Something that I felt was missing from the last season of Broadway musicals, and that I haven’t felt since, like, Hamilton, is the musical as an event. I’m not simply talking about the grandeur of the production, or the positive reviews after opening night, or a show becoming a hot ticket. I’m talking about the confluence of these things before the show even opens. I’m talking about a show that dominates the conversation while playing several hundred miles from New York, no Broadway theatre secured. The most recent Tony winner for Best Musical, The Outsiders, hardly dominated the conversation, opening in La Jolla with… insignificant fanfare. Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre consistently transfers musicals to Broadway, most recently Water for Elephants and the upcoming Maybe Happy Ending, but I feel like the only show from there in years that has even made a blip on my radar is The Preacher’s Wife. Recent off-Broadway shows that transferred uptown either received lukewarm reviews before being reevaluated (Hell’s Kitchen, S*ffs), received POSITIVE reviews before being reevaluated (Harmony), or were too small to reach event status (Days of Wine and Roses, my beloved Illinoise). Of these, Hell’s Kitchen and Illinoise came closest, and both, as well as Hamilton, have in common that they’re marketed behind the face of their star composer. Hamilton made Lin-Manuel a star (and we’re all worse off for it) but in the current Broadway landscape it’s safer to rely on someone pre-established. Enter Florence Welch!
We’ve seen pop songwriters matched to source material for Broadway musicals to varying effect, from obvious pairings that lived up to expectations (Elton John and Billy Elliot, Sara Bareilles and Waitress) to some more unexpected marriages (Cyndi Lauper and Kinky Boots, Duncan Sheik and Spring Awakening) and, obviously, some really bizarre failures (U2 and Spider-Man). In 2021, The Great Gatsby entered the public domain and it was announced that Florence Welch (of Florence + the Machine) would be composing the score to a musical adaptation while Pulitzer Prize-winner… why am I writing all this out it’s in the screenshot above, if you want to know who worked on this show it’s right there. ANYWAY, to me it felt like a natural pairing as Florence had written “Over the Love” for The Great Gatsby (2013) which was kind of a stinker but god that soundtrack was worth it. And if we want to talk about events, Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby was an EVENT, or what Las Culturistas would dub “monoculture”.
As Gatsby was now in the public domain, we faced a Wild Party sitch where a dueling musical with the same source material was fast-tracked to Broadway by the South Korean producing team that failed to bring over the Signature Theatre revival of Titanic (that was sooo good not lying) and with a team of flop musical theatre professionals (I call it like I see it) which opened on Broadway this year after an out-of-town tryout at Paper Mill and starred my love Eva Noblezada who could simply not save this show. Batted 1.000 at the Tonys (one win for costumes off of one nomination lol) and seems to be selling well enough, and my guess is it will have a long life in high school theatre in schools where the English teacher also runs the drama department, but an event? Hardly.
As The Great Gatsby (the title of the Paper Mill flopzilla) opened on Broadway, Gatsby: An American Myth (Flo’s show) was gearing up for its run at American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After Sweaty Oracle rumors that the cast would be led by Darren Criss and Rachel Zegler (heart eyes emoji), the official casting announcement revealed Solea Pfeiffer and Ben Levi Ross in “supporting” roles (heart eyes emoji heart eyes emoji) and Isaac Cole Powell and Charlotte MacInnes as Gatsby and Daisy, respectively (heart eyes emoji ellipsis question mark emoji). Three young hot Broadway veterans and one young hot newbie from Australia, all of whom come off as unattainably chic on social media, throw them in the suburbs of Boston in the sweltering summer heat, cast them in a new musical from a musician who is both radio-friendly and widely recognized as talented and innovative based on the favorite book of every high schooler and every adult who hasn’t read a book since high school, release three official photos from the production, lock up audience member phones… babe you’ve got an event on your hands.
Like… tell me after looking at these photos you don’t wanna kill yourself at least a little bit.
So last weekend I drove four hours to Cambridge, locked my phone in the little bag, and sat down to watch some hot people sing Florence Welch originals. What I got was the closest I have seen to an American mega-musical response to Les Misérables. You might be asking, what about Ragtime? And to that I say, yes, Ragtime on stage was that. But was Ragtime… an event? A mega-musical in a theatre does not equate to a mega-musical in the zeitgeist. Yes, I did just have a deep moment of self-reflection upon realizing I am writing a Substack and just used the word “zeitgeist”. Anyway, none of my hot young readers were sentient enough when Ragtime premiered on Broadway to remember that it was kind of a commercial failure, lost the Tony to The Lion King, and went dormant for a hot sec before its reappraisal and subsequent apotheosis. The general sentiment was that audiences were maybe not ready for Ragtime. Similarly, Rachel Chavkin got close with Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, but what kept that from achieving this status was a Dave Malloy score that the general public found unlistenable.
