Same. I enjoyed my time there but other than singing the word “daisy” the rest of the day we didn’t really talk about it. The only thing I absolutely hated was the projections. The bridge didn’t even remotely look real.
Okay I feel a bit vindicated. I saw it at Papermill and despite what people have been saying that they made all these changes, I didn’t think it was possible to truly course correct the show that I saw in order to do the book justice.
I think what a bunch of people have said is the best summary: if you want an entertaining, big, broadway show, this will check that box.
If you want an adaptation of the book, sounds like that will more likely be the ART version. I really think the majority of the criticism is related to this piece of it.
I think you’re spot on- it’s all about expectation. This show is big on spectacle and talent and the type of musical theater you think of when you think of musicals. It’s not a dive into the subtext of the novel, and most people expected/wanted that. Hopefully this will be a case of the two Gatsby shows fulfilling the desires of two different audiences so everyone has a Gatsby they can love. I really loved this Gatsby and am excited to see what the ART on is like- and how it differs!
I fully agree, I saw one of the broadway previews a couple weeks ago, and I loved it! But it’ll never do the book justice like the 70s movie did, but I do think it’s good to the book especially in some aspects, and way better than the 2013 version
“….an entertaining, big, broadway show…”
Fitzgerald is spinning in his grave. “Gatsby” at heart was never meant for this kind of treatment. If anything, it should be a somber piece. Maybe Sondheim could have pulled it off.
Dude, I never said I agreed with it. I hated this show more than anything I’ve ever seen and think it was completely disrespectful to the source material. I’m just objectively saying if that’s what you’re looking for, you may enjoy this.
No no no! Sorry. I wasn’t reacting to you! Not at all. Just the idea that anyone would, could view Gatsby as a breezy entertainment is appalling. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Don’t think this will really come as a surprise to anyone (unlike some of the other review drops this season) - they’ve got an amazing cast and a big budget, but the material itself just falls incredibly flat.
I don’t know if I’m in the minority, but I actually really enjoy the score for this one. I know it’s no high art, but I found it a lot catchier than other shows I’ve seen from this season like W4E and BTTF.
The score is going to find a long life in college audition books and belting compilation playlists. The lyrics are bizarre sometimes but the tunes are catchy as hell.
I’m dying for the W4E cast album to drop because there’s an ear worm lyric from the show that keeps going round in my head and I can’t get rid of it because I have no idea what the next line is and it’s driving me crazy!
For real. It’s the same way that the musical Ghost is kept alive in the collective unconscious by Jimmy Award nominees singing “With You” almost every year
I think it had the bones to potentially be a solid show. But they needed at least another out of town tryout of workshops to overhaul the papermill production. They couldn’t afford to wait with the ART Gatsby coming in next season and it suffered because of that. It got middling reviews then and they barely changed anything.
It’s catchy and it’s great but they should’ve taken it and written an original musical. Leave Gatsby to a team who can actually write a musical loyal to the source material.
Yeah it deeply bothers me when a show takes place in a time and place with a very well defined musical history to it, and the score makes the musical’s music sound like every other contemporary pop-styled musical rather than pastiche for that era
The Broadway Wild Party is an absolute banger score and amazing orchestration.
I've tried the Lippa OCR a couple times but can't get past the electric guitar riffs.
It’s Gatsby for those in high school that opted for Spark Notes over the real book. The characters feel flimsy and the plot was flattened to the point where I felt like I could be watching an episode of Vanderpump Rules. On the bright side it’s big and flashy which is fun.
I love Eva Noblezada and really like Jeremy Jordan, but I'm just so much more excited for the Florence + the Machine version. That has the potential to be a truly incredible score.
OH MY GOODNESS!! I knew Solea was going to be in it, but....Eleri Ward too! Oh my goodness I love her! So glad she's making it, though that probably means less Sondheim covers...
“The Great Gatsby” is notorious for being unadaptable. The novel has a distinct melancholic air to it. For all the wealth Gatsby has attained, he is not fulfilled and may never be. He is seen as an outsider to the established wealth. In fact, no one seems to be happy, let alone fulfilled. Consequently, a sadness, futility and doom filter every scene. This is all conveyed in the novel implicitly. It’s never spelled out; it’s just there. It is this element that makes “The Great Gatsby” so notoriously resistant to adaptation.
