This immersive staging of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic invites audience members to join the party, but the pathos of the novel is stretched too thin.
There ain’t no party like a Jay Gatsby party — in “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debonair poster boy of American ambition and the nouveau riche never lets the festivities stop. Neither does Immersive Everywhere’s “The Great Gatsby: The Immersive Show,” a jovial feast for the senses that never, in its lagging two-and-a-half-hour running time, truly rises above the status of a mere attraction.
In Fitzgerald’s classic book, Gatsby is a man who successfully, if shadily, works his way to a fortune, which he spends on a Long Island mansion where he hosts extravagant soirees. Gatsby’s neighbor, Nick Carraway, narrates Gatsby’s tragic — and, ultimately, fatal — fall from the world of the rich and famous. Gatsby hopes to woo Nick’s cousin Daisy, with whom he had a love affair that he’s never forgotten. But Daisy has married the brutish Tom Buchanan, a chauvinist blowhard with a violent temper and a mistress on the side. As the love triangle threatens to tear apart their lives, the glamour of bourgeois living proves to be no more than a guise covering their emptiness.
Adapted and directed by Alexander Wright and presented at the appropriately swanky Park Central Hotel, this “Gatsby” has a humble side entrance next to a Starbucks — more 2020s than 1920s for sure. An entryway leads to a dazzling Art Deco-style ballroom with a large bar, stage and grand staircase where flappers dance, dapper-suited gentlemen drink and fashionable audience members blend in with the cast in a sea of sequins, beads, fedoras and fringe.
Nick Carraway (played by Rob Brinkmann) moves through the crowd and begins his tale, as Gatsby (Joél Acosta) watches from the top of the staircase in a white suit with black lapels and a sharp pair of wingtip shoes. Main plot points, including major introductions and confrontations, are played as set scenes that everyone witnesses together in the main space. Otherwise Nick and the various characters peel groups of audience members away to separate rooms off the main ballroom: lounges and boudoirs styled with domestic extravagances of the time, including tufted velvet couches and chaises.
This production faces a typical problem for immersive adaptations of literary works: how to translate a beloved text via a format that is better served by a de-emphasis on the text. After all, there’s only so much plot, dialogue and character development you can serve an audience that is constantly being divvied up.
Fitzgerald’s work — a short read you could finish in an afternoon — is stretched too thin by the production, which has to elaborate on, conflate or create new minor characters to add enough material for its needs. You get the sense that this is “Gatsby: The Extended Version,” with filler and bonuses no one asked for.
The writing of the characters’ dialogue is often shaky, and noticeably weaker when it gets too far from Fitzgerald’s pared-down style. Also buried is the book’s cynical examination of the gorgeous, unholy facade that is American power and status.
The principal casting is well-done: Brinkmann’s Carraway is immediately recognizable, even before he speaks. He darts among different members of the audience, seeking understanding and reassurance, eyes moving with the nervous, earnest excitement of an outsider looking in. Acosta genuinely seems lost in time, a relic of old Hollywood with a classic beauty and charm. Jillian Anne Abaya, though always beautifully costumed in flirty white frocks, doesn’t quite offer the flighty, effervescent, pre-manic-pixie-dream-girl quality that Daisy requires, and Shahzeb Hussain has the bravado but not the menace of Tom. Claire Saunders gives Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s mistress, a sprightliness and sass that styles her as a romantic second-string diva who feels trapped in her life, particularly her marriage. And the ensemble, when weaving through the party or taking to the center of the floor to dance the Charleston, is always lively and engaged.
But Wright’s direction often lacks nuance, and quickly grows tiresome. The performers strike a perfect balance between improvising with audience members and delivering their scripted scenes, but they also spend a lot of time mugging to everyone in the room. And the constant shuffling of the audience means confusion, distractions and unsavory behavior — the bar access and participatory nature of the show enable those predisposed to booziness and loud interjections to be their worst selves. (Props to the actors, however, for always staying in character, as when a chatty, giggling pair of women in my show caused Abaya to snap in the middle of Daisy’s emotional breakdown, “I’m glad you find this funny. This is my life.”)
Casey Jay Andrews’s exquisite set design, Vanessa Leuck’s stylish costumes and the ever-shifting mood ring effect of Jeff Croiter’s lighting beautifully coalesce into a vivid, comprehensive vision of 1920s New York. And it’s a feat to behold. But the equally beautiful sentiment behind Fitzgerald’s work can’t be found at the bottom of a tumbler glass.
The Great Gatsby
At the Park Central Hotel, Manhattan; immersivegatsby.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
