(no subject)

[skygiants]

When I heard 'Florence and the Machine Great Gatsby musical coming to Boston' I knew immediately that was a Theater Experience that I needed to have and I would never forgive myself if I did not have it.

Did I expect it to be good? No!

Did I think it was, in the event, particularly good? Well, no. But it wasn't terrible either!

One common failure point that I have experienced with musical theater written by famous alternative rock bands -- cf. U2's Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark and The National's Cyrano de Bergerac -- is that often they do not really care to do their homework about writing for musical theater. I cannot accuse Florence of The Machine of this. Florence diligently did her homework. She put a song into every single location that musical theater might have wanted a song, and made sure they were a variety of different kinds of Musical Theater Songs, such as Solos and Duets and Large Choral Numbers, and added in respectful homages to Hamilton, Assassins, and Hadestown to boot. Do I think these added anything to the show? Not really. Did I have to cover my mouth not to laugh when the show ended with the full cast singing "so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" and then doing the Eliza Hamilton End Of Show Gasp? I did. But I do also think it's quite cute ... and I do have more respect for this tack than Bono and the Edge's "they burned us a CD of big musical theater numbers and we thought it was all rubbish and ignored it completely" methodology of composition for Spiderman ...

However, broadly speaking, we all agreed: too many songs. Some of these songs have to go. Personally, I think that the first ones that I would get rid of are Daisy and Gatsby's 'I Want' solos. I discovered over the course of this show a powerful conviction that neither Daisy, Gatsby, or Tom should ever sing onstage alone in a Gatsby musical. I do not care to hear them explaining themselves in a way that could possibly imply that they are exposing their genuine inner feelings. I believe very strongly that they should only be singing to Nick or to a crowd or in some other form of mediated narration. I also don't want to hear anything that happens between Daisy and Gatsby or Daisy and Tom when Nick isn't around! I especially think it's a mistake to let Daisy and Tom shout their Issues out for like ten minutes at the end .... I especially especially think that's a mistake when their furious duet includes the passionately sung line "a killer behind the wheel of a death car," which was the other point during the show when I had to cover my mouth to stop from being That Asshole in the theater.

Interestingly, I do not feel this way about Myrtle and George Wilson. IMO Myrtle and George Wilson can have all the solos and duets when Nick isn't around that they want, and, indeed, they do! It helps that Solea Pfeiffer, who played Myrtle, has by far the best voice of the cast and also the best match for Florence Welch's own musical style -- performance-wise, it lands in a way that a lot of the other songs don't -- but also I do genuinely think that 'we're going to give the Wilsons interiority' is an interesting thing for a Gatsby musical to do, in a way that 'we're going to give Gatsby and Daisy interiority' isn't. Similarly, there's a musical number that's sung for about a minute by the maids in the Gatsby mansion, which I also enjoyed quite a lot. I think what it boils down to is that structurally if you're adapting Gatsby for the stage I think it's much more interesting to highlight the gaps in Nick's perspective by leaning into the things that Nick doesn't pay attention to at all in the book than the things he's paying extremely close attention to. Gatsby and Daisy and Tom are all surface and artifice, and that's thematically relevant to the narrative in a way that I don't want anything about them to be conveyed to me directly, but I do think it's fun to use an adaptation to highlight what's going on in the places of the narrative where Nick's not looking.

I also think, in theory, that you could do some fun things with the use of a sort of jazz age Greek chorus; it is, after all, a tragedy. In practice, a.) ah! we're nodding to Hadestown again! and b.) God bless Florence and her Passionate But Unsubtle Environmentalist Message, it is again quite cute, I guess I can't argue against the notion that if you're Critiquing the American Dream you might as well go on and announce "oil is bad! plant trees!" while you're at it ... there's a part where Nick is waxing eloquent about redwoods and he has a bit at the end where he expands the Boats Beating Backward bit to suggest that perhaps we should rewind all of Manhattan back hundreds of years and Let Redwoods Grow again and afterwards genarti said to me with some concern, 'I have to ask, do you think Florence really thinks redwoods ever grew on the isle of Manhattan? I believe this is a mistake Nick would make, I just would like to know that it was on purpose.'

genarti also caught a bit of implication that none of the rest of us did, which is that there's a line in the very beginning We're Going To Critique The American Dream song where someone sings about how there's been people on the continent the whole time, and the guy who sings that comes back to play Gatsby's father at the very end with a couple choices of staging and lyrics that imply that the background Gatsby's run from might not just be North Dakotan but indigenous, which is both interesting and more subtly done than most of the choices in the show even if I'm not sure what I think about it as a choice.

