Flashy adaptation of ‘Great Gatsby’ brings pre-COVID scale to Broadway

The 2020s have not been especially roaring on Broadway.

Even as New York theater has survived the pandemic with a parade of productions and attendance near the pre-COVID years’, Broadway has also changed.

Ticket sales have sagged and grosses have failed to keep up with inflation. More suburban theatergoers, who may have more money to throw at shows, now seem to stay home, according to Broadway League data. And producers, who face a financial high-wire act even in the best of times, have made some not-to-subtle calculations.

Many of today’s Broadway productions — even the most tantalizingly innovative and impressively executed — are scaled down. Some have sets more reminiscent of small-town productions. Others, such as last year’s revival of “A Doll’s House,” hardly have sets at all.

Since Broadway reopened after closing for 16 months due to COVID, there have been only scattered attempts to conjure the ambitious, broad-shouldered Broadway musical of yore. The rare showy productions — including “The Music Man,” “Funny Girl” and “Sweeney Todd” — have mostly been low-risk revivals.

But in seeking to channel the glitz, glamour and grandiosity of New York’s roaring 1920s, a musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” has bucked the recent trend.

This “Gatsby,” driven by old-school ballads and backed by a producer who has said he’s not worried about losing money on Broadway shows, is brimming with bells and whistles.

Like Jay Gatsby as he woos his former lover, Daisy, the production team behind “Gatsby” plainly spared no expense in its drive to deliver 150 minutes of razzle-dazzle to theatergoers.

“When people think of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ they think of opulence and excessiveness and over-the-top and just glam for days,” said Cory Pattak, the planner of the show’s intricate lighting. “We really wanted to deliver on that.”

The goal, he added, was to create a show that feels “larger than life.”

Among the musical’s 42 scenes are trips to Gatsby’s gilded and labyrinthine Long Island mansion, a downtrodden and industrial Valley of Ashes in eastern Queens, and a flowery cottage that serves as the setting for Gatsby and Daisy’s reunion.

“Each one of them is uniquely opulent,” Marc Bruni, the show’s director, said of the sets, before clarifying, “and not opulent when it needs to be,” such as in the rusted-over Valley of Ashes.

There are 26 cast members, a 19-piece orchestra, two large retro automobiles and two types of fireworks that crackle above dancers’ heads. One visually arresting 1,644-square-foot LED video screen ties together the succession of complex set pieces that shuttle across the stage.

Sustaining the muscular musical, which opened Thursday at the cavernous Broadway Theatre, requires a “superhero team of stage managers and deck hands and electricians and props individuals,” said Paul Tate dePoo III, the show’s scenic designer.

“It’s kind of a marvel,” said Jeremy Jordan, who plays Gatsby and described the production as the biggest he has done “by far.”

Behind it all: A single pulsing tungsten light bulb, encased in green gel. It’s the green light at Daisy’s dock that Gatsby peers at longingly across Long Island Sound — and that, for decades of readers, has represented the elusive American Dream.

The story centers on Gatsby’s efforts to eclipse class differences in his romantic pursuit of the old-money Daisy, who loved him when she was younger but got married while he was away in World War I.

“Gatsby is a man with a big dream,” Bruni said. “And so that is something that very much lends itself to music.”

His production may not be the only or most successful musical interpretation of Fitzgerald’s handiwork headed to Broadway. A second show, titled simply “Gatsby” and directed by the Tony-winning Rachel Chavkin, is due at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., next month, with Broadway seen as its likely next stop.

There has been a mad rush to bring “Gatsby” to the stage after the novel’s copyright protection expired and the book entered the public domain in 2021, giving producers a green light to bend it into a musical.

One South Korean producer, Chunsoo Shin, immediately saw an opportunity in the material and recruited a team to take it to Broadway. Shin has had success as a producer in his home country. He has had a tougher go in the U.S., persevering through a series of flops, including this season’s Britney Spears-inspired “Once Upon a One More Time.”

But where “Once Upon a One More Time” recycled well-worn songs, “Gatsby” has its own original score from Jason Howland, who was behind the music for “Little Women” and “Paradise Square.”

Most Broadway shows do not turn profits. And Shin has said he’s less concerned with making money than with helping to elevate the Asian theater market on the world stage, in part by being a player in his own right on Broadway.

It’s unclear if Shin’s “Gatsby” will run long enough to cover its expenses. Critics have offered mixed appraisals. The Daily News’ Chris Jones deemed its scale “massive” and its score “lush” but its storytelling ultimately cold.

Even if “Gatsby” careens quickly offstage, it will have succeeded in reviving a degree of ambition that can sometimes seem relegated to Broadway’s boom-time past.

In that way, it may have something in common with its title character, who offers a defiant reply when another character, Nick, tells him one “can’t repeat the past.”

“Why, of course you can,” Gatsby says.