The Great Gatsby review – luxuriously glitzy yet glib West End musical

Despite hosting the British premieres of Broadway classics like Guys and Dolls and Kiss Me, Kate, the Coliseum sometimes feels too grandiose for musicals…but not for The Great Gatsby. Kait Kerrigan (book) and songwriters Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen’s crowd-pleasing adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novella is entering its second year on Broadway and arrives on St Martin’s Lane in a maximalist staging by Marc Bruni that demonstrates where every penny of your ticket money went.

The opulence of Paul Tate dePoo III’s Art Deco scenic and projection designs and Linda Cho’s costumes is matched by formidable musical theatre star power in the principal casting. Jamie Muscato inherits Jeremy Jordan’s role as lovelorn playboy Jay Gatsby opposite the Daisy Buchanan of Bonnie and Clyde’s Frances Mayli McCann, here turning in another variant on a fragile but deceptively tough young woman in Depression-era America, but with better frocks. Unfortunately, the central couple seems a little colourless compared to the supporting characters.

There’s beautiful work from Joel Montague as a God-fearing gas station owner who, bizarrely, appears to reside in a rubbish dump, and Amber Davies sparkles as sardonic Jordan Baker, the amateur golfer who’s a permanent fixture at glamorous house parties on 1920s Long Island. Broadway star and High School Musical alumnus Corbin Bleu makes a delightful, heartfelt West End debut in what is really the leading role: narrator, and Daisy’s impecunious cousin, Nick Carraway. There’s a firecracker turn from Rachel Tucker as doomed party girl Myrtle while Jon Robyns and John Owen-Jones play, respectively, Daisy’s faithless, brutish husband and a profiteering bootlegger. A large ensemble executes Dominique Kelley’s angular, only intermittently period-specific, choreography with commitment.

The orchestrations by Kim Scharnberg and composer Howland, awash with real brass and strings, sound lush and full by current West End standards, although the easy-on-the-ear music itself is unremarkable and impeded by a muddy sound design. Howland writes generic theatrical pop, occasionally evoking the Roaring Twenties of the setting, but mostly occupying the crescendo-heavy, Wicked-adjacent territory of relentless bombast and soft rock rhythms. A couple of numbers impress, especially “Beautiful Little Fool”, Daisy’s full-throated lament for the limitations on a woman’s life in chauvinistic early 20th-century America, delivered with note-perfect bittersweetness and power by McCann, and “One-Way Road”, a thrilling soliloquy of desperation for Myrtle; an incandescent Tucker sells this overwrought aria to the rafters and beyond.

The singing is so fine that the workaday music and lyrics (“We have a date with fate / But dammit I can wait”) probably won’t bother many people. I could have lived without a number dedicated to the surprisingly goofy Gatsby’s angst over a tea party, and the ballads tend to merge after a while. Some of the transitions from dialogue to song are the kind of moments that people who hate musicals point at when justifying their disdain for the art form. Still, the score works well enough in service of a story that, shorn of some of the finesse and complexity of Fitzgerald’s language, plays like a glossy soap opera. Apart from Bleu’s naive Nick, Montague’s open-hearted cuckold and Davies’s fun-loving Jordan, the characters are an unsympathetic bunch.

There’s seldom a moment where it’s clear why there needed to be a musical of The Great Gatsby beyond the fact that it was there and already spawned a couple of movie versions. The plot, which fizzles only periodically into life, probably suits the screen better than the stage, though Bruni’s gleaming production, simultaneously garish and elegant, sometimes approaches the cinematic. The storytelling is rudimentary.

A physical production that marries computer-generated scenery and actual sets to form luxurious stage pictures, the bravura, if somewhat relentless, vocals and the sheer majestic size of the whole glittering shebang collectively bludgeon you into dazed submission. The Great Gatsby isn’t a great tuner: it’s neither cynical enough to really explore the dark underbelly of the F Scott Fitzgerald story with which it flirts, nor is it distinguished enough to provide the uplift of musical theatre at its best, but it’s the epitome of a slick, escapist West End night out. Shallow, loud and sumptuous.