Atlanta Ballet
Turning a great American novel into a dance requires ambition, nerve and a keen sense of theatrical storytelling, but that did not deter Atlanta Ballet Artistic Director John McFall and choreographer-in-residence Lauri Stallings from taking on The Great Gatsby. Their resulting world première, staged at the Fox Theatre in February, was infused with the same shimmering lyricism and smoldering sensuality as novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age tragedy of love, infidelity and death.
The performance unspooled like a flickering celluloid dream, opening and closing with a scene of Gatsby (Jonah Hooper) alone in his mansion, puffing a cigarette and watching a whispery film of his beloved Daisy (Courtney Necessary). As the projector clicks, his shadow-angel frolics on the screen in front of him. She will be his awakening and his undoing.
Before a bullet propels Gatsby to its shattering conclusion, there’s emotive and evocative dancing in fizzy, percolating choreography that conveys the excesses that defined the glittering 1920s. The piece is appropriately set to recordings of vintage tunes by Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and others.
In a kicky introductory sequence, maids scoot around with boxes of clothes; Daisy and her confidante Jordan (Nicole Johnson) play peek-a-boo behind a sofa; and Daisy’s polo-playing husband, Tom (Christian Clark), arrives in a huff. Later, in a bustling Manhattan of colliding nuns, schoolgirls and traffic cops, the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway (Nathan Griswold), glides onstage under a red umbrella, offering another ethereal image.
Yet inside this glistening bubble, sumptuously lit by Robert Hand Jr., anguish exerts a sad undertow. In a yearning solo, Gatsby reaches out for the green light at the end of Daisy and Tom’s Long Island dock, and we follow Tom to the “valley of ashes,” where his desperate mistress, Myrtle (Anne Tyler Harshbarger), lives with her husband, George (John Welker). In these dark interludes the ballet offers a glimpse of the era’s sordid underbelly: drunken
parties and a bottle-tossing free-for-all in a Prohibition speakeasy.
McFall and Stallings work on a scale both grand and intimate in a fluid, unfussy style that nonetheless manages to incorporate the guest choreographer’s quirky modernism. Lavish, white-gloved party scenes dissolve into urgent couplings, swooning solos and brittle goodbyes. Gatsby is elegant and passive, Daisy lost and fluttering, while Tom appears arrogant and aggressive, Myrtle low and brazen. Ultimately, George’s tenderness gets twisted inside out, bent on revenge.
In his 13 years at Atlanta Ballet, McFall has built a top-notch company of graceful, athletic dancers. In Stallings, he has found an inspired collaborator. Sexy and haunting, a fusion of gossamer and grit, The Great Gatsby was not only the dance event of the Atlanta season, but one of the loveliest theatrical experiences in recent memory. In a word: superb.
Wendell Brock is the theater critic for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