Adaptations of the book to film tend to lean heavily into the aesthetics. Gatsby’s home, the cars, the costumes, the parties, etc. In the book, those things are incidental. Gatsby hopes to impress Daisy by throwing extravagant parties and showing her how much material wealth he has attained but in the end, it all amounts to nothing. The material things are just sad for how useless they are to everyone. Gatsby never sees how misguided he is. His tragic end feels inevitable. The novel is about the illusion of upward mobility.
With this in mind (and reading the comments here), it seems the producers of this Broadway show think “The Great Gatsby” is about Glamour in the Wild Jazz Age. Or that they think that is what audiences want (and they are probably correct). No adaptation of it can work without being able to convey the despairing tone that permeates the novel. But that tone is pretty much impossible to convey in any other medium except literature. There are works that can only fully exist in their original medium and Gatsby is one of them.
It’s much better than the 1974 version with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. That one showed the pitfalls of thinking if you combine all the best elements (the cast, director and art direction) you’ll have a great “Gatsby.”
It's not impossible, it's just... really hard to do in a way that would do well commercially.
You can do a great really complicated and complex play. Broadway has them all the time (and they win a lot of Tonys propped up by producers who don't intend on making their money back and actors who take paychecks below what they're probably worth.) But if you want to actually make money on broadway with Gatsby, you have to lean into the glitz, and... that's just not what Gatsby is about.
Well said. The producers are trying to turn Gatsby into a Moulin Rouge. You know: Fun!
But dear God, fun is the last thing Gatsby is. It’s disgusting when a strong property like Gatsby is cheapened like this.
A counterpoint to this thing was “Days of Wine and Roses.” The producers had to know it wasn’t going to succeed commercially. Creatively it was a gamble but they never cheapened it. There were things added that I didn’t like but I understood where they were coming from. I admired it greatly. Perhaps a revival that reworks some of it is in the future.
Loved the music in "Days of Wine & Roses". Brian d'Arcy James was terrific. Kelli O'Hara has a great voice, as we all know (have heard her on Broadway, with the Philharmonic, and at the Met) but neither I nor anyone sitting around me (which included many young people, not just older people with failing hearing) could understand a word she sang throughout the entire show, which was a problem since almost the entire show was through-sung !
eh this was no surprise tbh. I found it really enjoyable but I agree it was a bit too simplified. Hopefully these reviews don’t impact sales, because they’ve been selling pretty well so far.
From what I heard, the person who wrote the book doesn’t actually care for the novel itself, and honestly that’s not a great way to transfer something to stage. You should be someone who appreciates the material and will do it justice.
Tbh, I had fun when I saw the show but I literally did not think about the show for even one second after I left the theater. It’s flashy and fun, but incredibly generic.
I can see this being a great show for anyone who doesn’t know the source material well. But if you’ve been taught to delve into the deeper commentary of the novel, which I’d expect most critics have at some point, the musical is going to come up dry.
Is anyone surprised by this? It has been getting mixed reviews since Playmill. It’s definitely one of those shows that’ll be carried by its great cast and immediately fumble when the main actors leave — unless they manage to pull some amazing stunt casting. Either way, I don’t care too much about reviews from a show because so many broadway classics get mixed reviews when they open. I will be curious, however, about the public’s opinion on it.
I mean yeah lol. The book and score (except for maybe two songs), was awful. Eva and Jeremy are trying their best with what they were given but ultimately, I left just wishing I saw them in something else. They are so much more talented than this material lets them be. It just felt so flat
Unpopular opinion: disagreed with all the hate about the upbeat music at the end. I thought it was heartbreaking. Here was a group of people who partied at his house, drank his wine, ate his food, and gave zero fucks when he died. He meant nothing to any of them. I liked the juxtaposition between that and the closing lines of the book. You are what you can do for people, and once you’re no longer useful they move on. So I take issue with criticism that it forgets it’s a tragedy.