When I Google “what makes les miz so good” (because yeah I sometimes think that my critical analysis is Not Good Enough so I have to check that I’m on the right track and then I confirm that duh of course I was right), the AI assistant (eye roll emoji) generates this response:
Obviously Florence can write a song, but it becomes evident pretty immediately that Florence can also write a score. Somehow, though, the music is one of the aspects I feel least compelled to talk about. At intermission, my friend turned to me and suggested they could cut a number from the first act. While I disagreed with her suggestion (“New York Symphony”, featuring the lyric “drunken revelation/waiting at Penn Station” which I could not live without), I agreed with the sentiment, particularly feeling the final number of the first act, “Mr. Nobody From Nowhere”, was comparatively weak. But I also felt moments of genius in numbers in the first act, most saliently in Daisy’s numbers. “Golden Girl”, her introduction and the default I Want song, was when I knew I would enjoy my night, and “I’ve Changed My Mind” (the best staged number) was when I mentally noted that I would describe the score in my review as “masterful”. But then act two rolls around and by the end, a couple of the song blur together, and looking at the song titles on Wikipedia, I can only hear a few melodies in my mind’s ear. But in the realm of music, Les Miz is an unfair comparison for any show except, like, Fiddler on the Roof. Kind of loco that “I Dreamed a Dream” and “On My Own” are from the same show and now “My Days” from The Notebook is heralded as a showstopper… how far we’ve fallen. Where I think the score excels most is in those bullet points of timelessness and emotional impact. Florence’s pop music has always transcended the contemporary sound and that’s no different here. And emotional impact… I felt many things! If I’m getting in the weeds, the orchestrator needs to work on the buttons of the songs because the applause always felt delayed, which does actually make a significant difference in thinking back on the emotion of the song.
Plot, human experience, emotional impact, you know all this, you’ve read the book. However, having seen the way Floptina Aguilera Great Gatsby on Broadway butchered integral elements of the book (dumbing down the symbolism of the green light to be romantic love, having Nick find romantic love in Jordan), it’s refreshing to see the intention with which Martyna Majok interprets the themes of the book that the other musical fully missed. Those themes that Google says Les Miz deals with — poverty, abuse, redemption, revolution — are also explored in the show not only in the libretto but in Mimi Lien’s set and Sandy Powell’s costumes. The set, a junkyard of car parts piled high enough stage right to match the heights of the staircase in Gatsby’s mansion stage left, interprets George Wilson’s lyrical motif of “if we build it up higher” pretty literally and visually evokes Les Miz’s barricade, while the costumes also draw visual divisions between class, with Daisy, Jordan, and Tom in pristine white and the Wilsons in red that hides dirt better. And there is dirt! The hemlines of the skirts and pantlegs show the proverbial mud the characters plod through for the second act. A nice touch I think! Gatsby wears, you guessed it, pink.
Okay now let me talk performances. Ben Levi Ross is extremely solid, Solea Pfeiffer is working her ass off for the Tony, and Isaac Cole Powell is gorgeous and talented but perhaps the weakest of the quartet. Charlotte MacInnes… y’all aren’t ready!!! When she first opens her mouth in dialogue, she has a charming little rasp like Maya Hawke, and she has a radiant smile, she believably commands the adoration that Daisy does. When she opens her mouth to SING, I almost cried and I can’t even really say why? The vibrato and the gravity of Florence’s voice are present here in a slightly more conventional musical theatre soprano, and it sort of sounds like what a chocolate chip cookie with flaky sea salt tastes like. It’s crunchy and it’s soft and it stimulates so many different parts of my brain. Like I hate to say it but Eva’s crown shifted! I couldn’t take my eyes off her and I am in writing making the commitment to see every show she does in a 200-mile radius of New York.
Other fun notes:
Sonya Tayeh Tony for choreo incoming.
Nick and Jordan explicitly queer and not in a cringe 2024 way you LOVE to see it.
I went back and forth on Mayer Wolfsheim’s song, “Feels Like Hell”, between thinking it was generic musical theatre schlock and subversive commentary and landed on the latter and now it’s one of my favorite moments in hindsight. Also, gave Isaac Cole Powell a nice dance spotlight.
I really thought for a moment that we were getting a dream ballet and if that happened I would have leapt out of my seat. Sonya, Rachel, think about it!
When I was in sixth grade and coming into my own as a Theatre Kid, my district’s high school did Les Miz for their musical, and even at that age I felt the magnitude of the show onstage and among the student actors. It was an epic story about love and class and the music was rich and there were so many characters who all had dynamic arcs and it felt big. I remember being so jealous that I wasn’t old enough to audition, and for years afterward, when kids were putzing around at the piano during break, they’d be playing and singing Les Miz, or telling stories about it during rehearsals, or quoting it in the yearbook. Parents and faculty talked about it as the best show the school did in a decade, and of course it was, because it was Les Miz. Capturing something that massive onstage and having it be that massive offstage is a feat, and Gatsby comes reeeally close. By the time it reaches Broadway, I mean… Let Florence cook…
I would’ve posted this review sooner but I thought I was going to also have a review of Empire which is a musical about the Empire State Building and also three generations of a family, which opens tonight at New World Stages (A.K.A. International House of Flops) but my comp tickets fell through and you know what? I think that’s better off.
Well written. Was a riveting read.