A world premiere musical will be debuting Friday, March 22, at the Fountain Hills Theater, but the story itself will be a familiar one for many theatergoers.
"The Great Gatsby" is based on the classic F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, taking us inside life in the Roaring '20s.
Peter Hill is the artistic director of the Fountain Hills Theater and wrote the new musical. He spoke about it with The Show.
Full conversation
PETER HILL: I've always liked the story. I read the book. Of course, I was one of those people who was forced in high school to read it.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah.
HILL: And I wish I could say there was a more altruistic reason, or anything like that, but I realized it was going into public domain in 2023 and started working on the script, basically during COVID.
BRODIE: So meaning when it goes into the public domain, you don't have to buy the rights to it, correct?
HILL: Yeah.
BRODIE: So how did you try to adapt the book, which has obviously been made into movies over the years? How do you try to adapt it for the stage?
HILL: Well, the first thing you do is stay away from the movies. You don't want to be taking anything from there. Yeah, go back to the book. Look at all the dialogue, look at everything, all the events, and try to put them in some kind of order. And of course, it's set in the Jazz Age, so that you immediately think, well, a musical works really well here. So that's how it started.
BRODIE: How closely to the book do you try to keep it? Because obviously you, as you say, you have to add songs in there. It's in the Jazz Age. But there's, you know, the references to sort of, you know, jazz and the music of the ‘20s. But there are no songs in the book, obviously.
HILL: Correct. The great part that, and I discovered this in the process of writing it, is that's an awful lot of quotes in the book that sound like song titles. Flat out. Daisy says “sophisticated, God, I'm sophisticated.” Well, my heaven. That's a song title, right there. So that the songs came almost entirely from quotes from the book.
BRODIE: Really?
HILL: Yeah, as Sean sits, sings a song called “Blue Garden”, which, of course, Gatsby was famous for the Blue Gardens. The hardest part of writing, frankly, was planning that this was going to be done in my very small theater. I had to write out the cars.
BRODIE: Really?
HILL: Yellow Rolls [Royce] and the blue coupe, that's such a big part of the story. Yeah, they're talked about, and we have a very interesting way of handling the finale. Don't give away too much.
BRODIE: Yeah, no spoilers.
HILL: But the car has never come on stage.
BRODIE: Is it a little surprising to you that there hasn't been a Gatsby musical before?
HILL: Well, I wish you guys would say that was true.
BRODIE: Oh, there have been?
HILL: There is actually one that just tried out at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, and they're trying to take it into Broadway right now. Ah, so my production, we might not make Broadway, but maybe we'll make Baseline.
BRODIE: I mean, do you have any way of knowing how close together those might be, in terms of, like, how similar or dissimilar they might be?
HILL: Well, you know, there's a few clips online where they've done some videos, some promo stuff. Yeah, I think our music hones closer to the period. Their production seems to be more pop oriented, a little more blues oriented than mine. Our production, Jay Melberg is the man who wrote the music for this and leans very heavily into jazz.
BRODIE: Interesting, I would imagine, with taking a classic, which Gatsby is despite, you know, being forced to read it in high school, like it's a classic of American literature. Do you feel pressure to like not screw it up, to not have people come who love the story and say, “This is not what I was hoping for?” Because that happens a lot with movies.
HILL: I never thought of that.
BRODIE: Yeah, sorry.
HILL: There's a lot of people who love this novel, and I'm quite certain that there's no way in the world I can please the purists entirely, but we're trying our best to stay in the spirit of the book. I quote it whenever possible. Let's be honest, what someone speaks on the novel page doesn't always translate into how we talk in real life, right? So, but I tried as best I could to stick to Fitzgerald's actual words.
BRODIE: And it's interesting, because I know that one of the Great Gatsby movies is a more modern adaptation of it. You know, sort of putting it in more modern times, sounds like that was a conscious decision you made not to do that.
HILL: Oh, yeah, we're definitely 1922. Yeah.
BRODIE: What went into that thinking?
HILL: You know, it's, it says a lot of what the story itself doesn't translate to today. The separation of the rich and the nouveau rich is not the same as it was then. And that, of course, is a bit. Part of it between Daisy Bucha and Jay Gatsby is one's old money and one's new money.
BRODIE: Right. So I imagine, given what you do, that you are somebody who has been interested in the arts in theater for quite a while?
HILL: I've been at the Fountain Hills Theater for 31 years. I've been directing for 40.
BRODIE: Wow. So I guess yes is the answer. I mean, when you, what do you think that your high school self would think about the fact that these years later, you have written a musical based on this book that you kind of had to read against your will?
HILL: Yeah, not my high school self would never have thought I was even in this business.
BRODIE: Really?
HILL: My high school self thought he'd be in jail soon.
BRODIE: So like, there are obviously some lessons that come out of the Great Gatsby, do you try to bring those out on stage, or do you just try to entertain?
HILL: Well it’s both. We're going to say what the book had to say. But the reality is, we're trying to have people have a good time. It is, after all, a musical, and we're trying to make them just have a good time.
BRODIE: Interesting. So like, where are you now in terms of getting ready? Because you have almost exactly a month until you open?
HILL: Yeah, we're at that point in any production where it's never going to work. I ah, we're we're we're struggling every day. We're staging it. The numbers are coming together, working on the choreography. It seems I make daily changes to the lyrics or the script, which, of course, freaks out the cast. I came in one day with an entire scene completely musicalized. It had been a spoken dialogue.
BRODIE: Oh my gosh.
HILL: Suddenly came in as entirely sung through.
BRODIE: Did your cast freak out?
HILL: And yeah, yeah, they sat down and worked on it. By the time we were done, it was half spoken and half sung, and now it's going to be a highlight of the show.
BRODIE: Wow. Do you have a sense of how many people in the cast have read the book?
HILL: No, I didn't ask them. Most of them have said exactly what I said. They read it in
high school.
BRODIE: OK, so they were familiar with the story?
HILL: Yeah.
BRODIE: Do you find that that helps in terms of trying to their interpretation of it when they're portraying these characters?
HILL: Well, they have some preconceived ideas of who the characters are, so that part of it starts, you know, where they've already got the stereotype of the period. Then we have to start honing in on the details and how it relates to them, and how they can bring their own, their own experience through the character as well, because that's what makes it real.
