Venue: The Riverside Studios
“Tear yourself from the past”
This is at least the third adaptation of the (over-rated) novel showing in London in the last year. Its biggest problem is running concurrently with Baz Luhrmann’s grandiose film, sparing, it appears, little expense. Perhaps we can make an analogy between these two versions and the two male leads: Luhrmann’s is the gleaming, shiny Jay Gatsby, to this musical’s unassuming, bland Nick Carraway. While the former has its virtues, it is lumbered with many more flaws and wasted opportunities. However, it contains theatricality on a scale no stage can afford. The play has only a dozen or so cast members, in intimate, unchanging surroundings to try and capture the decadence and loose moral hedonism of the 1920s. By making it a musical, it separates itself from other interpretations, though not quite elevating it.
Music and lyrics by Joe Evans
Adapted by Linnie Reedman
Venue: The Riverside Studios
“Tear yourself from the past”
This is at least the third adaptation of the (over-rated) novel showing in London in the last year. Its biggest problem is running concurrently with Baz Luhrmann’s grandiose film, sparing, it appears, little expense. Perhaps we can make an analogy between these two versions and the two male leads: Luhrmann’s is the gleaming, shiny Jay Gatsby, to this musical’s unassuming, bland Nick Carraway. While the former has its virtues, it is lumbered with many more flaws and wasted opportunities. However, it contains theatricality on a scale no stage can afford. The play has only a dozen or so cast members, in intimate, unchanging surroundings to try and capture the decadence and loose moral hedonism of the 1920s. By making it a musical, it separates itself from other interpretations, though not quite elevating it.
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“Rich girls don’t marry poor boys.”
While Gatsby hosts the wildest jamborees at his mansion in New York State, he still remains a mystery to his guests. Rumours are circulating. Was he a spy? A murderer? Carraway moves into a humble cottage next door and receives an invite one summer’s Saturday. Meeting the reclusive neighbour, a friendship begins, building to a favour. Gatsby needs Nick to arrange a meeting with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, the wife of old money residing in a capacious manor directly across the bay. Jay and Daisy happen to have been loves.
Contorting an originally large canvas into a production that is cosy deserves props. The players give it their all in terms of energy, but the acting is a major let-down. When you have a DiCaprio, Mulligan, Maguire, Edgerton, Fisher, Clarke, Bachchan ringing in your ears, and you’ve decided to ride the slipstream of a pop cultural event, you better be bringing your acting A-game. I hate to be dismissive, but this ensemble just does not cut the mustard. Gatsby (Michael Lindhall) and Carraway (Sid Pheonix) are devoid of spark, not conveying the necessary emotional rollercoaster or inner conflict (whether of the ethical or self-worth variety). When you’re making a piece where within a foot I could step into it, the microscope is unavoidably switched on. Having said that, the fact that many of the cast smoothly switch to instruments to support the singing shows a varied skillset.
Apart from two sequences involving overlapping crooning anguish, the music left me, personally, cold. Musical passion is however extremely subjective, and others may be swept along.
Praise for creating in limited confines and resources; and if viewed outside the shadow of a behemoth, and better cast, there might have been something to tease out of Fitzgerald’s examination of reckless behaviour and reinvention.