“The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel of garish glamour and dashed dreams, is coming to Broadway as a musical this spring.
The show — the latest in a long string of adaptations of this widely read story — had a pre-Broadway run last fall at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., where it opened to mixed reviews. (As it happens, the book also arrived to mixed reviews, and is now widely considered a great classic of American literature.)
The lavish production will join a spring Broadway season packed with new musicals at a moment when many industry leaders are concerned that there do not seem to be enough patrons to keep most of the shows afloat.
This new “Gatsby” musical is backed by Chunsoo Shin, a Korean producer hungering for a Broadway hit after a spate of unsuccessful ventures here. He most recently was part of the producing team for “Once Upon a One More Time,” the short-lived show featuring Britney Spears songs; previous endeavors included a stage adaptation of “Doctor Zhivago” and a Tupac Shakur musical, “Holler if Ya Hear Me.”
The “Great Gatsby” musical features songs by Nathan Tysen and Jason Howland, who collaborated on the 2022 musical “Paradise Square,” and a book by the playwright Kait Kerrigan (“The Mad Ones”). (Tysen and Kerrigan are married to each other.) The director is Marc Bruni, whose previous Broadway outing, “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” which opened in 2014, was a significant hit.
The musical will star two Broadway fan favorites. Jeremy Jordan, a Tony nominee for “Newsies,” will play the nouveau riche title character, Jay Gatsby, while Eva Noblezada, a two-time Tony nominee, for “Miss Saigon” and “Hadestown,” will play Daisy Buchanan, the young woman with old money whom Gatsby has long desired.
“The Great Gatsby” is scheduled to begin previews March 29 and to open April 25 at the Broadway Theater, one of Broadway’s largest houses.
The novel has been explored in other media many times, including in a glitzy 2013 Hollywood film directed by Baz Luhrmann that starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. On Broadway, there was a “Great Gatsby” play staged in 1926, the year after the novel’s publication; Off Broadway there was a highly acclaimed seven-hour version, called “Gatz,” developed by Elevator Repair Service and staged at the Public Theater in 2010.
The novel entered the public domain in 2021, opening the door to any number of adaptations. Most significantly, at least for theater audiences, is another musical adaptation in development. It’s called “Gatsby” and is scheduled to start performances in May at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. That production, which also has Broadway aspirations, has a book by the Pulitzer-winning playwright Martyna Majok (“Cost of Living”), songs by the rock star Florence Welch (of Florence and the Machine) and Thomas Bartlett (also known as Doveman), and direction by Rachel Chavkin (a Tony winner for “Hadestown”).
I saw the Paper Mill production last year and agree that it deserved mixed reviews. The Great Gatsby is one of the great novels in American literature and this adaptation was workmanlike, stripping the book of a lot of its elegance and subtlety. I did like Eva Noblezada (more than I liked her in Hadestown and Miss Saigon) and some of the other performances. I suspect that as long as the Broadway production has some well-known stars it'll run, but as soon as Jordan and Noblezada leave (assuming they aren't replaced by performers of comparable stature) it'll sink pretty fast.