Did critics give The Great Gatsby the green light?

The Great Gatsby has roared its way onto the gargantuan stage at the London Coliseum in the West End, and the critics have now published their opinions. Led by Jamie Muscato, Frances Mayli McCann and Corbin Bleu, the show will have a summer sojourn on UK shores to coincide with its ongoing Broadway spell.

Alun Hood, WhatsOnStage
★★★

“A physical production that marries computer-generated scenery and actual sets to form luxurious stage pictures, the bravura, if somewhat relentless, vocals and the sheer majestic size of the whole glittering shebang collectively bludgeon you into dazed submission.

“The Great Gatsby isn’t a great tuner: it’s neither cynical enough to really explore the dark underbelly of the F Scott Fitzgerald story with which it flirts, nor is it distinguished enough to provide the uplift of musical theatre at its best, but it’s the epitome of a slick, escapist West End night out. Shallow, loud and sumptuous.”

Laurie Yule, The Stage

★★★★

“Post-interval, on the approach to the automotive denouement, Kait Kerrigan’s book gathers momentum and the musical hits full throttle. Show-stopping numbers begin to pile up, and Fitzgerald’s themes get some attention: the close concert between high wealth and low criminality, the veiled brutality of polite society, all is laid out, albeit briefly. It probably won’t please literary purists, but it will delight a broad audience…”

Nick Curtis, The Standard
★★★

Andzrej Lukowski, Time Out

“Frances Mayli McCann’s Daisy is given a series of heartfelt ballads that explore her love of Gatsby and her reasons for putting up with her ghastly husband Tom. It makes her more sympathetic, a borderline Girl Boss – but she’s not meant to be sympathetic, or certainly not to this degree. The whole point of its most famous line – ‘they were careless people, Tom and Daisy’ – is that the couple are sundered from their humanity by their privilege. Jon Robyns’s Tom is pretty much left as a monster. But the musical’s efforts to vindicate Daisy speak of a general drive to prod and poke Fitzgerald’s story into a conventional tragic romance, something that leaves it sapped, confused and lacking edge.”

Clive Davis, The Times

“The real centre of attraction are the lavish scenic and projection designs by Paul Tate dePoo III which generate an ever-shifting series of tableaux. Gatsby’s mansion and cottage glitter and shimmer, the glimpse of New York’s Plaza Hotel has a genuine touch of grandeur, and there’s even a swimming pool hovering over the orchestra pit. Linda Cho’s costumes are sleek, too.”

Claire Alfree, The Telegraph
★★

“Nick Carraway, the original narrator, and the golfer Jordan Baker, both sexually ambiguous presences in the novel, are here presented as a sidekick comedy double act. Jon Robyns’s Tom Buchanan emanates a persuasively smooth blank cruelty but Frances Mayli McCann’s Daisy – who symbolises above all the blithely rotten heart of this gilded world – is reduced to a stock dull socialite. And Jamie Muscato, so brilliant in Natasha and Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 at the Donmar, struggles to preserve Gatsby’s evasive, essentially unknowable soul. The only character who comes out well is Rachel Tucker’s vivacious Myrtle, whom Kerrigan gives a proper rounded story and who, in her final moments, strikes an unexpected poignant note.”