While Paul Tate DePoo III’s gorgeous Art Deco set, Linda Choo’s sequinned costumes, and Dominique Kelley’s snappy choreography provide a bone fide Jazz Age spectacle, the show perhaps inevitably sacrifices the subtleties of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s feted novella in the transition to full blown musical.
Here the relationship between Jamie Muscato’s obsessive, but humourless Gatsby and Frances Mayli McCann’s privileged, brittle Daisy is played as a straight love story – stymied by strictures of class and gender rather than her shallow selfishness.
But Marc Bruni’s capable direction does deliver a depiction of heartless opportunism in an America booming into a consumerist powerhouse.
Back projections evoke New York as a building site where old and new money, rich and poor rub shoulders – and a terrific chorus play the hedonistic crowd who sponge off Gatsby’s hospitality.
He’s Daisy’s cousin and our down to earth guide to this amoral world of careless wealth.
His wise-cracking bond with Amber Davies’ sardonic, spirited Jordan is a welcome antidote to the Gatsby/Daisy relationship – although their later separation is rather glossed over in a second half that races through plot without pause for characterisation.
But the show has a kind of bludgeoning forward momentum and classy moments as when Mayli McCann nails the bittersweet Beautiful Little Fool.
Jon Robyns does a decent turn as the brutish villain of the piece Tom Buchanan.
And while John Owen-Jones is underused as the bootlegger and illicit source of Gatsby’s fortune, he gives it his all in slick act two opener Shady.
Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen’s pop numbers have a passing relationship to jazz and are powerfully sung if not memorable.
The Great Gatsby runs at The London Coliseum in London until September 7.