Anyway, all that said, as a piece of stage spectacle, it was visually interesting and fun to watch. The A.R.T. is good at what they do. The set was broadly speaking designed to look like a junkyard full of crashed/crashing cars ... again, subtle? No. But cool looking! The costumes were great and the cast was very good at languidly posing like Leyendecker paintings. I'm not quite sure why there were so many instances of people whipping off their glamorous period attire to reveal that underneath they were wearing scanty black negligees left over from the Cell Block Tango, but technically speaking all the quick changes worked very well! Technically speaking, good theater! And solid performances, etc, and now I do really want to go back and read Gatsby, because in all my commentary above I'm going off twenty-year-old memories of the book, ten-year-old memories of the most recent movie, and two-year-old memories of Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful. I just went back to check the Wikipedia article for something and it said "themes of environmentalism" and I was like "huh, I don't remember those! maybe Nick does talk about redwoods in the book!" so, who knows, we'll see.

I stand by not wanting Gatsby or Daisy to sing solos though.

Sidenote: in the program, there were two contributors who were both credited for having previously worked on Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet and Moby Dick -- both other recent A.R.T. Weird Musical Spectacles that genarti and I made a point of seeing -- and then the one was also listed as having worked on a show called RooseElvis and the other as having worked on The Communist Dracula Pageant and I spent the rest of the night convinced I was being punk'd because they'd locked our phones up at the beginning at the show and I had no way to verify these were real productions and surely they could not have happened without us hearing about them and going?? There was nothing on hell or earth that would have kept me from The Communist Dracula Pageant if it really existed???

Anyway it did turn out these were real shows, they just happened long enough ago that they were before our time. Alas for the constraints of linear chronology!

Comments

[ghost_lingering]

omg time machine for The Communitist Dracula Pageant stat!

[skygiants]

please! we all need this so badly!

[chestnut_pod]

omg, NOT the full cast singing "so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past"!!!

I think what it boils down to is that structurally if you're adapting Gatsby for the stage I think it's much more interesting to highlight the gaps in Nick's perspective by leaning into the things that Nick doesn't pay attention to at all in the book than the things he's paying extremely close attention to. -- agree very much, and had much the same thoughts about Nghi Vo's Gatsby adaptation.


…Are there redwoods on the east coast at all? I think the noble American chestnut would probably have been a better pick, if we're playing by the Lauren Groff rulebook of "all art must be climate art."

[genarti]

To my knowledge, there are not, lol. There are redbuds, and they're very pretty little trees, but that's a very different thing. I agree that the chestnut would have been a much better pick for the line. But I'm just SO curious whether that's Nick's mistake or Florence's! Or Fitzgerald's, I guess?

[chestnut_pod]

This is curious! A quick text search reveals no instances of "redwood" in Gatsby. One of those endearing mistakes by people who don't quite understand how big the continent is :D

[genarti]

littledust dug up the passage that presumably inspired the line in a comment further down, and indeed, it does not specify redwoods (or any other specific type of tree). Florence! Florence, your Britishness is showing.

[skygiants]

it's like I guess you HAVE to face up against the last line in one way or another but surely .... there was a better ..... no? no???

and the thing is that theater provides a really interesting opportunity to lean into that via staging, music choices, etc.! I kept sort of wistfully mentally overlaying the show that did lean into that on top of the one I was actually watching, which probably is not fair to the one I was actually watching, and yet.

[newredshoes]

Heh, the author of the book is a college friend who I was in two shows with: hamletmachine and No Exit. I have some deeply silly photos of us floating around on FB and on here. Very interesting to hear your thoughts on all this! I can see why she was interested in the project, but it seemed like such a strange project from the word go.

