Review: THE GREAT GATSBY at Blumenthal Performing Arts

Even if you’re as forgetful as I am, certain signature moments of an immortal classic will stick with you for a half century or longer once you’ve read them. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, it’s the indelible image of Jay gazing across Long Island Sound from his mansion to the distant estate of Tom and Daisy Buchanan on the opposite shore. Then there’s the last line of the novel, “So we beat on, boats against the current…,” mercifully quoted in erudite discourse less often than the opening lines of Moby-Dick or Pride and Prejudice – but often enough for it to linger in memory.

Most pleasurable, perhaps, are the buried treasures: moments you’ve totally forgotten until they are resurrected by the first mention or evocation in decades. There’s the great optometrist billboard looming over George Wilson’s grubby gas station. Another such diamond lies hidden until narrator Nick Carraway shouts out what becomes his farewell tribute to Gatsby, “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

Sadly, what is so profoundly wrong with Kait Kerrigan’s adaptation of Gatsby, not salvaged by Jason Howland’s score or Nathan Tysen’s lyrics, crystallized for me in that suddenly familiar moment. At Charlotte’s Belk Theater, where the touring show lingers through Sunday, it is so painfully obvious that Gatsby outclasses the Buchanans from the beginning of Act 1 that he hardly needs to appear.

Nor were there compelling reasons to remain interested in the Buchanans. Will Branner as Tom is so nasty, negative, and noxious that you wonder why Daisy hasn’t run from him screaming years ago. For her part, Senzel Ahmady sings too many high notes on too many moribund power ballads without projecting more than an intensely vague anguish.

Yes, her dear Tom is an asshole, but life in her little palace, waited on by a private maid who frees her from the annoyance of parenting, is far from a horror. That’s about all you can say about this Daisy. As for Leanne Robinson as her bestie Jordan, you’ll be hard-pressed to discover whether she’s a champion golfer or a dreary duffer. Her stylish skepticism is certainly up to par. We seem to be shown this whole damn bunch with the assumption that we already know them.

With Paul Tate dePoo III’s mix of scenery and projection design, and Linda Cho’s costumes, the look of this Gatsby is always stylish, able to withstand Cory Pattak’s lighting excesses, which have a bit of a Vegas lean. In fact, the opening tableau, an epic view across the water, with its distant shore dotted by the lone green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, yields intriguing foreshadowings of the orchestrations to follow.

Cued by the gilt flavors reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard and Grand Hotel, we’re likely expecting a moody, bluesy decadence. But Kerrigan and Howland give such impulses little more than a passing nod. The blizzard of high notes from the upper set is only punctuated by the elevation of Meyer Wolfsheim, reputed fixer of the Black Sox World Series, into a semi-awesome sinister force.

This notorious bootlegger gets the satanic majesty treatment at the top of Act 2 when Edward Stautenmayer and company launch into an overwrought “Shady,” seemingly staged in Vegas or a parallel Art Nouveau netherworld. When Wolfsheim reappears at Wilson’s filling station, overseeing a shipment of bootleg booze, Stautenmayer suddenly diminishes into a rather humdrum mob boss, though he can wield an ostentatious cigar at a Gatsby soiree during his leisure hours.

Effortlessly, Jake David Smith as Jay and Joshua Grosso as Nick rise above the crooks, the lowlifes, and the filthy rich – though Gatsby’s riches may not be driven snow. Without any patrician airs beyond his habit of calling people “old sport,” Jay’s role is not conspicuously plumier than Nick’s. Or it wouldn’t be if Grosso’s “Roaring On” didn’t quickly devolve from its bluesy beginning into a mess of storytelling and Broadway spectacle.

By the end of that opening song, Nick has arrived in Manhattan from Minnesota, lucked out on an $80-a-month cottage on the Island, seen his mysterious neighbor reaching toward the opposite shore in iconic silhouette, and received an invite to Gatsby’s next “little party.” So much for moodiness and atmosphere: the whole world seems to be a party.

In reality, it’s Smith who lucks out, since Gatsby draws the two most memorable and focused songs in the show, “For Her” and “My Green Light.” He also gets to ham up the best comic bit, stressing out as Gatsby readies to ambush Daisy during her upcoming visit to Nick’s cottage. All the decorations and the servants scurrying around are too much, yet so cute. Smith’s preadolescent panic is cuter.

The whinings of the Wilsons are somewhat better scored by Howland. The slime-pit scenery by DP3 paired with Choo’s costumes – grubby for Tally Sessions as George, squalid for Lila Coogan as Myrtle – supply the Buchanans with cringeworthy depths they have risen above. It’s also the best lens for viewing the residents of East Egg with admiration. From his balcony at West Egg, Gatsby can only look across the water toward a solitary green light with a futile longing.

It should be easier to empathize with Jay than it was at Belk Theater. Wednesday night’s muddy sound – and a fifteen-minute pause for technical difficulties – further impeded the flow.

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