Review: GATSBY, Union Theatre, April 19 2016

Even if you don't know Gatsby, you know "Gatsby", the word having passed into popular discourse as a result of F Scott Fitzgerald's celebrated novel (and mythmakingly short, incident-packed life). Roll in the its many adaptations for screen and stage and you've a bona fide icon of popular culture. One of those adaptations was Ruby In The Dust's, which I reviewed positively in 2012, so I was looking forward to seeing how the show had developed, as the same company moved across the Thames from the King's Head to the Union. Unfortunately, something was lost en route.

The story remains the same. It's the Roaring Twenties and nowhere is that roar louder than at Jay Gatsby's lakeside mansion just outside New York. Amongst the partying set are the beautiful couple, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, but the spark between them is waning, with womanising Tom setting his cap towards wannabe socialite Myrtle (trapped with her gas station owner husband, George, dreaming of more), while the mysterious Gatsby has eyes only for the shallow Daisy, a strange connection between them reviving from a shared past. Things don't turn out well.

Linnie Reedman's book switches the narrator role from one-foot-in, one-foot-out Nick Carraway to mobster Meyer Wolfsheim which weakens both Carraway's character (he now appears to be little more than a saxophone-playing hanger-on who judges his friends) and limits Gatsby's free-floating detachment (since a mobster is emotionally invested in him from the word go). These are the choices creatives make and some work and some don't, and that conclusion can take a while to come through.

Less forgivable is the inexplicable casting. Though many of the actors are individually talented, the requirement placed on so them to act, sing, dance and play the music makes some compromises understandable - but the one thing not to compromise in a musical is the singing! With the notable exception of Zed Josef's Tom and a very decent stage debut by Ferne McCann as husky-voiced femme-fatale Myrtle, the singing lacks expression and often seems to work against Joe Evans' musical direction, rather than with it. This lack of connection carries through to the spoken sections, in which the actors tend to announce statements to each other rather than converse. Joanna Brown's Daisy doesn't look very happy with Tom, but she scarcely looks happier with Nicolas Fagerberg's stiff Gatsby - the chemistry is too flat throughout.

It's never much fun to give a review that finds so much wrong with a show, but sometimes, in the very tricky world of musical theatre, things, like Daisy and Gatsby, just don't work out.

Gatsby continues at the Union Theatre until 30 April.

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