This show confronts me with two of the issues I have grumbled about in previous reviews: there is no intermission, and it is ostensibly a musical rather than a play—and that complaint is as good a way into this review as any, because the script plays with those two issues: while there is no intermission for the audience, the main character, Man in Chair addresses the whole subject of intermissions during the “intermission”; and while it is filled with over-the-top musical numbers, they are really set pieces within the play, which itself is about an old man telling us how much he likes this old musical. The emotional power of the piece is vested in the play, not the musical. And that approach is its strength.

We have seen how Hollywood converted Fitzgerald’s brilliant The Great Gatsbyinto a flashy flop, simply because the crucial irony of the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, did not translate to the screen. The concept of a narrator is pretty primitive: it was a staple of classical Greek theatre, where the chorus interpreted Continue reading →