Get ready to roar because the Tony Award®-winning new musical THE GREAT GATSBY is coming to London, and will be the party of the century. Fresh from its sell-out success on Broadway, this “shimmering, sparkling spectacle” (Variety) “explodes with life and energy” (Entertainment Weekly).
Produced by Chunsoo Shin, acclaimed Korean musical producer, 5-time winner of Korea’s most prestigious theatrical award and OD Company president, THE GREAT GATSBY is based on the classic American novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, New York, this is “one wildly entertaining night at the theatre, and musical theatre at its finest” (Theatrely).
Directed by Marc Bruni (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical), this story of extravagance and longing features choreography by Dominique Kelley (So You Think You Can Dance), a book by Kait Kerrigan (The Mad Ones) and a jazz and pop-influenced original score by Jason Howland (Little Women) and Nathan Tysen (Paradise Square).
Meet mysterious millionaire, Jay Gatsby. He entertains the rich and famous with riotous parties at his Long Island mansion yet never joins in. Gatsby longs instead to reunite with his former flame Daisy Buchanan, but Daisy comes from another lifetime, long before the money…
A more ambitious creative team might have turned The Great Gatsby’s keening lyricism, elusive spirit and sheer tragic beauty to its advantage. Instead, we get a screechy clodhopping musical that amps up the Roaring Twenties clichés at the expense of anything Fitzgerald had to say about class, money and the scissoring chasms between appearances and reality. Book writer Kait Kerrigan foregrounds the romance between Gatsby and Daisy in ways that make their cryptic love affair the routine stuff of a thousand Broadway power ballads – and in case we don’t get the message, a deluxe bed is at one point rolled onto the stage.
Boasting a production design to which every future ‘glamorous’ musical will be compared, a cast of bona fide West End superstars performing at the top of their game, and – crucially – two and half hours with not a hint of boredom… has anybody really been shortchanged?
| 2017 | West End |
The Guild of Misrule Production West End |
| 2021 | West End |
West End |
| 2025 | West End |
West End |
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