What’s the best metric to measure the success of the American Repertory Theater’s upcoming adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby?” Ticket sales is one — a month before opening, “Gatsby” extended its run and plays now to Aug. 3 at the Loeb Drama Center. Another is Tony Awards — the production is bound for Broadway after the ART engagement.
But actor Ben Levi Ross, who plays Nick in “Gatsby,” may have come up with the ultimate yardstick.
“(Book writer Martyna Majok) has fleshed out all of these characters in such a beautiful way while staying true to Fitzgerald’s novel and also painting parallels that your English teacher would have a field day over,” Ross told the Herald with a laugh.
Pleasing English teachers carries a lot of weight, especially in a Broadway landscape littered with adaptations literary lovers might not care for (see film rehashes of “Almost Famous,” “Beetlejuice,” and “Back to the Future”).
“Gatsby” arrives at a time when intimate, introspective musical productions are pushing back against the bombast of fun fluff.
“People are looking for nuance and specificity in theater,” Ross said. “I think in some of these bigger, commercial movie-to-musical pipelines you get large brushstrokes of certain feelings rather than actual people, real character development.”
Ross knows about nuance and specificity having logged time with the musical “Dear Evan Hanson.” The creative team is also familiar with complexities and introspection over pure spectacle.
Majok won a Pulitzer Prize for her play “Cost of Living.” Tony-winning director Rachel Chavkin helmed “Hadestown” and “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.” But the big name is rock star Florence Welch (Florence + The Machine), who wrote the lyrics and collaborated on the score with Oscar and Grammy Award nominee Thomas Bartlett.
“This is truly one of the best scores of the last decade and is at once incredibly modern and feels of the era too,” Ross said. “It’s so lush and full, and yet kind of experimental and so accessible. I don’t think any of this music is ever going to feel dated.”
“The music that Florence has written for the character Daisy is incredibly different from the music that she’s written for Myrtle, which is also incredibly different from the sound of Gatsby,” he added.
“Gatsby” has to engage with the idea of spectacle. The novel is about a millionaire throwing parties to impress the woman he loves (note, this is a deeply simplified summary). But the opulence and excess need to be a backdrop and not that whole point — one of the novel’s most telling lines comes from Nick’s girlfriend Jordan when she says, “I like large parties. They’re so intimate.”
“The (creative team) highlights the myth of the American dream, race and class dynamics, mental health (struggles),” Ross said. “‘The Great Gatsby’ is not a glitzy, glamorous, over-the-top spectacle. It’s a great American tragedy. The spectacle is a lie.”
Which is just about how 10,000 English teachers would rightly sum up the novel.
For tickets and details, visit americanrepertorytheater.org
