It’s among the many ironies of our time that Jay Gatsby—the enigmatic title character of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary classic The Great Gatsby—has become one of the most familiar figures in popular culture.
Whatever there is about the mysterious Long Island millionaire that we find so fascinating, it has held our interest from publication of the 1925 novel onward through multiple film and theatrical adaptations, an opera, more than one ballet and even a video game.
Orlando Ballet, too, keeps finding new reasons to revisit Fitzgerald’s fictional West Egg, the peninsula on Long Island that’s the main setting for the story and a primary archetype of social class.
The company performed its rendition of the prototypical jazz-age morality tale, which was critically praised, in 2022. The encore will run Thursday, April 30, to Sunday, May 3, in Steinmetz Hall at Dr. Phillips Center. Showtime is 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, with 2 p.m. matinees on Saturday and Sunday.
According to Jorden Morris, artistic director of Orlando Ballet, the appeal of this revival lies not only in the opportunity to remount the show in Steinmetz Hall—the 2022 version trod the boards of neighboring Walt Disney Theater—but to tweak the staging in ways that better reinforce the narrative and characters.
“We’re putting a little bit more spice in the recipe,” says Morris, whose refinements include the tea-party sequence in which the chimerical Gatsby, freshly returned from World War I, is reunited with his great lost love, Daisy Buchanan.
Another upgrade will surely pull at our awww strings: When Daisy’s husband, Tom, is shown buying a puppy for his mistress, Myrtle, the audience will see a real service dog in the role. (It seems unlikely that the dog will dance but animals are notorious scene-stealers.)
Orlando Ballet’s Great Gatsby relies upon choreography Morris created for a 2019 production by The Pittsburgh Ballet, which had been on the lookout for a fresh take on the subject after several unsatisfactory attempts. Morris’s work has subsequently proven to be nearly as enduring as the source material: In addition to the two local mountings, his adaptation was danced in January of this year by Colorado Ballet.
A throughline has been music by late composer Carl Davis, who came to Morris’s Gatsby as something of an old hand at the character and his world, having scored a 2000 made-for-TV adaptation of the book that starred Toby Stephens, Mira Sorvino and Paul Rudd.
As was the case in 2022, Davis’s music will be performed by the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra under guest conductor Julian Pellicano. According to Morris, it’s a welcome but bittersweet reprise, given that Pellicano was the last person to have worked with Davis on the latter’s score before the composer’s passing in 2024.
Continuity will be evident on the staging front as well, thanks to sumptuous background drops and other set pieces that Morris inherited from those previous Pittsburgh forays and has used in every production since.
There’s a certain synchronicity to the scheduling of this Gatsby, given that the current Broadway musical has just begun a national tour that will arrive at Walt Disney Theater at Dr. Phillips Center in February of next year as part of the AdventHealth Broadway in Orlando series.
Morris says he’s happy for the coincidence, especially as his group gets the chance to go first. But even if they hadn’t, he wouldn’t worry that the story was in danger of losing the
resonance that it has enjoyed for the past century.
“I think that everybody at one point or another in their life has brushed up against that kind of Gatsby enigma,” he says. “Whether it’s an athlete or an actor or a Steve Jobs-type businessperson. Wanting to be close to fame and fortune is part of the fabric of our society.”
Dr. Phillips Center is located at 445 South Magnolia Avenue, Orlando. For more information, call or visit the website.