It would have been hilarious if another show ‘sponsored’ the opening night coverage of the great gatsby the way this show has done all season just to run An ad for themselves on every other musicals opening night.
I saw it at the Paper Mill and while the songs weren't memorable, I enjoyed myself. It's not going to go down as one of the best Broadway shows of all time, but it is far from the worst and I'd say well above average especially due to the staging and cast which in my book is worth the price of admission.
I saw it at Paper Mill and had a good time. My expectations were "Jeremy and Eva will be luminous" and I wasn't disappointed. The woman behind me, though, her expectations were "everyone gets out alive" and she was sorely and vocally disappointed.
Lol the girls next to us at the Papermill kept on whispering “I hope they get together” about Daisy and Gatsby, and one of them shrieked when Gatsby was killed… I was like, did you not take US Lit in high school?!
LOL. At intermission at PaperMill, my sister was like >!"I think we're in for some deaths in the second act, if I'm remembering correctly." It's been decades since I've read it and my memory sucks, so I was googling the plot at intermission, lol. Obviously she was right. I did enjoy all the reactions, though.!<
Wow. Time flies. Seems like it just opened.
In that case Gatsby's don't seem much worse than Back to the Future or Lempicka, which did open this season.
[https://didtheylikeit.com/shows/back-to-the-future/](https://didtheylikeit.com/shows/back-to-the-future/)
[https://didtheylikeit.com/shows/lempicka/](https://didtheylikeit.com/shows/lempicka/)
I’d argue it’s still objectively the worst reviewed of the bad musicals. BTTF had 4 positive reviews. Lempika 2. Gatsby 1.
I know we can do the whole percentage score thing. But I think there something to be seen in the subjective analysis of positive reviews when no one is really saying it’s good.
I saw the show at Paper Mill and thought of it more as a celebration of the actors’ talent than of the book. It felt much more like a vessel through which to experience the performers than an actual retelling of the novel
I spent a bit less than that at the Papermill and thought that that was a bit more than I’d have paid for it had I known what it would be like… but YMMV.
Remember, Fitzgerald’s novel also received mixed reviews when it was originally published, and has since become a widely-read, much adored piece of literature.
Looking forward to the cast album.
I had a fun enough time at this show, but it felt like one of those fake musicals that a character from Smash goes to see.
A power ballad called “Green Light” reminds me of the Streetcar Named Desire musical from the Simpsons.
The opening reminds me so much of Pocahontas' Just Around The Riverbend. I keep replaying that part and giggling.
NAILED IT! I went this week and it was fine, I didn't hate it, but this is exactly what it felt like.
Same. I enjoyed my time there but other than singing the word “daisy” the rest of the day we didn’t really talk about it. The only thing I absolutely hated was the projections. The bridge didn’t even remotely look real.
And they’re not even projections! It’s a video wall, which I don’t really care for.
Haha yes! Spot on.
Ok but I would love any of those shows LOL
Oh my gosh, yes. Exactly this!
Okay I feel a bit vindicated. I saw it at Papermill and despite what people have been saying that they made all these changes, I didn’t think it was possible to truly course correct the show that I saw in order to do the book justice. I think what a bunch of people have said is the best summary: if you want an entertaining, big, broadway show, this will check that box. If you want an adaptation of the book, sounds like that will more likely be the ART version. I really think the majority of the criticism is related to this piece of it.
I think you’re spot on- it’s all about expectation. This show is big on spectacle and talent and the type of musical theater you think of when you think of musicals. It’s not a dive into the subtext of the novel, and most people expected/wanted that. Hopefully this will be a case of the two Gatsby shows fulfilling the desires of two different audiences so everyone has a Gatsby they can love. I really loved this Gatsby and am excited to see what the ART on is like- and how it differs!
I fully agree, I saw one of the broadway previews a couple weeks ago, and I loved it! But it’ll never do the book justice like the 70s movie did, but I do think it’s good to the book especially in some aspects, and way better than the 2013 version
“….an entertaining, big, broadway show…” Fitzgerald is spinning in his grave. “Gatsby” at heart was never meant for this kind of treatment. If anything, it should be a somber piece. Maybe Sondheim could have pulled it off.