[skygiants]

oh man, extremely small world -- I'm pretty sure I remember you talking about your No Exit experience way back when, too.

it was definitely an interesting project and provided much to think about and talk about, so thank you to your college friend for an engrossing night of theater!

[shadaras]

thank you so much for watching this and giving a summary, I am so fascinated by this

also I am so sad that The Communist Dracula Pageant happened too long ago for you to see it! I want to know everything about it!

[skygiants]

I'm really glad I went, even if it didn't 100% land for me it gave me a great deal to think about and chew on which is mostly what I want out of a night of theater!

me too

[rymenhild]

I am coming to this post as an English teacher who will never choose to be on the tenth grade team because I have less than no interest in Gatsby. I read it in high school; I know it's very teachable; but I find it boring as anything and its themes were explored to death long ago.

That said, I am very entertained by your review of what does and does not work in the musical concept! Redwoods in precolonial Manhattan, hee! Potentially indigenous Gatsby, I could absolutely be convinced. Sung "so we beat on, boats against the current..." Oh dear. Oh dear.

[skygiants]

I don't think of Gatsby as formative for me, and then I remember that I apparently liked it so much in high school that i went on to read at least two or three more Fitzgerald novels, so it must to some extent have been! & it was interesting realizing how much I had in fact successfully internalized as I squinted somewhat dubiously at the musical's choices, especially sitting next to Beth who read it just as long ago but internalized it much less.

[chomiji]

I love Florence + The Machine but this really does sound like more than a bit of a goat rope!

Still, I do love live theater and haven't seen any for far too long.

[chestnut_pod]

I had never heard "goat rope" before -- what a fun piece of slang!

[chomiji]

I think it's military slang - the hubs worked with a bunch of veterans and used to come home with this stuff. Language and expressions are such fun!

[skygiants]

'goat rope' is also new to me and I'm really delighted to learn it!

I love pretty much all live theater but 'this show has a 100% chance of being either really great or really terrible' is my favorite kind of live theater to see and this one definitely landed in the sweet spot where it was a little of both :D

[osprey_archer]

My twenty year old memories of Great Gatsby ALSO don't include Nick talking about redwoods in the book, but huh! Maybe?? Maybe I too should reread it.

Anyway, this sounds like one of those shows that while maybe not actually exactly good is nonetheless very interesting to experience and talk over afterward, if only to go "why??? was the set a junkyard of crashed cars??" Because I think that also works a lot against the themes of "glittering artifice that covers an essential vacuity in these characters/their way of life/the American dream as a whole," given that a junkyard is not, generally speaking, very glittery. Although perhaps it was a bedazzled junkyard.

Although given that Daisy & Tom & Gatsby got solos, it sounds like overall the show was maybe not interested in the glittering artifice over essential vacuity part of the book, since it was at least attempting to give the characters interiority unmediated by Nick. And I think Nick thinks that Tom and Daisy don't really have any, and he maybe thinks Gatsby does but is in fact perhaps projecting? Gatsby might also be a hollow shell? But again, working off my memories as a freshman in high school here...

I did love this book in high school, though, which most of my classmates didn't.

It truly does seem criminal that you missed The Communist Dracula Pageant.

[genarti]

We had a great time talking it over afterward, it's true! We went to a bar that was close to closing, and after a while the bartender came over to talk to us about musical theater (his perspective: I always thought it sucked, but then recently I watched The Sound of Music and that was GREAT!)

I broadly agree with Becca but did like it a bit more. I did personally think the show was interested in the artifice over essential... if not vacuity, self-centered carelessness, because to me Daisy and particularly Gatsby's "I Want" songs read as a different kind of performative than the book's party scenes. Like, it felt to me that they'd swapped Gatsby's central performance from Life Of The Party (though he certainly did still host wild empty parties every night) to Pining Romantic Lead but it was still a performance he'd cast himself in, with a mystery beneath whose past and real motives and moral compromises were only hinted at and never really revealed. And Daisy's still basically boiled down to being glittering over vacuity and taking no responsibility for any of her own choices, even if she got a couple of songs in which to cast herself as a sheltered, stifled ingenue. But it depends on a) whether that switch works for you, and b) whether you the viewer choose to read these songs as relatively subtle unreliability in self-told narratives (as I did) or unsubtle interiority (as I think Becca did).

