Old Sports and Green Lights - Orlando Ballet's "The Great Gatsby"

On May 1, 2026 I saw Orlando Ballet's production of The Great Gatsby.  Serendipitously, it hit right when I was writing a series of essays about adaption of stories into new mediums so I thought it would be fun to do a deep dive into it from this perspective.  (It's also been a while since I've written about the ballet.)  In preparation for the show I reread the novel which, hardly shockingly, is really good.

I very much liked the ballet though it is pretty different than the novel, having both a different focus and much different framing, even if the plot is mostly the same.  This is not a criticism as  change is a necessary component in adaptation, especially when going from a book whose author is a near-legendary wordsmith to a wordless ballet.  Even if I hadn't liked it I would still have admired the chutzpah of the attempt.

In addition to being good on its own merits it was especially interesting in light of just having read the novel, though I don't at all think remembering the book is a prerequisite for enjoying the ballet.

I am going to be talking a lot about plot and themes and I realize focusing on this does a certain disservice to ballet as an art form.  Like, six nameless Louisville girls doing an impressive dance at the beginning of the show has no plot relevance, but the celebration of movement is the raison d'être for seeing a ballet in the first place.  So you can safely assume that for every plot thing I mention there was a bunch of really fantastic and striking dancing surrounding it.  That may be obvious but I didn't want to leave it unsaid.

Note: Orlando Ballet alternates casts; generally different people are in the matinee performances.  I saw the Friday evening performance and so any references I make to specific dancers are the ones from that particular show.

Background

The Novel

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940.)  It was a commercial disappointment on release but over the decades it climbed its way into the canon of 20th Century American literature.  Most people I asked read it in high school.  (I did not, somehow, but I've read it twice as an adult.)

Fitzgerald died never knowing its enduring legacy.

A Very Cursory Plot Summary of the Novel

The Great Gatsby is set in 1920s Long Island and narrated in retrospect by bond salesman Nick Carraway.  It's the story Jay Gatsby, a mysterious and newly rich man who has recently bought a palatial mansion in the new money town of West Egg.  Nick, his neighbor, meets him and discovers that Gatsby's singular goal in acquiring all his wealth and throwing his ridiculously lavish parties is to reconnect with his old girlfriend Daisy Buchanan who he lost touch with five years earlier when he was still poor.  Daisy, who is Nick's cousin, is now married and lives across the bay from Gatsby in the old money town of East Egg.

Gatsby does reconnect with Daisy and they have an affair for a time.  At a dinner in the city, Daisy's philandering husband Tom finds out about the affair and Gatsby loses Daisy after he tries to get her to tell Tom that she in fact never loved him, and only ever loved Gatsby.  On their way back to Long Island Daisy, driving Gatsby's car, accidentally hits and kills Tom's mistress Myrtle.  Myrtle's husband George blames Gatsby and shoots him before committing suicide.  The end.

That's the plot, but it doesn't even remotely capture what the book is like or is about.  Despite being relatively short and a quick read The Great Gatsby has a lot of themes and explores a lot of ideas and there's a lot of threads an adaptation could tug on.

The Ballet

The ballet was created by choreographer Jorden Morris and composer Carl Davis on a commission from the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater.  It premiere in 2019.   

Jorden Morris, the Artistic Director of the Orlando Ballet since 2021, was born in Alberta, Canada and was a principal dancer before retiring and taking up choreography.  His first work, a one act adaptation of Three Musketeers premiered in 1999.

Carl Davis (1936-2023) was born in New York City and moved to England in the 1960s.  He was a prolific composer who wrote concert works as well as scores for live theater, film, television, and ballet.  He won a BAFTA award (i.e. a British Oscar) for his The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) score.  He was also known for writing and reconstructing scores for silent films, including Ben-Hur (1925), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (1931).  Per Davis's website, he composed more than 50 of these.

Orlando Ballet also performed The Great Gatsby in 2022.  If this staging was different, I didn't notice.