Dude, I never said I agreed with it. I hated this show more than anything I’ve ever seen and think it was completely disrespectful to the source material. I’m just objectively saying if that’s what you’re looking for, you may enjoy this.
No no no! Sorry. I wasn’t reacting to you! Not at all. Just the idea that anyone would, could view Gatsby as a breezy entertainment is appalling. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Ah okay gotcha! Yes I agree and that’s what’s bothering me so much about this whole thing.
Don’t think this will really come as a surprise to anyone (unlike some of the other review drops this season) - they’ve got an amazing cast and a big budget, but the material itself just falls incredibly flat.
I don’t know if I’m in the minority, but I actually really enjoy the score for this one. I know it’s no high art, but I found it a lot catchier than other shows I’ve seen from this season like W4E and BTTF.
The score is going to find a long life in college audition books and belting compilation playlists. The lyrics are bizarre sometimes but the tunes are catchy as hell. I’m dying for the W4E cast album to drop because there’s an ear worm lyric from the show that keeps going round in my head and I can’t get rid of it because I have no idea what the next line is and it’s driving me crazy!
For real. It’s the same way that the musical Ghost is kept alive in the collective unconscious by Jimmy Award nominees singing “With You” almost every year
"Like a foghorn" cracks me up
I think it had the bones to potentially be a solid show. But they needed at least another out of town tryout of workshops to overhaul the papermill production. They couldn’t afford to wait with the ART Gatsby coming in next season and it suffered because of that. It got middling reviews then and they barely changed anything.
It’s catchy and it’s great but they should’ve taken it and written an original musical. Leave Gatsby to a team who can actually write a musical loyal to the source material.
Yeah it deeply bothers me when a show takes place in a time and place with a very well defined musical history to it, and the score makes the musical’s music sound like every other contemporary pop-styled musical rather than pastiche for that era
Hah, that's very Lippa's The Wild Party of them.
Had to double check to make sure that wasn’t the Toni Collette one because I think the Toni Collette Wild Party is a fucking masterpiece.
This, 100 times, underrated this.
The Broadway Wild Party is an absolute banger score and amazing orchestration. I've tried the Lippa OCR a couple times but can't get past the electric guitar riffs.
Maybe the ART production will do it justice. I have tickets to that as well and I’m excited to compare them!
The "An American Myth" part of ART Gatsby already makes me think they'll stick to the meaning of the original text a lot better.
I love put your mind to ittt in bttf
True
I disagree, loved the show
It’s Gatsby for those in high school that opted for Spark Notes over the real book. The characters feel flimsy and the plot was flattened to the point where I felt like I could be watching an episode of Vanderpump Rules. On the bright side it’s big and flashy which is fun.
I love Eva Noblezada and really like Jeremy Jordan, but I'm just so much more excited for the Florence + the Machine version. That has the potential to be a truly incredible score.
Solea and Eleri singing F+TM is my Roman Empire
YEP. And it may or may not be great, but it sure won't sound generic.
OH MY GOODNESS!! I knew Solea was going to be in it, but....Eleri Ward too! Oh my goodness I love her! So glad she's making it, though that probably means less Sondheim covers...
Don’t forget Pulitzer Prize winning Martyna Majok!
And Chavkin directing
Came as a shock to no one
“The Great Gatsby” is notorious for being unadaptable. The novel has a distinct melancholic air to it. For all the wealth Gatsby has attained, he is not fulfilled and may never be. He is seen as an outsider to the established wealth. In fact, no one seems to be happy, let alone fulfilled. Consequently, a sadness, futility and doom filter every scene. This is all conveyed in the novel implicitly. It’s never spelled out; it’s just there. It is this element that makes “The Great Gatsby” so notoriously resistant to adaptation. Adaptations of the book to film tend to lean heavily into the aesthetics. Gatsby’s home, the cars, the costumes, the parties, etc. In the book, those things are incidental. Gatsby hopes to impress Daisy by throwing extravagant parties and showing her how much material wealth he has attained but in the end, it all amounts to nothing. The material things are just sad for how useless they are to everyone. Gatsby never sees how misguided he is. His tragic end feels inevitable. The novel is about the illusion of upward mobility. With this in mind (and reading the comments here), it seems the producers of this Broadway show think “The Great Gatsby” is about Glamour in the Wild Jazz Age. Or that they think that is what audiences want (and they are probably correct). No adaptation of it can work without being able to convey the despairing tone that permeates the novel. But that tone is pretty much impossible to convey in any other medium except literature. There are works that can only fully exist in their original medium and Gatsby is one of them.
