The Great Gatsby: The Immersive Show
Partygoers revel at Jay Gatsby’s mansion in The Great Gatsby: The Immersive Show.
Phones are not allowed at The Great Gatsby: The Immersive Show. Despite the seemingly endless opportunities for Instagram posts, participants are asked to power down all devices before entering the ballroom where Jay Gatsby is throwing one of his famous parties. Anyone who fails to obey is quickly informed that if they want to use 21st-century devices, they can leave and return to the present day.
Adapted and directed by Alexander Wright and presented by Immersive Everywhere, this staging of The Great Gatsby arrives in America following a seven-year run in England. Located at the Park Central Hotel, the production is both immersive and interactive, inviting its audience members to engage with the performers throughout the evening. Some accompany Daisy in her dressing room, while others assist Gatsby as he prepares for afternoon tea, and many bear witness to romantic interludes between the characters. All are invited to dance and drink.
Audience members at The Immersive Show are meant to feel like guests at one of the title character’s infamous fetes. In hotel’s ballroom, Casey Jay Andrews’ set design invokes an atmosphere of glamour and indulgence, featuring a grand staircase and elegant bar strong enough to host dancers, while the side rooms provide period-perfect venues to stage private encounters.
The evening begins with Nick Carraway (an excellent Rob Brinkmann) reciting lines of Fitzgerald’s sparing prose. This invokes a reflective moment before jazz and dancing burst into action.
While the most crucial scenes of the novel are staged in the ballroom, guests are frequently escorted into other areas to witness exchanges between characters. I found myself part of several encounters between Myrtle Wilson, mistress of Tom Buchanan (Daisy’s husband). Familiarity with Fitzgerald’s novel can be assumed of most theatergoers, but it is possible revelers are here merely for the atmosphere and cocktails.
For those familiar with the doomed love story, these seemingly random asides will be confusing, to say the least, but further exposure to the novel’s minor characters was undeniably interesting. Claire Saunders’ performance as Myrtle, an ambitious and sexual woman struggling with the limitations of the patriarchy, was powerful. (I could have done without watching her and Tom [an aggressively intense Shahzeb Hussain] engage in foreplay on the floor of the parlor.) The game of Truth or Dare led by Myrtle, who asked audience members about their sex lives, also felt excessive.
Jillian Anne Abaya and Joél Acosta as Daisy and Gatsby.
As much as I enjoyed watching the scenes with Myrtle, I was particularly interested in seeing more of Daisy. Having re-read the novel just before attending this production, I was curious as to how she would be brought to life. I imagine playing Daisy is challenging, given how few defining characteristics Fitzgerald gave her. According to publisher Charles Scribner III, Fitzgerald blamed the books’ disappointing sales on that “the book contains no important woman character and women control the fiction market at present.”
Beautiful, wealthy and coquettish, Daisy is also unreliable, impressionable and narcissistic and has inspired ire in fans and scholars alike. She has no qualms about flirting with everyone, carelessly asking her own cousin, “Are you in love with me?” when he requests her company without her husband. How does one perform a character whose entire life is a performance and fashions herself into whatever she thinks is wanted? Daisy is an ideal, not a human.
Jillian Anne Abaya, as Daisy, is beautiful and coquettish and certainly appears wealthy in Vanessa Leuck’s beautifully-fitted costumes, but she does not possess the capriciousness of the novel’s character. Abaya is too grounded and humane to embody Daisy’s flightiness. Her reunion with Gatsby (Joél Acosta) is touching, complete with a dance duet, but it lacks in the passion required after years of fevered obsession.
I only witnessed one other scene of the two of them together, when Gatsby guides her through his mansion complete with his abundance of silk shirts. The two lunge for each other and begin kissing passionately, but that passion was not earned. (My lack of investment could be credited to having no encounters with Gatsby himself. Acosta certainly looked the part, and presented swagger and wealth in the group scenes, but I never experienced a quiet moment with him.) I was then pulled into Daisy’s wardrobe to help her change into a new dress (also beautiful). In those moments, I felt as Nick must have, acting as the voyeur and reluctant third wheel to Daisy and Gatsby’s first reunion in the novel.
My only other moment with Daisy followed the fatal car accident when she pulled a small group into another private room and asked us if she should flee town with her husband or stay with Gatsby. Several people told her to leave Tom, urging her to remember that she deserved better. She ignored the advice, but the entire scene felt forced; Fitzgerald’s Daisy would not seek guidance on her love life.
Beautiful as the show was, and looked stunning from beginning to end, it lacked the depth of the novel, failing to inspire any thoughts on class structures, capitalism or the American Dream.
Similar to a glass of champagne, the experience was beautiful and bubbly and inspired short-lived gaiety, but it left me with a bit of a hangover.