A roaring good time, but a hollow Gatsby

This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on October 14, 2026. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.

by Lawrence Toppman

If you think that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” reveals the hollowness of people who produce nothing and live only for pleasure, and that it offers an insightful look at the American penchant for reinvention and lying to gain power and wealth, you will find the musical version trivial and unfulfilling.

If you perceive it primarily as a romance about a fundamentally likable guy mooning over an unattainable dream girl, the touring Broadway show now at Belk Theater may be extremely satisfying. It played to me like a sexy melodrama — “The Real Housewives of Long Island” — that took its inspiration more from Baz Luhrmann’s visually dazzling 2013 movie than Fitzgerald’s short novel from 1925. Yet Luhrmann’s picture, the best overall of four filmed versions, packed more psychological complexity into its narrative than the stage musical.

The emphasis in the musical's book by Kait Kerrigan and lyrics by Nathen Tysen is on love, soured or thwarted or misguided. They have been remarkably faithful to the events of the novel with a couple of additions, yet not to its spirit. Character analysis doesn’t just take a back seat; it’s stuffed into the trunk of this gaudy vehicle, until it’s hauled out at the end with a sententious moral tone.

Narrator Nick Carraway, a bond salesman from Minnesota freshly arrived in New York, becomes inexplicably infatuated with self-focused golf champion Jordan Baker. She hangs out with Nick’s cousin, Daisy Buchanan, a former Louisville debutante who has married spoiled playboy Tom Buchanan. He in turn has embarked on an affair with Myrtle Wilson, the restless wife of garage owner George Wilson.

Millionaire Jay Gatsby happens to live next to the little cottage Nick rents and uses him as an introduction to Daisy, whom he has loved from afar since meeting her just before World War I. The point of Gatsby is that he really does have charm and suavity, however manufactured, and his emptiness shouldn’t be revealed until the end. Jake David Smith sings strongly as Gatsby but has been encouraged to play him as both a goofy nerd and an obvious phony, someone who couldn’t have talked a potential business partner into a deal or a reluctant ex-deb into a bed.

The show’s creators have inexplicably decided that Meyer Wolfsheim, a peripheral figure in the novel and all the films, should be elevated to a major character. Fitzgerald based him on Arnold Rothstein, the gambler said to have been behind the 1919 World Series swindle, and made him an urbane and shadowy presence. In the musical, he’s a swaggering boor, an embodiment of evil who cackles satanically and is followed by a chorus of men in trench coats, looking like Spy vs. Spy cartoons from Mad Magazine. He not only treats Gatsby as a puppet but menaces Wilson, who’s now needlessly involved in his bootlegging racket.

The show, which has been running on Broadway for two and a half years, justly won a Tony for costume design and a Drama Desk Award for set design. Both elements shine in this production, and the movable pieces of the set effectively create Gatsby’s high-ceilinged mansion and a claustrophobic (if shrunken and sparse) Plaza Hotel suite.

Though the choreography isn’t authentic to the 1925 setting, it includes one tap number that rocks the house. Jason Howland’s tunes, mostly an ongoing series of anthems expressing unsubtle emotional needs, are consistently delivered at top volume, with notes held as long as possible whether blatant showmanship disrupts the drama or not.

Howland also directed and doesn’t trust us to use our imaginations. When Nick tells us he can see Gatsby in his mind’s eye, staring across the water to the Buchanans’ distant dock, a good director would let us summon that poignant image in our own minds. A bad one would feel compelled to have Gatsby walk out and stand onstage, pointing into the distance. Guess which happens here.

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.