Yahoo Lifestyle Why ‘The Great Gatsby’ Parties On From Page to Stage, 100 Years After Publication
A century after the novel first hit shelves, “The Great Gatsby” is the bee’s knees all over again.
Just take a look at the New York theater scene, where adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic have started to multiply. First there was “The Great Gatsby,” a splashy Broadway musical that’s grossed more than $1 million nearly every week since it opened in April. That show was joined last month by “Gatz,” the audacious theatrical version that stages the novel — every single word of it — over six and a half hours, in an Off Broadway production at the Public Theater.
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Not done basking in Gatsby’s green light? Well, there’s a second musical about the party king of West Egg waiting in the wings. That would be “Gatsby,” the brainchild of pop musician Florence Welch, Pulitzer-winning playwright Martyna Majok and Tony-winning director Rachel Chavkin. The show premiered at A.R.T. in Cambridge, Mass., earlier this year, with an eventual Broadway run in its sights.
To an extent, the “Gatsby” proliferation has a pretty simple explanation: The novel entered the public domain in 2021, so now the story is fair game for producers and creators — not only onstage but in bookstores, with recent literary remixes including Nghi Vo’s fantasy-inflected “The Chosen and the Beautiful” and Anna-Marie McLemore YA redux “Self-Made Boys,” in which the Gatsby and Nick characters are trans men.
But the public domain angle doesn’t fully explain the property’s enduring appeal, or why “Gatsby” has resurfaced in pop culture again and again over the past 100 years. “Gatz,” for instance, originated in the mid-2000s, and its popularity helped put the troupe that created it, Elevator Repair Service, on the map.
“The story becomes interesting at moments of social upheaval and transformation, when people are feeling anxious about their place in the world and when visible wealth is playing in a particular, visible way,” says Anna Wilson, a Harvard professor who teaches a class on adaptations, including versions of “Gatsby.”
“Gatz” has been performed all over the world in the past two decades, during which time the show’s director (and the company’s artistic director), John Collins, has seen the many ways the story can resonate with contemporary times. These days? “Tom Buchanan, who’s sort of the bad guy in the novel, is kind of a right-wing white nationalist,” he says. “It’s going to be very hard not to feel like that element of the story is speaking to right now.”
The story’s international appeal is evident in the Broadway “Gatsby,” which is the brainchild of the Korean producer Chunsoo Shin. In fact, the show is getting a London production next year.
For Kait Kerrigan, the musical’s book writer, there’s plenty in the tale that chimes with our own Roaring ’20s. “There’s a rampant capitalist consumerism that was happening then, and that’s happening now,” she says. “And the question of whether the American dream can ever be achieved, or even is a reality that we want, is very alive in us right now.”
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