The Broadway musical is roaring into London!
F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is widely considered a classic. Some go as far as to herald it as the Great American Novel.
So, when that novel enters the public domain and a producer, the acclaimed Chunsoo Shin, scouts you and asks you to write the book and music for a musical stage adaptation, you’d think it would come with an unholy amount of pressure.
But not for the chosen writers: Kait Kerrigan (book), Nathan Tysen (score) and Jason Howland (score).
“Honestly,” Tysen starts, “The most difficult part of the collaboration was finding childcare.”
You see, Tony Award-nominee Tysen is married to Kerrigan. When they first started working on the musical they had a six-month-old and a five-year-old and were in the throes of a worldwide pandemic. Meanwhile, they were diving into a time, the 1920s, roaring to life in the aftermath of the Spanish Flu.
Initially, the plan was for the adaptation to hit the stage in South Korea. Fast forward just four years and the musical has been up and running in New Jersey, on Broadway – with Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada – and is now hopping over the pond for a stay at the London Coliseum.
Kerrigan explains that while the story of Long Island longing – where the elusive millionaire Jay Gatsby holds a torch and a lavish party for a forgotten love – is inherently about America, the idea of an American dream is international. “It feels like the story is angled a little bit further away from the American’s perspective because of that,” she explains why the West End was the next step.
Here in the UK, we share the same affinity to the 1920s era. For the writer, what attracts her to the period is the commentary of how quickly the future is coming: “In the literature, there are talks of telephones and transatlantic travel. It was something that suddenly people were paying attention to,” she says, “People were traveling across the country on a train at lightning speeds, and there was a sense that the past was disappearing and people were feeling nostalgic for the moment they were living through.”
She says today people are experiencing the same thing, referencing the idea of a lost generation – somebody who knew what it was like when there were horses and buggies on the street and then suddenly were using a telephone, “I think we deeply understand that as human beings at the turn of the 21st century.”
She carried that empathy into her writing. What struck her most was that the novel is written in first-person, so everything readers know is from Nick’s perspective. “Watching someone tell you the story of something is not how you want to experience a piece of theatre,” she concludes. “So that immediately opened us up to figuring out how to get to know the characters outside of Nick’s lens.”
This opened up the world to write about the women in a way that Nick “may not have fully understood them.”
“For me, the women in the story didn’t have the same depth that some of the male characters had. I was really excited to start to dive into that and look for moments where we could see the women on stage by themselves without Nick’s perspective on it.”
Both Kerrigan and Tysen hail The Great Gatsby as their favourite high school-required reading. And much of that is thanks to the iconic and regularly quoted lines. These include Daisy crying over beautiful shirts, Jordan observing that large parties are the most intimate, and Nick’s famed final line about boats against the current. “But what does that mean to those characters?” the two ask, “Were they fully understood by Nick in the moment that they were said, or could there be another layer to them?”
As a result, the musical’s book and numbers explore the more human and anxious sides of the characters. Daisy’s famed line; “I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” has become a hurting ballad. The jazz-infused score (from the duo behind Paradise Square) has wry wit commentary (“New Money”), glamorous sultry rhythms (“La Dee Dah With You”) and melancholic pop ballads (“My Green Light”), and more in its catchy repertoire, which does an excellent job of driving forward the narrative and locking it in your head.
“Hopefully [the musical] is something that’s in conversation with the novel, rather than trying to be a direct replica of what the novel is,” Kerrigan says, though there are plenty of Easter Eggs for literary aficionados to look out for.
But as the 2013 movie adaptation said, a little party never killed nobody. This production doesn’t short-change those looking for a champagne-spraying time. “You get that spectacle, you get those parties, you get those fantastic fun numbers,” Tysen says, “But also at the heart of it, there’s an emotional core and there’s a big love story, and there are secrets, and there are lies. And there are deaths.”
Almost every character is striving to get a foothold in a class that is beyond them, hiding in a sense of allure.
Kerrigan compares it almost to internet culture, where we show our lives in the way that we want to be seen. “I think that that’s all over the place in this novel and on this stage. And you see what Gatsby has created as this facade to show Daisy who he has become and I think that we really empathise with that. We understand that so deeply.”
There’s a reason that the story of Gatsby and co has withstood the test of time as a tragic romance of longing, and now the West End is calling, old sports!