GATSBY

PRESENTED BY RUBY IN THE DUST

Adapted from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Book by Linnie Reedman
Music and Lyrics by Joe Evans
Featuring the Benoit Veillefon Orchestra

“GATSBY” has entered the vocabulary in recent times to become synonymous with glitz and glamour. But Fitzgerald, when writing “The Great Gatsby”, was trying to scratch beneath that veneer and show us the sadness and the desperation underneath the surface. Set in the ‘roaring twenties’, the predominant sound is the roar of engines, heading towards the inevitable crash. It was the end of the ‘American Dream’.

The party is over; the carnival is crumbling before our very eyes. But Gatsby really believed he could build a ladder to the stars. What he didn’t realise, as Fitzgerald reminds us in the final passages of the book, was that his ‘dream was already behind’ him.

Despite everything, the one thing that never truly dies is hope. From the ‘valley of ashes’, from the desolate landscape, hope springs eternal:

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning… So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach... Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.

Set in the sizzling heat of a 1920s New York Summer, Ruby In The Dust’s acclaimed adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic Jazz Age novel, GATSBY, was first presented in 2012 and again in 2013 when it received a BEST NEW MUSICAL – Off West End Award nomination. It had a run at the West End's Arts Theatre in November 2015, and runs at the fringe Union Theatre in April 2016, to mark ten years since Ruby in the Dust presented their first show at the Union in March 2006.