A Leap into the Ballet

Dancing as Storytelling

For all the potential spectacle of the rich Jazz Age setting, at its heart The Great Gatsby is a domestic drama with a pretty narrow scope.  The whole thing unfolds over like 3 months in the summer of 1922 and the story and conflicts all come out of the relationships and frictions between the characters, all of whom have different dynamics.  This is excellent material for a ballet to work with.  In a medium where all interactions have to be made physical, you can reveal character traits and relationships by how the characters move together.  Are they in sync? In opposition?  Are they assured together or seem like they are feeling each other out?  This is all very legible in a well choreographed ballet, which Gatsby is

The opening scene of the ballet is really instructive here.  The initial dance in 1917 between Gatsby (Jaysan Stinnett) and Daisy (Hitomi Nakamura) is intimate, fluid, and covers a lot of the stage.  They are also touching a lot and do a lot of lifts.  In contrast, when Tom (Thomas Gerhardt) shows up to court Daisy, he's mostly dancing at her.  Even when Daisy gets over her reluctance and dances with him, he only picks her up once and just spins in place while he holds her aloft.

(Side note, I have a theory that in a pas de deux the amount of ground the man covers while lifting the woman is a shorthand for how emotionally connected they are.  So far it's held true for Gatsby and Romeo and Juliet.)

The Great Gatsby's choreography lays out a lot of different dynamics.  Nick and Daisy's dance when he first arrives in Long Island is affectionate but not romantic.  Jordan's dancing when she meets Nick reads as flirty.

And it's really interesting to me that, despite my lacking the vocabulary to articulate exactly how, the way Gatsby and Tom dance with each other during the confrontation scene very much scans at first like just an argument and then transitions into a fight.  It's also a great touch that when appealing to Daisy they mirror each other, as if they are both making their case to her.

Dancing as Character Detail

The ballet does a great job of revealing character and having the dancing style feel specific to the individuals.

For example, Tom, an imposing former athlete who peaked in college, has a more blunt and performative physicality to his moves than the other characters.  It's also a nice detail that there is one particular move that Tom does in nearly all of his dances, an impressive high vertical leap where he lifts his leg parallel to the ground but then hitches it down to perpendicular twice before he lands.  He is the only character in the show who does this and in context it reads as a showy display of the character's athleticism.  If I recall correctly, the only dance he does not do it in is his more traditionally romantic reconciliation dance with Daisy at the end.

I also think it's really cool that in Act 1, Gatsby only dances with Daisy or when he's contemplating the green light on her dock.  He does not dance at the party or when he's introduced to Nick.  Daisy is the only thing that stirs him to motion, just like in the book.

"You Can't Repeat the Past"

One last thing about the dancing that I want to touch on is how the ballet, through the nature of the medium, manages to capture something of the novel.  Jay Gatsby is wistful, consumed by and even obsessed with recapturing the Daisy that lives in his memory and he refuses to accept that he cannot.  Even if they do get together again, it's been five years of experiences for both of them; she is not the same person, and neither is he.  The book Is quite literally and explicitly about this.  After Gatsby and Daisy take up their affair, Gatsby has this exchange with Nick:

“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

“I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.”  (p100)

In a live theater setting, storytelling through movement is an ephemeral and almost delicate thing.  It exists in the moment but when the dance stops it's over and gone.  The experience of a later pas de deux, in a different setting, in a different part of the score is going to be different even if the moves are the same.  Even the same production on a different night is going to be a little different.

"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."  Gatsby never figures this out and it's really cool that the ballet can subtly evoke this idea just through its nature.

The Score

I really like Carl Davis's score, which I purchased a week before the show and have listened through several times.  I'd call it a horn forward orchestral score.  It's very suggestive of the 1920s with the added textural and emotional flexibility that standard orchestral instrumentation allows.  I don't know if it is actually authentic to the 1920s sound, nor do I care, but it certainly feels authentic.

In a talk at the Orlando Ballet's open rehearsal the week before the show opened, conductor Julian Pellicano said that Davis "wrote in so many different styles and the dances, the foxtrots, and all the others, the Charlestons, they all sound like they came from the 1920s, but actually he wrote them. They're not tunes from that time. He created them."

There's also a lot of good leitmotif work, i.e. short musical lines that represent a character or an idea.  The most obvious example is the green light theme, a simple and lovely melody that starts with a descending bass line that leaps up to a kind of an inverted pedal tone before playing a simple scale run.  The theme plays near the beginning as Gatsby looks across the bay at the green light that's on Daisy's dock. In the novel the light symbolizes Gatsby's hope and longing and the ballet's melody really does feel like it's reaching upward for something.  And later, after Gatsby and Daisy reconnect it plays again.

