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VERONICA LEE reviews The Great Gatsby: Dazzling, but not the greatest Gatsby
Marc Bruni's dazzling production of The Great Gatsby opened on Broadway last year and now - with a mostly British cast - bursts into life in the West End.
But while the musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel about money and class looks like a million dollars, the creators still struggle to overcome the essential problem of the work: none of the leading characters are likeable, not even narrator Nick Carraway (Corbin Bleu), who may not be nasty or vapid but is still (whisper it) a bit of a sap. Brown’s ludicrous plot provides some fun as a nerdish sudoku thriller, supplemented by anagrams, cryptic clues and the notorious Fibonacci sequence – imagine TV’s The Crystal Maze meets Countdown, in top tourist destinations across France and the UK. From there, Bryony Lavery’s book goes back to before, when the provincial young Texan (Paul Jacob French, an underwhelming, oddly vacant beefcake), dressed as an ersatz cowboy, takes a bus to New York city, determined to shrug off his haunted, hopeless past and reinvent himself as a gigolo.
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