The Good Gatsby

On the subject of musicals, a few weeks ago I was at a performance of Vieux Carre at the Charing Cross Theatre where I bumped into that prolific theatre director and sometime theatre reviewer Phil Wilmot. I have had the pleasure of seeing a number of Phil’s productions over the years and I was particularly impressed with his King John at the Union earlier this year for which he has been nominated as Best Director in the 2012 Off West End Awards.

We spoke of musicals and in particular The Great Gatsby Musical, which I had seen the previous week. I mentioned that I had not been expecting much from it but found it a pleasant surprise. I also mentioned that a colleague had vehemently disagreed with me on it arguing that it was easily one of the worst musicals he had ever had the displeasure to witness.

I had previously written here in May about the subject matter of musicals. The underlying problem with any musical treatment of The Great Gatsby is that the source work dwells on characters who are generally unsympathetic. In order to create a satisfying musical version, something of the nihilism of the source work has to be adapted.

Adaptations of great novels are indeed that, adaptations and historically compromises are made all the time to suit the nature of the medium. Lionel Bart's Oliver! removes vast swathes of the plot to Dickens' Oliver Twist to create his popular masterpiece and Boubil & Schoenberg's epic Les Miserables is still practically a York Notes version of Victor Hugo's classic. In the same way unsympathetic characters are altered to suit a purpose. Sweeney Todd is allowed to slaughter but not mindlessly, so Sondheim assures us that he has a very good motive for doing so.

What The Great Gatsby Musical gave me was a sense of the period, a workable plot and some decent, evocative musical numbers that coloured the piece. It was not by any means perfect and there were vast stretches of dialogue and denouement that screamed out for musical treatment, but as an early draft I felt that the show had legs. If producers Ruby In The Dust think they have a polished piece of musical theatre on their hands then they need to think again. Composer and lyricist Joe Evans needs to go back to the drawing board and take another look at his work and consider the old adage 'Great musicals are not written, they are re-written.'

I think I managed to leave Phil with the impression that I felt that musicals have to be light, nonsense filled with pretty or formulaic characters. I certainly don't think that - but I do feel that writers of new musicals can sometimes ignore the basic elements of structure and characterisation when working in the medium.