(Side note: at intermission in the lobby, I heard at least three people humming this theme to themselves.  It's that striking.)

Even some locations get a leitmotif; the part of the score titled "City of Steel" briefly plays every time characters go into New York City.

The score also has a certain narrative quality to it even without the visuals.  If you know the track names and are familiar with the novel, you can "hear" the events happening.  Like in the track "Chez Myrtle" which is when Tom and Nick hang out with Tom's mistress in the city, you can hear when they're starting to get a little drunk, when Tom and Myrtle start to argue, when Myrtle starts shouting "Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!" at him, and when he hits her.  (Tom's a colossal prick in all versions of the story.)

It's worth a listen.  The Czech National Symphony Orchestra released a version in February of 2021.  Just look up "The Great Gatsby Ballet by Carl Davis."  (Note that the track order isn't exactly the same as the order of the performance.  The recording seems to leave out some reprises.)

Sets and Staging

Unusually compared to a lot of ballets that I've seen, Gatsby has a lot of set changes and short scenes.  There's a lot of locations in the story but it was all handled well.  It was easy to tell when the characters had gone somewhere else and the changeovers happened quickly and fluidly enough to not be distracting.  I would not be surprised if there are venues that couldn't pull off a show of this scenic complexity.

Generally there were really nice and, if not elaborate, then evocative backdrops that established the setting with only a few props and a couple of scenic flats on stage to suggest apartment walls etc.  The New York City backdrop was one of the more prominent ones and the Valley of Ashes one of the more immediately memorable ones.

I really liked the Valley of Ashes set, representing the crappy stretch of Long Island where George's garage is.  The scenic painting on the back wall looked like Mordor with deeply unsettling spectacled eyes glaring down from a derelict building.  This is very in line with the book description and captured the same atmosphere:

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. (p24)

The only very elaborate location was Gatsby's house, both the outside where his parties are and the inside where he shows Daisy around.  They both looked opulent without being gaudy and had multiple levels of elevation which added a lot of visual interest.

I thought it was really great how the opening scenes in 1917 were on a mostly bare stage with no backdrop.  It made the prologue feel like a prologue when contrasted to the more complicated stagings during the actual plot.   It was also a nice touch that Gatsby's first real scene echoed this bare stage with only a set of steps on stage right and the point of green light in the background.   It hearkened back to the prologue; he may have been standing in the present but he was living in the past.

The Adaptation

This section isn't so much about the execution of the ballet performance but is an exploration of how Morris and Davis adapted the novel to this extremely different medium.

Challenges

It seems to me that The Great Gatsby is challenging to adapt into a visual medium while maintaining the tone and themes of the novel.  And, from my research, it seems that films have been failing at this since 1926.  The book is melancholic and deeply ambivalent if not outright hostile towards the gaudy spectacle of the generationally wealthy and the nouveau riche alike.  Nick, the narrator, is also quite ambivalent about Gatsby himself as well as the man's doomed quest to beat his boat against the current of time and recapture a past that has evaporated, and might never have been real to begin with.

It's a book that lays potential landmines in the path of an adaptor.  To take an example from the most recent screen adaptation, Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film which, full disclosure, I have only seen some representative parts of, has grand bombastic ambitions that seduce the viewer with spectacle and frame Gatsby with a heroic romanticism, but it also half-heartedly retains some of Nick's condemnatory monolog.  These two ideas are at war with each other and since film is a visual medium, the spectacle wins.  A reader obviously can't see the fun parties and they're all filtered through a cynical Nick so the perception of the ostentation is different in the book, and therefore the framing is too.  From all the reviews and retrospectives I've looked at, Luhrmann's film seems to be a little confused on what it thinks its saying versus what its actually saying.  The events are mostly faithful, but the framing is off so it's stuck in a weird middle ground of including stuff from the source material that doesn't support the version of the story it's showing.

As Aron from the YouTube channel TripleNeon says in his essay "Why the 2013 Great Gatsby Movie is a Bad Adaptation":

Put simply when making an adaptation you can’t directly copy the source material.  You have to play to the strengths of whatever medium you’re moving the story to.