Mind you, I disliked the book in high school but hadn't read it since, and had in fact forgotten nearly all the plot (and misremembered key details about the things I did remember, it turns out, lol). So I was coming to this with very little baggage of book comparison.

[kore]

Huh, if Gatsby was any kind of Performative Life of the Party guy at all, I have to wonder how much the musical was influenced by the movie, because in the book he doesn't like the parties at all and hates giving them -- indeed, nobody ever sees him at one, and Nick doesn't know who he is when they meet. And he's definitely absolutely pining! But not redwooding. Ha. Ha.

[skygiants]

I saw the junkyard of crashed cars and nodded to myself sagely and was like 'ah, they're dramatically foreshadowing the bit where someone gets hit with a car' and then the plot kicked in and I was like "OH ALSO I GUESS THE WILSONS DO RUN AN ACTUAL JUNKYARD." To be fair it was a very shiny and chrome junkyard!

But yes, Beth as you can see from the comment read it differently, but I didn't get the feeling of the essential emptiness at the center that I want from a Gatsby -- or at least I didn't think the musical was using its structure as a musical to lean into that, which is a shame because I like it when musicals do cool things with their structure as musicals, whereas to me all those Gatsby and Daisy solos felt like "ahhhh we've got lead characters I guess they need solos!" Beth's reading is a more charitable one though ....

(I also loved the book in high school!)

[ceitfianna]

I'm glad you saw this as I was curious about it after my favorite musical youtuber got deep into the Gatsby musicals and I reread it recently. This sounds like a lot but not in a lot way that completely works.

[skygiants]

I'm also quite curious about the rival Gatsby musical! But who knows if I will ever have a chance to see/compare/contrast.

[littledust]

(I didn't renew my paid account... hilariously, this is the musical icon that survived the culling.)

I enjoyed Gatsby: An American Dream for the experience of being in the theatre, seeing a show, but boy could I not hum a single note afterwards. Generally a bad sign, especially for a show with so many songs... Absolutely no shade to Florence Welch, but it is HARD to write musical theatre songs.

Other thoughts:

- I did sit down in the theatre with the half-joking thought that if I had to see straight Nick Carraway in 20-goddamn-24, I was LEAVING. And then he kissed a man! You love to see it, literally. (I am 95% certain Jordan had some queer flirtations with ensemble members, though I don't remember any kissing.)

- I liked the unsubtle car crash set a lot, largely because of how it paired with the ensemble's Cell Block Tango costumes (lol). The ensemble supplies the jazz age glitz; the ominous car crash set looms over the narrative. So much "this glittering life is seductive, but oh! the rot beneath it" media is SO incredibly visually beautiful that it almost undermines the point it's trying to make, and I appreciated seeing something different. Subtle it ain't, but neither is the novel...

- Unlike soooo many others, the alterations to Myrtle and George fell flat for me! Or rather, Myrtle's songs and actress were so great that I wanted to see the show starring the OC who happens to share a name with the Gatsby character. After some rumination--it's so rare for me to dislike expanding on a female character's story!--I've concluded that I like how Gatsby!Myrtle is loudly, vulgarly awful. It makes for more of a gut punch when Nick realizes that Daisy and Tom (especially Daisy) are also awful people.

- There's also the fact that George addresses the audience right before he shoots Gatsby?? We almost made it through a show at the A.R.T. without an actor addressing the audience... please... there is another way... (Nick/The Audience also gets an ensemble member yelling DON'T JUDGE HER re: Myrtle, so maybe I am just allergic to shows telling me what to think through direct address.)

- I was wondering whether the show would do anything about that "reading Gatsby as a man of color" essay. You are not the only person who missed the implications re: Gatsby's indigenous ancestry, which REALLY calls into question how effective it is. There was an attempt.gif

- Agreeeeeeeed re: the Gatsby and Daisy songs telling me too much about their interiority. No! At least save it for the second act if you have to have some in there!

