The Great Gatsby, starring Jamie Muscato and Frances Mayli McCann, plays at the London Coliseum until 7 September 2025. Book Tickets.
The Great Gatsby is a poisoned chalice. Some classic novels like Lady Chatterley’s Lover endure in the public consciousness despite not getting much airtime in secondary school classrooms. But I’d argue that The Great Gatsby – a cautionary tale about a mysterious entrepreneur in 1920s New York hoping to recapture the heart of his World War I sweetheart, Daisy Buchanan – has been astroturfed to literary greatness by the US’s teach-to-the-test style of pedagogy. Its low word count and heavy-handed symbolism have made it a consistently safe choice for high school English teachers across America.
This may be why there’s yet to be a truly successful adaptation of the novel, although it’s certainly not for lack of trying. It was a swing and a miss for Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 attempt, which initially garnered some positive reviews but left audiences feeling both overstimulated and underwhelmed by its frenetic pacing and dense visuals.
In contrast, the West End transfer of Jason Howland, Nathan Tysen and Kait Kerrigan’s musical adaptation takes a decidedly unadventurous approach to the material. While Luhrmann may have dated himself to the 2010s with dubstep and Lana del Rey on his deliberately anachronistic soundtrack, these choices still helped the movie to distinguish itself. Even allowing for the fact that musical theatre is one of the slowest genres of music to respond to changing trends, the songs are largely bland and uninspired. The Past is Catching Up to Me, one of the musical’s better songs, sounds far too much like The Wizard and I, which first hit theatres over twenty years ago. Despite a propulsive and genuinely show-stopping performance from Jamie Muscato, the declarative park-and-bark songwriting style completely stomps on the source material’s tone.
This problem is also evident in Beautiful Little Fool, Daisy’s final song of the night, where she admits that she hopes that her daughter Pamela will be ignorant enough that she never realises just how constrained her choices are in a world that expects a woman to be nothing more than an ornament. F. Scott Fitzgerald manages to distil this sentiment into a single sentence, but having a direct, declarative song about it deprives it of the subtle melancholy of the original prose, which is one of the few things the novel has going for it.
In the absence of substance, there’s no shortage of flash and flourish. Paul Tate dePoo III’s sets and projections work in perfect tandem on the Coliseum’s vast stage to achieve an immense sense of scale. That said, the climactic sequence at Gatsby’s swimming pool falls a little flat in its execution, particularly when the National Theatre’s recent production of The Grapes of Wrath saw the first few rows of the Lyttleton unexpectedly finding themselves in a genuine splash zone when the Judd family jumped into a creek.
The overall production design cleaves strictly to the 2010s approach to the 1920s art deco aesthetic, which will be more than familiar to anyone who’s walked past a branch of The Ivy in the last ten years. The flapper costumes, in particular, look like something you would have found on the rack at Max Mara or Jimmy Choo circa 2011 rather than successfully evoking the style of the period while still including any necessary theatrical embellishments.
The show is oblivious to the irony of condemning its characters for fixating on a past that they are doomed to never recapture when it exists purely for the sake of title recognition and not because it has a new take on the source material or a novel sense of style that it can deploy to convey a familiar story to its audience in a new way. It’s sad to watch performers like Jamie Muscato and Frances Mayli McCann, who deliver the best performance of their career so far as Daisy, when all their efforts are in service of such an empty spectacle.
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