Ballet is such a different medium from both novels and films and has such different tools and vocabulary that I think it sidesteps some of the framing pitfalls.  There are literally no lines so you can't frame them in a way that contradicts their message.  Ballet excels at emotional and evocative storytelling and the use of movement rather than spoken language means the interactions feel more metaphorical than literal which can be really efficient in delivering meaning.

This production leans into the romanticism and leaves out the social commentary.  It's a more straightforward story and I appreciate that Morris took a thread, rolled with it, and went hard on it rather than falling into the middle ground of wanting to heighten the romance but still kind of trying to maintain the framing of the book.  A novel like Gatsby has a lot of intellectual interiority that would have to be done really carefully when adapting to film, as minutes of voiceover is not a good or compelling use of the medium, and ballet, with no language other than movement and music, is even less equipped to handle it.   

In his video essay "Why Every Great Gatsby Adaptation Fails: The 'Unfilmable' Classic Explained," Steve Shives ended with some advice for future film adaptors of Gatsby:

Treat it like source material not sacred scripture.  Be willing to cut stuff out, to add things, to change things. ... Instead of porting over Fitzgerald’s actual words in the form of voiceover or on screen titles find a ways of evoking them visually.  Create cinematic moments that echo the elegance and beauty and poignancy that Fitzgerald creates on the page. … Use the language of film the same way that Fitzgerald used prose.

I think the ballet does all that successfully.  It has a different focus than the book but the vision is internally consistent so...so what?

Point of View - Nick

The ballet uses Nick differently than the novel, probably for obvious reasons.  You can't really have a narrator in a ballet so Nick is more of an audience surrogate than a character whose perceptions everything is filtered through.  Ballet Nick (Israel Zavaleta Escobedo) is experiencing the story rather than reflecting on it.  And judging from his dancing up until the confrontation, he's having a lot more fun in West Egg than book Nick did.

I'm sure the retrospective point of view character thing could be done in a ballet, but I have no idea how and given the ballet's romantic focus its probably for the best that Morris didn't try.

In the Great Courses series "Classics of American Literature" Professor Arnold Weinstein discusses a perspective that views the novel as a realist work:

I really want to suggest that it falls into the very tradition of realism as a kind of deflating genre, as a genre that traditionally sees through illusions, sees through facades, and the project of such books is precisely to enlighten the reader, or to chasten the protagonist. ... Realism, then, is the narrative of disenchantment, starting with enchantment and then our gradual understanding that enchantment is an illusion. It's bogus. That there's something behind it we need to understand. That's the way this book is built.

He goes on to describe The Great Gatsby as a "story of lost illusions, or exposed illusions, or of becoming un-illusioned, of seeing through the facade, seeing through the mist.  And that is the realist premise."

By this measure the ballet is not a realist work in the sense that Weinstein described.  As I alluded to above Nick's condemnation of Long Island society and his disillusionment in both its elites and Gatsby's obsessive quest is absent in the ballet which makes sense given the change in chronology and perspective.

Novel Nick has great distaste for everyone involved. Near the end he says this to Gatbsy:

“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”  (p138)

He also makes this brutal assessment:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. (p160)

Nick doesn't exactly canonize Gatsby either, referring to his "appalling sentimentality" or the "grotesque and fantastic conceits" that haunt the man.  And after Gatsby expresses no concern for the dead Myrtle, only for how Daisy is handling it, Nick says:

I disliked him so much by this time that I didn’t find it necessary to tell him he was wrong.

(p129).

Absent all of this, ballet Nick's sadness at the end is grief over his lost friend rather than an indictment of the whole lot of them.

Framing - Gatsby as Hero

Conductor Julian Pellicano said something interesting in the open rehearsal talk that pretty clearly sums up how Gatsby is framed in the ballet:

Gatsby has his own theme, of course. And at the very end of the ballet, we hear it in E-flat Major ... if you go all the way back to Mozart's Magic Flute, E-flat major is the key of heroes. It's the key that Beethoven's Heroic Symphony is in. It's the key that all the heroic stuff in Wagner's Ring Cycle happens.  Richard Strauss's A Hero's Life. It's all an E-flat. So music in E-flat major since the 1790s has been heroes.  ... [A]nd you find E Major at the very, very end, during Gatsby's funeral, so you realize he was the hero all along.

