Great Gatsby review: Broadway musical messes up beloved novel

Two hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission.At the Broadway Theatre, 53rd Street and Broadway.Forget East Egg and West Egg.

The creators of the new musical “The Great Gatsby,” which opened Thursday night on Broadway, have laid an egg.This song-and-dance version of F.Scott Fitzgerald’s enduring 1925 novel about, among other things, American excess in the aftermath of World War I, is excessive all right. The gaudy barrage of clone ballads by composer Jason Howland and lyricist Nathan Tysen (“Paradise Square”), indiscriminately handed out to any character who wants one, blare like a foghorn on the Long Island Sound.And the attractive art deco sets by Paul Tate DePoo III are so oppulent and oversize that I had a flashback to watching “King Kong” in the very same theater six years ago.But now, a monkey isn’t captive — your favorite novel is.Inferior “Gatsby,” directed bigly by Marc Bruni, is a hodgepodge of many other shows that came before it.During an impressive all-company tap number called “La Dee Dah With You,” the show briefly ventures into “Anything Goes” Land.

Many other bombastic songs have the volume, if not the tunefulness, of gothic musicals like “The Secret Garden” or “Jekyll and Hyde.”What “The Great Gatsby” almost never brings to mind, though, is “The Great Gatsby.” The musical, a patchwork quilt of discordant styles that belongs in a box, becomes the latest in a long line of adaptions of this beloved novel to mess up a story that’s far more satisfying to read and imagine.It completely misses its intoxicating atmosphere, meaning and layered characters.One of the rare smart decisions of the night is the casting of Noah J.

Ricketts as our man Nick Carraway, a modest Midwesterner who moves to a Long Island cottage in “new money” West Egg. The actor has a pretty voice and a naturally easygoing persona that contrasts with the cartoonish East Coast impressions on display that are akin to what Katherin...