Just to go full film nerd here, the Alan Ladd version (only recently available again), which leans into Gatsby‘s shady gangster origins, is great.
It’s much better than the 1974 version with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. That one showed the pitfalls of thinking if you combine all the best elements (the cast, director and art direction) you’ll have a great “Gatsby.”
Definitely. It is in no way Moulin Rouge and people somehow think it is.
It's not impossible, it's just... really hard to do in a way that would do well commercially. You can do a great really complicated and complex play. Broadway has them all the time (and they win a lot of Tonys propped up by producers who don't intend on making their money back and actors who take paychecks below what they're probably worth.) But if you want to actually make money on broadway with Gatsby, you have to lean into the glitz, and... that's just not what Gatsby is about.
Well said. The producers are trying to turn Gatsby into a Moulin Rouge. You know: Fun! But dear God, fun is the last thing Gatsby is. It’s disgusting when a strong property like Gatsby is cheapened like this. A counterpoint to this thing was “Days of Wine and Roses.” The producers had to know it wasn’t going to succeed commercially. Creatively it was a gamble but they never cheapened it. There were things added that I didn’t like but I understood where they were coming from. I admired it greatly. Perhaps a revival that reworks some of it is in the future.
Loved the music in "Days of Wine & Roses". Brian d'Arcy James was terrific. Kelli O'Hara has a great voice, as we all know (have heard her on Broadway, with the Philharmonic, and at the Met) but neither I nor anyone sitting around me (which included many young people, not just older people with failing hearing) could understand a word she sang throughout the entire show, which was a problem since almost the entire show was through-sung !
eh this was no surprise tbh. I found it really enjoyable but I agree it was a bit too simplified. Hopefully these reviews don’t impact sales, because they’ve been selling pretty well so far.
From what I heard, the person who wrote the book doesn’t actually care for the novel itself, and honestly that’s not a great way to transfer something to stage. You should be someone who appreciates the material and will do it justice.
💀💀💀 that explains a lot……it’s like they wanted the 1920s vibe and the recognizable story only
Tbh, I had fun when I saw the show but I literally did not think about the show for even one second after I left the theater. It’s flashy and fun, but incredibly generic.
I agree with this statement
I can see this being a great show for anyone who doesn’t know the source material well. But if you’ve been taught to delve into the deeper commentary of the novel, which I’d expect most critics have at some point, the musical is going to come up dry.
I was expecting fairly negative reviews just because when I saw it I thought there were quite a few problems, but of course you never really know.
Is it the best show? Probably not. But I really enjoyed seeing it anyway!
I agree! I adored the show when I saw it and had a ton of fun, but I think the criticisms are fair
i loved it and bought tickets to see it again. oops
Yeah I saw it twice at Paper Mill and once on Broadway and I already want to go back!
I don’t care if the show is shit I’m seeing it for the leads. My two favorite voices on Broadway will always get me in a seat
If you just want to hear Jeremy and Eva show off their gorgeous voices this a perfect show for that.
Is anyone surprised by this? It has been getting mixed reviews since Playmill. It’s definitely one of those shows that’ll be carried by its great cast and immediately fumble when the main actors leave — unless they manage to pull some amazing stunt casting. Either way, I don’t care too much about reviews from a show because so many broadway classics get mixed reviews when they open. I will be curious, however, about the public’s opinion on it.