This makes dramatic sense for this adaptation but it is not really how he's framed in the novel.  Or at least it's not how I saw him.  Gatsby has grand romantic ambitions for sure but I actually think he's kind of a pathetic loser.  Nick seems to at least partially agree, saying this about him:

So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. (p90)

Getting rich off bootlegging and other assorted shadiness just so he can buy a mansion across from the woman he liked and throwing big ostentatious parties just in the hopes of meeting and impressing her would be sad on its own, but when paired with his attempted erasure of Daisy's own experiences just to make himself feel better it makes him into a self-centered jerk.

It's not enough that Daisy wants to be with him, he has to try to erase her five years with Tom.  If Gatsby wants to erase himself to try to recapture an idealized month long relationship with an 18 year old from five years ago, then you do you I guess, but he doesn't get to force Daisy to do the same.

"Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now—isn't that enough? I can't help what's past." She began to sob helplessly. "I did love him once—but I loved you too."

Gatsby's eyes opened and closed.

"You loved me too?" he repeated. (p119)

Take yes for an answer, dumbass.

The confrontation between Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy goes down differently in the ballet, albeit with a very interesting adaptational choice.  Without dialog there really isn't a way to convey how book Gatsby overplays his hand but the ballet opts to have his and Tom's argument end in a fight, with Gatsby knocking Tom down and choking him until Daisy pulls him off.

Similar to the novel, this is the inflection point in the show, the point where Daisy tilts away from Gatsby.  On a surface level it makes sense to make it a physical confrontation in a ballet context but it also is kind of an awesome way to literalize Gatsby's mistake from the novel.  Daisy draws back from him when he tries to erase Tom, figuratively in the book and literally in the show.

After the confrontation, book Tom has a dismissive sense of triumph when he smirkingly tells Daisy to drive back to East Egg with Gatsby.  He knows the threat of Gatsby is over.  (In the ballet, Thomas Gerhardt captured this moment perfectly, by the way.)

Even with this neat literalization of book Gatsby's mistake, he is still far more heroic in this scene than he is in the novel.  I came out of the book scene thinking he was an immature, manipulative jerk but in the show he was in a fight with a giant prick who has hit women twice already and been restrained from doing so two other times.  Everything in the ballet's framing of the two men makes Gatsby the obvious choice.  Maybe he took it too far during the fight, but at this point who in the audience doesn't want to see Tom get choked out?

The Ineffable and the Idealized - Daisy and Gatsby

In the novel you see very little of Gatsby and Daisy interacting.  What was their relationship like before he went off to war?  It's really not clear.  What was it like during their brief affair in West Egg?  Shrug.  What do they talk about? ... Eh?.

This is by design, of course, because the reality of their relationship doesn't matter, at least not to Gatsby.  He is faithful only to his own founding myth about his love.  As Nick says about Daisy and Gatsby's first meeting in West Egg:

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart. (p88)

Where in the novel Nick gets filled in on Gatsby and Daisy's past by second hand stories from narrators who may themselves be unreliable, the ballet is told chronologically, beginning with Gatsby and Daisy courting in 1917.

Since the narrator thing has been dropped, we're seeing the reality of the interaction rather than the second hand (and possibly bullshit) romanticized version Gatsby tells, and the relationship has a different character.  They also get another intimate dance when he is showing her around his mansion after they reconnect.  (Nick is not present for this in the ballet like he is in the novel.)

Gatsby's grand ambitions of romance feel more based in reality than they do in the book and Gatsby moving mountains to get back with Daisy feels more justified in the show, rather than being the sad and immature obsession they are in the novel.

Ballet lends itself really well to this kind of genuine romanticism.  A romantic pas de deux is by its very nature idealized. Also, it's easier to assign grand and genuine romanticism in a wordless medium of movement and music without accidentally making it banal like you can in film, where a writer can screw everything up by trying to write actual dialog.  (Though lame banality in a central romance can be part of the point of a story. The Bride of Lammermoor, where the narrator thinks the romantic leads are idiots, comes to mind.)

