REVIEW
The Great Gatsby
Running until Dec. 15
Walterdale Theatre
10322 – 83 Ave.
Tickets: $18 to $20. Call 780-4291757 or at www.tixonthesquare.ca
Walterdale Theatre opens the door to Gatsby’s world, a plush place where guests lose themselves in a never-ending stream of swirling gin and sensual dances.
J. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby may take place in the Jazz Age, but in this production director Bethany Hughes also channels a slight paranoia of the social media age, that fear of missing out.
Even before this glittering adaptation of The Great Gatsby starts, there’s a party on stage of dancing flapper girls. It’s the Roaring ’20s. Prohibition is in effect, but it’s flouted among a mass of sparkles and double-string pearls. There are two different rules of conduct. One for the moneyed, one for the poor.
Jay Gatsby, a mysterious tycoon and host, watches from a distance. Everyone seems to know something about him, but it all adds up to rumour.
Although Gatsby embodies the American Dream, a poor man who acquired immeasurable wealth, the story is about Nick Carraway. And in Hughes' production, she makes Nick Carraways of all of us.
Nick is a 30-year-old naive bond trader who rents a tiny cottage on Long Island next to the much gossiped-about Gatsby. He receives an invitation to the sumptuous parties and discovers a society that operates under its own rules.
Nick also renews his acquaintance with a cousin, Daisy Buchanan, who with her boorish Ivy League husband, Tom, lives just across the bay from Gatsby. Daisy and Tom are both old money. Despite the many comforts of life, Daisy lives in a permanent state of elegant melancholy.
Nick is bothered Tom is having an affair with Myrtle, an impoverished woman desperate to get away from her circumstances. Myrtle puts up with Tom’s violence in the mistaken belief he will divorce Daisy and marry her.
Through Nick’s eyes as the insider-outsider, the audience has a front row seat to Gatsby and Daisy rekindling a doomed romance that ends in tragedy for everyone around them.
As Nick, Simon Pawlowski grows from a wide-eyed innocent to a jaded man through the shocking realization that rot underpins the glittering lifestyle of the rich, and when tragedy occurs, they hide behind the impenetrable walls of wealth.
Patrick Maloney as the rags-to-riches Gatsby is the ultimate con man. Unfortunately, the one person he cons the most is himself in pursuit of decadent wealth and an unattainable woman.
Melenie Reid is the perfect Daisy, a woman who represents old money and the unreachable. Reid’s Daisy has a beautiful voice, cultured and alluring. Reid also generates an ethereal, unstable quality that suggests Daisy could fall apart at any moment.
Ed Medeiros as Tom perfectly represents that ugliness of entitlement through his acts of violence, racism, sexism and abuse, while Samantha Vandenbrink as the sexual Myrtle shows us she is as trapped in her life as Daisy is in the Buchanan mansion.
Kudos to Joan Heys Hawkins’ simple sepia set that allows Julienna Lazowski’s dazzling costumes to colour the stage.
While The Great Gatsby is a sombre reflection of the American dream and an indictment of class, it also asks us to reflect on the roles we choose to play.