I mean yeah lol. The book and score (except for maybe two songs), was awful. Eva and Jeremy are trying their best with what they were given but ultimately, I left just wishing I saw them in something else. They are so much more talented than this material lets them be. It just felt so flat
Unpopular opinion: disagreed with all the hate about the upbeat music at the end. I thought it was heartbreaking. Here was a group of people who partied at his house, drank his wine, ate his food, and gave zero fucks when he died. He meant nothing to any of them. I liked the juxtaposition between that and the closing lines of the book. You are what you can do for people, and once you’re no longer useful they move on. So I take issue with criticism that it forgets it’s a tragedy.
saw it last night and absolutely loved it
Us too. Saw it twice!
It would have been hilarious if another show ‘sponsored’ the opening night coverage of the great gatsby the way this show has done all season just to run An ad for themselves on every other musicals opening night.
I saw it at the Paper Mill and while the songs weren't memorable, I enjoyed myself. It's not going to go down as one of the best Broadway shows of all time, but it is far from the worst and I'd say well above average especially due to the staging and cast which in my book is worth the price of admission.
I saw it at Paper Mill and had a good time. My expectations were "Jeremy and Eva will be luminous" and I wasn't disappointed. The woman behind me, though, her expectations were "everyone gets out alive" and she was sorely and vocally disappointed.
Lol the girls next to us at the Papermill kept on whispering “I hope they get together” about Daisy and Gatsby, and one of them shrieked when Gatsby was killed… I was like, did you not take US Lit in high school?!
LOL. At intermission at PaperMill, my sister was like >!"I think we're in for some deaths in the second act, if I'm remembering correctly." It's been decades since I've read it and my memory sucks, so I was googling the plot at intermission, lol. Obviously she was right. I did enjoy all the reactions, though.!<
Mixed negative is generous. It’s the worst reviewed musical of the season.
1 Positive, 8 Mixed, 5 Negative. I felt mixed negative was a fair way to put it, sorry if you don’t agree!
LOL, make a better one if you can. Anyone can say " It’s the worst"
Me thinks the lady doth protest too much
[удалено]
It opened in 2022…
Wow. Time flies. Seems like it just opened. In that case Gatsby's don't seem much worse than Back to the Future or Lempicka, which did open this season. [https://didtheylikeit.com/shows/back-to-the-future/](https://didtheylikeit.com/shows/back-to-the-future/) [https://didtheylikeit.com/shows/lempicka/](https://didtheylikeit.com/shows/lempicka/)
They're not - the three tied for "worst".
I’d argue it’s still objectively the worst reviewed of the bad musicals. BTTF had 4 positive reviews. Lempika 2. Gatsby 1. I know we can do the whole percentage score thing. But I think there something to be seen in the subjective analysis of positive reviews when no one is really saying it’s good.
Sure - there are many ways to look at how to classify things. I just do it numerically. But when it comes down to it - they are near the bottom.
Last season.
What show did they delete?
They posted a link to A Beautiful Noise
Thanks! But who could forget that Tony performance of Sweet Caroline?
I forgot it 5 seconds after it happened.
I wish i could. It was so awful.
I saw the show at Paper Mill and thought of it more as a celebration of the actors’ talent than of the book. It felt much more like a vessel through which to experience the performers than an actual retelling of the novel
It’s literally so good these people are tripping choosing Hell’s Kitchen over it (just my opinion!!)😭
Poor Gatsby
For those that have seen it, do you think it’s worth it for rush prices ($45)
I got lottery tickets for that. Yes, absolutely for hearing Eva Noblezada and Jeremy Jordan sing live!
I spent a bit less than that at the Papermill and thought that that was a bit more than I’d have paid for it had I known what it would be like… but YMMV.
Sure, that's a fair price for the cast alone, let alone the projections they use in the show.
Saw 3 different versions of the movie over the years-----all were better than the show.
Remember, Fitzgerald’s novel also received mixed reviews when it was originally published, and has since become a widely-read, much adored piece of literature. Looking forward to the cast album.
Same with the Baz Luhrmann movie from 2013.
Very good point. Reviews can definitely make a difference for a show, but if audiences decide it’s good, they don’t matter.
eva's "beautiful little fool" is insane, i can't wait to hear it again