So by under-explaining and leaving the details undefined, or in this case just wordlessly capturing the emotionality of it, the ballet shows Gatsby and Daisy's relationship as both more idealized because its dance and more genuinely ideal because we see it happen.  We see their happiness, rather than just hearing Gatsby assure Nick that "it was perfect, trust me."

Climax and Anti-Climax

The finale of the ballet has a different vibe than the novel.  In the ballet, after the plot climaxes with Daisy siding with Tom during the confrontation, there's a crescendo of emotion and tragedy as Myrtle is killed, a reeling Daisy reconciles with Tom, and then George murders Gatsby.

Gatsby then gets a hero's send off.  A rousing and poignant recapitulation of the green light theme plays over a striking and dramatic funeral scene and the show ends with a light rising from his coffin into the sky.

In the book the climax is also the confrontation with Tom and Gatsby where the bubble of Gatsby's illusion is pierced after Daisy won't say she never loved Tom.  After that, though, the central conflicts kind of just fizzle out.  The book has a distinct, and deliberate, sense of anticlimax.  Myrtle's death happens off page.  Hell, even Gatsby's death is off page.

Daisy has no lines after the confrontation scene and is only seen through the window of her mansion eating chicken with Tom while "there was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together"(p131).  She and Tom soon jet off to...somewhere without a word to anyone.  Gatsby never finds out that she's not coming back for him.  Daisy and pretty much everyone else do not attend his funeral.

This very morose and downbeat ending would not have been the right choice for this ballet and I'm glad we got the one we did.

Some Thoughts on the Novel

As I mentioned up top, I really like The Great Gatsby.  I am a big fan of Fitzgerald as a prose stylist in general; I also very much liked his Tender is the Night.  (Though the blurb on the back is hilariously misleading.)  Fitzgerald is not everyone's cup of tea and some people find him too florid or think he overwrites.  I don't share this opinion but it's a subjective preference and I do get why a person could think that.

I love Fitzgerald's casual brilliance as he almost offhand tosses out passages like this:

As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman in New York” was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. (p22)

And the concluding lines of The Great Gatsby are potentially my favorite last lines in any novel I've read:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (p161)

I like all the echoes and parallels in the novel.  Very early on Nick describes how his well off family made up a tradition that they are descended from Scottish nobility, a bit of nouveau riche mythmaking in order grasp at the respectability of old money elites, something Gatsby is also doing.  Tom, an athlete who as I said earlier peaked in college, "would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game." (p9)  Sounds a little familiar, right?  In her city apartment with Tom, Myrtle says to her sister with regards to her husband:

“Crazy about him!” cried Myrtle incredulously. “Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there.” (p34)

("That man there" is Nick, who she has just met.)

All of these parallels to Gatsby are established long before Gatsby even makes his first appearance and to a cold reader these aren't blindingly obvious setups.  Chekhov's parallelism, as it were.

Baby's First Literary Analysis

I very much understand why this book is taught in high school.  The symbolism, the strong subjective point of view, the multitude of themes, and the beautiful writing all make it a great primer for studying literary techniques and analyzing texts.  And it's hardly an inscrutable novel; the symbolism and themes are perfect for readers making early forays into deeper literary analysis as they are straightforward without being clunky.  I mean, right before reconnecting with Daisy, Gatsby catches a falling clock.  It's not exactly subtle.

But one of the strongest themes, the folly of trying to recapture an idealized past, is probably lost on high schoolers.  "Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" probably doesn't personally resonate much with people who aren't even adults yet.

I would guess a lot of young readers see Gatsby's romanticism as aspirational.  After all, Gatsby is the kind of person "that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent."

...

Teenagers are stupid, is what I'm saying.   (I'm joking.  Mostly.)

Their Vast Carelessness - The Rich

For Nick, the rich are a different species and it seems they were for Fitzgerald, too.  Per Jeff Cunningham in an article for Medium:

In 1925, Fitzgerald penned a brief essay titled “The Rich Boy” for Redbook Magazine. In the third sentence, he says something about wealth that is quite revealing:

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

As for the decadent partying of the rich. there was actually less of it in the book than I remembered there being.  We only see two big bashes on page and they're being relayed by a jaded Nick who kind of isn't having any of it.  Also, as I mentioned above, not being able to literally see the debauchery makes it feel less important.

