[NEohioPAL] Review of "The Great Gatsby" at Ensemble Theatre

Bob Abelman via NEohioPAL neohiopal at lists.neohiopal.org
Mon Nov 17 14:17:40 PST 2014


Ensemble Theatre misses what's great about 'Gatsby'



Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics 

 

  

Several years ago, the folks at the Public Theater in New York staged a six-hour-long adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," the brilliant 1925 novel about pursuing the unattainable. 

 

The production, called "Gatz," began with a bored contemporary office worker finding a dog-eared copy of Fitzgerald's novel and, while reading every single word out loud, his co-workers gradually morph into "Gatsby" characters and enact his narration.  

 

With no text added and none removed, this production captured all that was poetic and rhythmic in the novel's sumptuous sentences.  

 

It also maintained the omnipotent first-person voice of the novel's uncompromisingly honest narrator, Nick Carraway, presented all that was romantic in the tale of the mysterious tycoon Jay Gatsby and his love for the rich and reckless Daisy Buchanan, and reflected all that was extravagant about the Jazz Age - a time when bootleg gin was the beverage of choice, lavishness was the latest craze, and sex with other's spouses was the favorite sport of the rich and gorgeous. 

 

Using brilliant sound, lighting and costume design, the Public Theatre production was able to entice its audience into imagining Gatsby's vast Long Island pleasure palace, the squalid one-room apartment that houses the lower-class lover of Daisy's husband, and Gatsby's grand roadster - a cream-colored 1922 Silver Ghost Rolls-Royce - without actually providing them.

 

The sensibly shorter, less radical and more frequently performed adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" by Simon Levy also possesses the essential poetry, romance and extravagance found in the novel.  Unfortunately, the current Ensemble Theatre production of it - which, like the Public Theater version, offers a minimalistic and highly stylized presentation - is significantly less fruitful.    



For more of this review, go to:  http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/features/article_b03c8a48-6ea5-11e4-978b-bf4819b6f9fe.html



 
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