The Jazz Age shimmies back to life at Brisbane Festival
One hundred years after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Brisbane Festival’s GATSBY at The Green Light celebrates F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal work in a delightfully saucy way.
The shadow cast by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, is long.
A century after its publication, one musical adaptation is currently playing Broadway, with a different interpretation on its way to London’s West End. Here in Brisbane, Twelfth Night Theatre in Bowen Hills has been given a serious spruce up to host a slick cabaret act in homage of Gatsby and Jazz Age excess, as part of this year’s Brisbane Festival.
The stage has been transformed into a smart cocktail bar where the waiters are pulling double duty. One moment they are serving drinks to audience members seated around small tables. The next they are grooving as a well-oiled ensemble.
It turns out everyone staffing this place has secret talents, including the bartender (Florian Vandemeulebroucke), who confidently juggles champagne flutes and serving trays before emerging later to manipulate light-up clubs.
The bar’s maître de is Bettie Bombshell, who sports a fabulous Art Deco-inspired sequined outfit and lives up to her name in a raunchy and commanding burlesque act.
Oscar Kaufmann’s early aerial number (featuring a hat stand suspended from the ceiling) is all class and expertly assembled. Daniela Del Mar surprises the audience as she flies about the space, suspended by her hair.
A few scraps of recorded dialogue aside, the show does not shed any new light on the complex relationship between Gatsby and Daisy. Towards the show’s end, however, we are treated to a sensual and hypnotic lyra (aerial hoop) act featuring the two characters (performed by Spencer Craig and Caitlin Marion Tomson-Moylan). The two artists also impress in their own individual performances, wrapping and rotating their bodies mid-air in inventive and unexpected ways.
As the production’s sole live musician, Georgia Sallybanks works hard to carry big numbers from Beyoncé, Barrett Strong and others. Some of the early songs lack a bit of oomph, but as the show reaches its moody crescendo, Sallybanks’s vocal narration smoulders.
Brisbane Festival audiences are experienced consumers of circus and burlesque in the Spiegeltent style. GATSBY at The Green Light is a well-balanced creation that samples its source material in visual and emotive cues, without requiring the audience to understand the intricacies of the plot or its commentary on the American Dream. (The bar that frames the production takes its name from the haunting light that Gatsby sees across the bay, flashing from Daisy’s dock.)
Subscribe for updates
Set designers Renier Jansen van Vuuren and Stuart Couzens are to be thanked for giving Twelfth Night Theatre a long overdue facelift. The dancers eat up Lucas Newland’s sharp, attacking choreography, and costumes by Mason Browne and Rose Jurd are stylish interpretations that allow the artists to showcase their incredible talents.
And, as a bonus act, they are serving the good stuff (Taittinger champagne) at the bar upstairs. Jay Gatsby would approve.
GATSBY at The Green Light plays at the Twelfth Night Theatre in Bowen Hills until September 28.