A Beautiful Fool? - Daisy and Ambivalence

Daisy may be the character the plot revolves around but she comes across more as an object to be fought over than a real character.  Fitzgerald just doesn't give us much of her and to me she was hard to get a read on.  I don't know if this was Fitzgerald being intentionally withholding or if this is how male writers wrote women in the 1920s.  The book's presentation of Daisy, of course, is all from Nick, so she may have more depth than he relays.

I didn't think much of her, though I had some subtextual sympathy for her after this line about her daughter being born:

She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. (p19)

Critical opinion on Daisy as a character has been mixed to say the least.  Per wikipedia:

In the 1940s and 1950s, scholars and critics condemned Daisy as an irredeemable villain.  Critic Marius Bewley deplored the character's "vicious emptiness," Robert Ornstein dubbed her "criminally immoral," Alfred Kazin judged her to be "vulgar and inhuman," and Leslie Fiedler regarded her as a "dark destroyer" purveying "corruption and death".  In these earlier critiques, scholars likened Gatsby to an innocent victim and equated Daisy with "foul dust [that] floated in the wake of his dreams." As late as 1978, scholar Rose Gallo described Daisy as "a vacuous creature" whose beauty conceals her emotional bankruptcy.

I might not have held Daisy in super high regard but this all seems a little strident and a lot sexist, tapping into a "women are vile seducers who only exist to lead men astray." The men certainly can't be held accountable for their own choices, right?

Later critics often see Daisy as more the victim of a crappy society and crappy men, both of which don't allow her to have much agency.  I find this view to be pretty persuasive, especially in light of her 'beautiful fool" line quoted earlier, though I also agree with Nick about her and Tom being "careless people" who can retreat into their money to avoid the fallout of their actions.   

Daisy does kill a woman after all and then faces no consequences.  As I mentioned, the book doesn't show her reacting to it in any way, so it's easy to assume she cared about as much as Gatsby did before she went to wherever the obscenely wealthy go when they skip town.

Gallimaufry

• I know I gave short shrift to Daisy in the ballet.  Nakamura danced her beautifully but I don't really have anything interesting to add.  I'm now firmly in the tradition of Tom, Gatsby, and Fitzgerald himself in not spending much time reckoning with her as a character.

• The Great Gatsby was Israel Zavaleta Escobedo's final show before retirement after ten years with Orlando Ballet.  It sucks to see him go, as he rules, but I wish him all the luck in whatever he does next.

• Carl Davis also wrote the music for a 2000 TV movie version of The Great Gatsby that starred Mira Sorvino and Toby Stephens.  I wonder if any of the musical ideas from that informed his ballet score.

• In a 2022 interview with The Point Magazine, Jorden Morris said this regarding his vision for Orlando Ballet:

As far as the repertory, I feel there needs to be a cohesive balance between presenting ballets by the masters and pushing the artform forward with contemporary ballets and those by developing choreographers. There are certain ballets every company should have, works that are important for the dancers, audiences and the organization. There is sort of a graduating tier: You have to do The Merry Widow before you can do Onegin, before you can do Manon. You must build the repertoire and the strength of the artists alongside your audience in an intelligent progression, so that the organization scales things up appropriately both artistically and financially.

Morris has held to that vision and I really like the company's mix of war horse pieces and newer or more experimental ones.  I also appreciate that Morris understands that a company's repertoire choice trains the audience as well as the dancers and we can all grow in the art from.

• I love this line from the book:

Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry. (p81)

• There's some absolutely spectacular drunk dancing in the ballet.  Seeing people look inebriated while precisely pirouetting is amazing.

• The quote I used earlier, "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man" is attributed to Greek philosopher Heraclitus.

• Orlando Ballet would most vehemently disagree with this line from Gatsby:

"The dance?” He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. “Old sport, the dance is unimportant.” (p100)

• I didn't talk much about the American Dream and Jazz Age decadence aspects of the novel but believe me, there's a lot to unpack there.

• Tom is less violent in the book than he is in the ballet but he's also a vile racist spewing the white-nationalist Great Replacement Theory, claiming that it's all "scientific," and Jesus I can't believe we're still doing this 100 years later.

• Steve Shives had this great line about where adaptations of Gatsby can go wrong, pointing at an "overly reverent view of the source material" and how it's easy to "adapt the novel's reputation rather than the novel."

