‘The Great Gatsby’ Broadway Review: Tap Dance, You Sinning Bootleggers, Tap Dance!

Maybe it’s time to call a moratorium on turning F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel into movies and musicals

Jeremy Jordan in "The Great Gatsby"
Jeremy Jordan in "The Great Gatsby" (Credit: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

Jay Gatsby lives in West Egg. Daisy Buchanan lives in East Egg. And the new musical about them that opened Thursday at the Broadway Theatre lays a big egg.

It’s debatable whether one of American literature’s most mysterious characters should ever sing. What Gatsby should definitely not ever do is lead a chorus of tap dancers. That not-since-“Carrie” spectacle sums up what goes wrong with the new musical “The Great Gatsby,” with book by Kati Kerrigan and score by composer Jason Howland and lyricist Nathan Tysen.

Kerrigan runs into the same problem that confronted the screenwriters of the three movie versions of F.

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