- I reread Gatsby after seeing the show (imo the correct order to do it), and this is the passage that inspired the mysterious redwoods: "And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

- ...and I do not think the lyrics were up to the task of reclaiming that colonialist POV while preserving the painful sense of nostalgia for life's wonders even as one lives them, because to experience a perfect moment is also to lose it forever. Or so Mr. Fitzgerald says!

I made "enjoys The Great Gatsby" part of my personality in high school, if you couldn't tell. 😅

[genarti]

Jordan EXTREMELY VERY MUCH had some queer flirtations with ensemble cast members! I'm also not sure if there was any kissing, but if not there was dancing (and Leyendecker posing) that was the next thing to it.

HA. Thank you for looking up the passage! I note the utter lack of specific trees, which does avoid specifying trees famous for only being on the other side of the continent... (Well, and in Asia, but who's counting.)

[skygiants]

asdk;fjd INCREDIBLE CHOICE THOUGH

yeah I saw the show one week ago and I do not remember what any of the songs sounded like ... I also feel like maybe musically Florence was trying to shape her very distinctive style to make it sound More Like a Musical, and ended up in that awkward middle place where the music sounded neither as distinctive as her songs usually sound, nor as normal-singable as a catchy musical. But perhaps I would feel differently if I heard Florence herself singing!

YES I can't believe I forgot to mention that thankfully Nick Carroway DID kiss a man and both he and Jordan DID have some notable same sex dancing situations and WE DO INDEED LOVE TO SEE IT. Nick was also really hilariously googly-eyed over Gatsby which, on the one hand, I feel like Nick in the book is not QUITE such a baby ingenue lad and has a more judgmental distance on the whole thing and on the other hand is extremely extremely funny.

I suspect that when I reread the book I might agree with you about the changes to Myrtle -- I do think that making Myrtle and George so reeeeeeally obviuosly Sympathetic is weighting the scales in a deeply unsubtle way, but she was such a powerhouse that I was happy to see her any time she was on stage, and on principle I'm glad to spend some time on things that Nick doesn't care about.

THANK YOU for digging up the passage about trees! YOU ARE RIGHT. The lyrics aren't up to it. Unfortunately when the lyrics steal directly from the book it doesn't work and when the lyrics don't steal directly from the book they're worse .... a bit of a catch-22 there and I probably shouldn't be harsh on the creative team because I certainly don't know that I could do better, the language in Gatsby is iconic for a reason!

[ranalore]

I do so love reading your live musical theater experiences, especially as someone who has never, generally speaking, enjoyed them myself.

This all sounds amazing, if not quite good, but the thing that really jumps out at me is the implication of Gatsby as indigenous. I've had to read the novel twice for various courses, and while I can appreciate the technical craftsmanship while finding the artistry lacking, Gatsby's backstory sticks with me because it's so similar to my own Scandi-German-American grandfather's. I do feel like Gatsby's name may hint at Jewish ancestry, but I'd never considered indigenous. It doesn't sound like it quite works in the show, and I'm not sure how I feel about the likelihood of its roots in the novel, but I definitely find it interesting as a choice for inclusion.

I join those mourning both your chance to see The Communist Dracula Pageant, and the absolutely hilarious write-up you would have done of it for our benefit.

[kore]

Yeah, his original name is Gatz, which I think is German-Slavic or Polish, and I've seen critical discussions about whether Gatsby might be Jewish or Black -- kind of the same speculation about Heathcliff's background. I think Gatz or Gertz can be Jewish, altho Fitzgerald also might have been punning on "gat" (gun). The funeral is conducted by a Lutheran minister, tho.

[ranalore]

Yeah, I'd misremembered his original name as Jake (Jakob) Gatz, but I just looked it up and it's James, which doesn't negate the Germanic inflections of Gatz. I do feel like the funeral was another post-mortem performance as Gatsby, even if the key audience isn't in attendance, so the subtextual implication of Gatz as possibly Jewish remains. I like the idea Fitzgerald was riffing on "gat," though.

