The Great Gatsby Director Marc Bruni on Subverting Expectations and Mixing Modern Elements Into the Musical

Is anything more associated with Jazz Age decadence than The Great Gatsby? F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel is so ingrained in the public imagination that the intricacies of its actual content are sometimes obscured. “Everyone thinks they know it,” says Marc Bruni, who directs the musical adaptation currently running on Broadway. “What we found is that a lot of [audience members] may not have read past about page 40, because there's so many surprises that they find in the plot of the show. We have audiences that gasp at all of the revelations that happen in act two.” The accomplished director sat down with Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens to discuss what he considers to be “the great American story about class.”

Bruni came into the production with an understanding of what audiences might expect from the story. “They remember the vibe, the parties, but they forget what the novel is actually about: the impossibility of the American dream. So what we tried to do in creating the show was create this sense of opulence, the sense of being dropped into the middle of the 1920s and what it must have felt like to be amidst all of that glamour. And then with act two we sort of pull the rug on that and let the audience see what is underneath.”

Gatsby’s creative team also knew they were competing with the memory of previous adaptations. “People are very familiar with the various movies that have come out. And I think when they read the book, everybody has a specific movie version in their head, as did I in reading it when I read it in high school. So there's a lot of pressure going into this about creating a version that lives up to everyone's expectations.” Among the distinctions of this iteration is how certain characters are portrayed. “Kait Kerrigan, the book writer, read the book and was very conscious of trying to give the women a more dimensional portrayal. Daisy, Jordan and Myrtle all have their choices contextualized within what it means to be a woman in the 1920s and they get to sing about it.”

Another key element in contemporizing the material was how the production approaches dance. “Dom Kelley, the choreographer, has one foot in the present and one foot in the past. The dance steps that were popular in the twenties have been remixed and remade in subsequent decades,” explains Bruni. “[Kelley] has done a great job of creating dances that are rooted in 1920s dance forms but very much have something to say to audiences today.”

Before making his directorial debut on Broadway with the jukebox musical Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Bruni had multiple stints as an associate director, lending his discernment to Broadway productions of Anything Goes, Legally Blonde and Grease, among others. Reflecting on his previous experience, Bruni says, “I've been tremendously fortunate and have gotten to assist and be associated with a number of wonderful directors. That gave me the opportunity to—not to quote Lin [Manuel Miranda]—be in the room where it happens and get to see the ways in which collaboration happens. And that's the part that is so exciting to me: getting to collaborate with other artists, with this tremendous design team that we have on Gatsby. I'm not a writer, but to take a story and to get a group of artists all on the same page about how we're going to tell this story and to get in the weeds with all of those details, that was what I was growing up wanting to do. The fact that I get to do it for a living, I still sort of pinch myself.”

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