• The ballet had a bunch of cool easter eggs for anyone familiar with the book. The twins Nick meets at the party, the abstract flashback vignette of the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim puppeteering Gatsby before giving him his fancy rich man's coat etc etc.  None of it was plot relevant to the production but they were fun to see.  Oh I also really liked Tom angrily getting a bottle of liquor from the bar and then thrusting it at Gatsby during their tete-a-tete at the party.  It's a reference to Tom accusing Gatsby (correctly it turns out) of being a bootlegger.

• I liked how the music during the aforementioned Meyer Wolfsheim scene had an Eastern European almost klezmer vibe.  It was subtle but a nice touch for the Jewish gangster.

• After reading the novel, where during the first party scene Nick doesn't even realize one of the low key men he's been having low key conversation with is Gatsby himself, the equivalent scene in Luhrmann's film is pretty funny.  After a disorienting cruise through the insane bash, DiCaprio's Gatsby has a dramatic slow motion turn towards the camera and after a big horn blast dramatically says "I'm Gatsby" before smiling and raising his martini glass before fireworks go off behind him.  It's absolutely ridiculous.  I don't even know if I hate it so much as think Luhrmann's vision cannot be judged by the rules of man and nature.

• I like the matador sounding theme at the second dance party when Tom and Gatsby kind of get into it for the first time before the partygoers take up a dance to de-escalate.  It plays again during the climactic confrontation between Tom and Gatsby.   (Nick, Jordan, and Daisy don't manage to defuse the situation this time, though they make a valiant effort.)  It's the track "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere" on the recording.

• I liked how in the abstract opening to Act 2 Tom confronting Daisy and George confronting Myrtle about suspected infidelities played out in parallel, with Tom and George at one point doing the exact same moves simultaneously.

• A striking romantic line from the novel, regarding Gatsby and Daisy:

His heart beat faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. (p101)

• Professor Weinstein drew an unexpected literary parallel to Nick's view of the moral decay of Jazz Age elites and the "laxity, for the speciousness, to the corruption that he's encountered."  Weinstein goes on to say:

I would like to compare him in some ways to Conrad's Marlowe.  We know that Fitzgerald really loved Conrad, and I think that that's sort of the role that Nick plays. It's very similar to Marlowe, as he tries to take the measure of Jim in Lord Jim, or as Marlowe makes his way after and through Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. And I see the same sort of function for Nick.

• My friend Chris Belt played guitar in the pit for this show.  Well, per the program he played the guitar but I also saw him playing the banjo, which I didn't know he could do.

• In a letter to Ludlow Fowler from August 1924, Fitzgerald said this about The Great Gatsby:

I remember our last conversation and it makes me sad. I feel old too, this summer—I have ever since the failure of my play a year ago. Thats the whole burden of this novel—the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.

• My only real critique of the ballet adaptation is the book accurate complication around Tom and Gatsby switching cars for their ride into the city before the confrontation.  In the book this is so Myrtle can see Tom in Gatsby's car on their way out of Long Island and why she runs out to meet it at the end.  She thinks Tom's in the driver's seat and is trying to get his attention when Daisy hit-and-runs her.

The way the ballet is choreographed it really reads like she's running away from George and accidentally got herself in the path of the car.  This is simpler, but also makes Tom and Gatsby switching cars before going into the city not all that necessary.  (It's also unclear which car even pulled up to George's garage on the way into the city.  if it wasn't Tom's car from Act 1 it sure looked like it)

I remember being a little confused about the key switching when I saw the ballet in 2022.  (I hadn't read the book in more the 10 years before that production.)  It's book accurate, but if the car swapping had been cut entirely, nothing in the production would have needed to change, really.

Conclusion

I ended up having a great deal to say about this which I suppose isn't surprising as both the novel and the ballet have been knocking around a lot in my brain.

I think that the book earns its classic status and the show is a worthy and interesting adaptation.  Morris and company obviously gave great attention to detail and used the strengths of ballet as a medium to tell the version of the story they wanted to tell.

I found it to be an impressive experience that was rewarding enough for me to write [redacted] words about.

Hats off to everyone involved.  Keep on dancing

-m