The most recent course I read the book for was actually one that focused on line-editing. In it, we were really digging into both how much influence Fitzgerald's editor had on Gatsby, and how much the "classic" status of the book rests on its sentence-level technical accomplishments, as opposed to other writing elements. It was also interesting because we got to compare it to another, earlier novella Fitzgerald wrote, the title of which escapes me now but I'm pretty sure it included the word "Winter." That story reads like an early draft of Gatsby, and I think it could be argued not all of the changes were to the novel's benefit.

[skygiants]

Yeah, we were discussing Gatsby's ancestry after the show and I wrinkled my forehead and said 'wait, isn't he an immigrant?' because I'd so firmly associated 'Gatz' with 'German immigrant, possibly Jewish' that I'd completely forgotten that's not actually anywhere in the text!

[kore]

When I heard 'Florence and the Machine Great Gatsby musical coming to Boston'

Oh....my. Somehow I did not hear anything of this despite being a pretty big fan of hers! Bzuh. (I'm one of those really annoying "I heard Anais Mitchell sing Hadestown songs before there was even a concept album" ppl lol, really not generally plugged into musical theatre.)

the show ended with the full cast singing "so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" and then doing the Eliza Hamilton End Of Show Gasp

I whaaa

[skygiants]

I don't know that I'd have heard of it if I wasn't getting ads for the A.R.T.! I saw that they were doing a Gatsby and I said 'huh' and then I looked at the poster and the names associated with it and I said 'huh???

[kate_nepveu]

this is amazing but I'm commenting selfishly because I like the National and am amazed at the idea that they did a musical!

[skygiants]

They did the music for the recent version of Cyrano de Bergerac with Peter Dinklage! Unfortunately, because I like everyone involved, I personally did not think it was a particularly good version of Cyrano de Bergerac ... or at least I did not think this when I saw the live version in NYC a few years back, but perhaps the film is better! or perhaps it's just me and my strong Cyrano opinions that it disagreed with

[larryhammer]

I stand by not wanting Gatsby or Daisy to sing solos

I stand with you. So does the entire narrative framework of the novel.

[skygiants]

Thank you! That's what I thought!

[rushthatspeaks]

I highly recommend Greil Marcus's book on The Great Gatsby, a piece of criticism I knew I would love forever when it spent most of chapter one proclaiming Moby-Dick the Great American Novel. Anyway, in it Marcus describes what I suspect is the Platonic ideal of Gatsby theatre, which one can see if one is willing to go to the good God I just found out they changed the name of the Museum of Television & Radio to the Paley Center-- anyway, there-- Anyway. Entire text of the book read aloud, as in book passed from hand to hand, by each member of the cast, reading their dialogue when appropriate, everyone acting out everything as it is read, and splitting the narration among themselves in what is apparently a masterpiece of theatre direction. Yes, it is ten hours long. And you can only watch it in the museum because it's never been released. But it sounded obviously perfect.

I hope Florence enjoyed herself, as I can absolutely see what attracted her to the project, but it didn't seem likely to work for actually the same set of reasons, and I'm not surprised both that it didn't and that it was entertaining.

[skygiants]

you know, I've been meaning to pay a visit to Paley for ages [in large part because they are to a certain extent Our Professional Rivals] [in a friendly way] so if I can find ten free hours ...

[lirazel]

Did I have to cover my mouth not to laugh when the show ended with the full cast singing "so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" and then doing the Eliza Hamilton End Of Show Gasp?

Okay, that's so earnest that it's delightful.

. I do not care to hear them explaining themselves in a way that could possibly imply that they are exposing their genuine inner feelings. I believe very strongly that they should only be singing to Nick or to a crowd or in some other form of mediated narration. I also don't want to hear anything that happens between Daisy and Gatsby or Daisy and Tom when Nick isn't around!

Oh, I love this take. You've convinced me!

afterwards [personal profile] genarti said to me with some concern, 'I have to ask, do you think Florence really thinks redwoods ever grew on the isle of Manhattan? I believe this is a mistake Nick would make, I just would like to know that it was on purpose.'

Hahahaha!

The Communist Dracula Pageant

I will never know peace.

[skygiants]

It's so earnest and also like ... how do you handle the last line? You've got to do something with it. I sympathize enormously. I don't think this is the right answer but I do sympathize.