The Great Gatsby
Broadway review by Adam Feldman The Great Gatsby looks great. If you want production values, this adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, directed by Marc Bruni, delivers more than any other new musical of the overstuffed Broadway season. It’s the Roaring Twenties, after all—now as well as then—so why not be loud? Let other shows make do with skeletal, functional multipurpose scenic design; these sets and projections, by Paul Tate de Poo III, offer grandly scaled Art Deco instead. Linda Cho’s costumes are Vegas shiny for the party people and elegant for the monied types. The production wears excess on its sleeveless flapper dresses. The Great Gatsby | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman The Great Gatsby often sounds great, too. Its lead actors, Jeremy Jordan as the self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby and Eva Noblezada as his dream girl, Daisy Buchanan, have deluxe voices, and the score gives them plenty to sing. Jason Howland’s music dips into period pastiche for the group numbers—there are lots of them, set to caffeinated choreography by Dominique Kelley—but favors Miss Saigon levels of sweeping pop emotionality for the main lovers; the old-fashioned craft of Nathan Tysen’s lyrics sits comfortably, sometimes even cleverly, on the melodies. In other regards, this Gatsby is less great. Book writer Kait Kerrigan has taken some admirably ambitious swings in adapting material that has defeated many would-be adapters before her. She cuts much of Gatsby’s backstory, and m