The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a new musical drawn from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel about a mysterious man with a new fortune, the lavish parties he throws on Long Island, and the one guest he is really waiting for. The action takes place in the summer of 1922, moving between Long Island mansions, a bleak stretch called the Valley of Ashes and Manhattan. The bond salesman Nick Carraway narrates. Kait Kerrigan wrote the book, Jason Howland composed the music, Nathan Tysen wrote the lyrics and Marc Bruni directed.

The show is not a revival: it began with a world premiere at Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, in 2023 and opened at the Broadway Theatre on April 25, 2024. The novel had already reached Broadway as a play in 1926, but its producers bill this as the first musical version of the book to play there.

At its heart the show looks at money, social standing and the American Dream in the Roaring Twenties, and at how much a single obsession can cost. Its costumes won a Tony Award in 2024, and the production has since played London and launched a North American tour.

Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner home from World War I, comes to New York to sell bonds. He rents a cheap cottage on Long Island from his neighbor, the mysterious Jay Gatsby, whose mansion stands next door. Across the bay live Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband, Tom, a wealthy former football star Nick knew at Yale. Through them Nick meets Daisy's friend Jordan Baker, a golfer, and picks up the first signs that the Buchanan marriage is in trouble.

Nick is invited to one of Gatsby's parties and brings Jordan along. During the evening the host takes Nick aside with a confession: before the war, when Gatsby was poor, he loved Daisy, and her father turned him away. Everything he has built since then has had one purpose, getting her back, and he asks Nick to bring the two of them together again.

On the far side of all that wealth is the Valley of Ashes, where George Wilson keeps a rundown garage that takes regular deliveries from Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby's shady business partner. George's wife, Myrtle, longs to escape poverty and is having an affair with Tom, who barely bothers to hide it. When an argument in a Manhattan apartment ends with Tom hurting Myrtle, a disgusted Nick decides to help Gatsby.

He invites Daisy to tea, and Gatsby, a bundle of nerves, crams the little cottage with flowers and food. The former sweethearts find their way back to each other while Nick and Jordan share a kiss outside in the rain. The first act closes at the mansion, where Daisy learns that her father destroyed the letters Gatsby wrote her during the war, and the affair begins.

In the second act, Nick and Jordan grow closer, and she proposes to him. Sure that Daisy will leave Tom, Gatsby neglects his dealings with Wolfsheim and throws a party that recreates their wartime courtship, and Daisy says she is ready to go away with him. It all comes to a head at the Plaza Hotel: the affair comes out, Daisy cannot claim she never loved Tom, and Tom reveals that Gatsby's money comes from bootlegging. How it all ends is covered in the last section of this page.

Howland's original score draws on jazz and pop. He describes the story as two things at once, a grand spectacle and a painful private romance, and says the Broadway version expanded both sides. The stage version has 25 numbers, 11 in the first act and 14 in the second, counting reprises. A few to know:

• "Roaring On" opens the evening with Nick and the full company, and it comes back as the finale.
• "New Money" is the big first-act party number, led by Jordan, Nick and Wolfsheim.
• "My Green Light", a duet for Gatsby and Daisy, ends the first act. It is named for the light at the end of the Buchanans' dock, visible from Gatsby's mansion, which returns through the show as a sign of his hopes.
• "Shady" opens the second act, with Wolfsheim and the company singing about the hidden side of his trade.
• "La Dee Dah With You" is sung by Gilda Gray, a real 1920s performer whom Gatsby hires for his second-act party.

Expect a period piece rather than a reinvention. Cho and her team built close to 300 costumes, a count that includes the separate outfits made for swings and understudies. In 2024 the company numbered 42, and each performer had an individual look; apart from a few suits, no outfit was repeated. The classic drop-waist flapper dress was reworked with a fitted waist and a fuller skirt, so the dancers can manage partnering and high kicks. The oversized headpieces are made the way a milliner would make a hat, from wire and lightweight stones, and each weighs only a few ounces.

Color tells you where you are. The opening party is dressed in black and gold, and Gatsby makes his first entrance in a white suit against it. "New Money" starts with a parade of huge headpieces, long sleeves and trains before the dancers change into dance dresses, all in peacock blues, greens and silvers. The workers of the Valley of Ashes wear browns and yellows, and "Shady" turns the stage into a world of smoky grays and trench coats.

A play by Owen Davis, staged by George Cukor, opened at the Ambassador Theatre on February 2, 1926, and the first musical treatment was a 1956 student production by the Yale Dramatic Association. The novel entered the US public domain in 2021, and a wave of new adaptations followed. This show should not be confused with Gatsby: An American Myth, a different Gatsby musical from Florence Welch, Thomas Bartlett and Martyna Majok.

In July 2023, Paper Mill Playhouse announced the world premiere with Jeremy Jordan as Gatsby and Eva Noblezada as Daisy. The limited engagement ran from October 12 to November 12, 2023, with an official opening on October 22. The producers later reported that it sold out before the first performance and became the highest-grossing show in the theater's history.

Broadway previews began on March 29, 2024. Seven principal actors from the Paper Mill run moved with the show, among them Jeremy Jordan, Eva Noblezada, Noah J. Ricketts as Nick and Samantha Pauly as Jordan Baker, while Eric Anderson joined as Wolfsheim. Masterworks Broadway released the original Broadway cast recording, a 23-track album, digitally in June 2024 and on CD on August 2, 2024.

In January 2025, Ryan McCartan took over from Jeremy Jordan as Gatsby, the first of several changes in the title role; Reeve Carney later played Gatsby from March 30 to July 26, 2026, opposite his wife, Eva Noblezada. For the novel's centennial in 2025, the production held a gala with the New York Public Library that January and took part in a lighting ceremony at the Empire State Building. By October 11, 2026, it had given 1,028 regular performances on Broadway after 27 previews.

The musical had its European premiere at the London Coliseum, opening on April 24, 2025, for a limited run that ended on September 7, 2025. Corbin Bleu was Nick in London and later joined the Broadway company in the same part. The North American tour opened at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland, on January 31, 2026, led by Jake David Smith as Gatsby and Senzel Ahmady as Daisy. In July 2026, a Polish-language production was announced for the Roma Musical Theatre in Warsaw; it would be the first staging of the show in a language other than English.