You’re Invited To Party With The Great Gatsby

For nearly a century, readers have been swept up in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s vision of the Roaring Twenties and Jazz Age hedonism in and around New York, with all the attendant violent delights and ashen dreams.

This week, immersive theatergoers can experience that world themselves, when “The Great Gatsby: The Immersive Show” opens at New York’s Park Central Hotel.

It might be time to brush up on your Charleston dancing skills.

Creator Alexander Wright spoke to Forbes about how it all began, the appeal of immersive theater over traditional theater, and why the New York incarnation of the show feels like its ultimate form.

Alexander, your version of “The Great Gatsby” was meant to run for four weeks in an empty pub in York in 2015. Can you tell us a little about that run — and how/when you realized the show could have a bigger life?

We made that first production of “The Great Gatsby” in York as a big adventure. We were running a local pub that was going to be closed down, and we took it over to run as a grassroots arts and community space. As we came to the end of our tenure, we thought, Oh, when’s the next time we’re going to have a three-storey building on our hands? — so we decided to have an experiment and make “The Great Gatsby.”

Me and producer Brian Hook texted a bunch of our mates and got the ball rolling. It was a hugely DIY team effort. We spent our time equally rehearsing, painting all the rooms of the building, and hoping what we were doing was a good idea. We boarded up the front of the pub and put a tiny sign on the door saying “Drugstore closed” so all the audience had to come in down an alley at the side of the building, and over a fire escape on the roof. It was a lot of fun.

On the first night of the show, seven audience members turned up, and they had a great time. By the end of the run no one could get a ticket for love nor money. It felt exciting, to watch people experience a story in that way, and to watch that story take place in so many ways around a building we’d lovingly transformed into our Jazz Age world.

There are a lot of wonderful memories from that first run, and every time I pass that building — it’s now a bathroom showroom — I’m flooded with such warmth. York is a small city, and it felt amazing to have made such a different piece of work in my hometown, and to see the local creative community come and support.

After that, everyone we described the show to seemed amazed and excited. And so many people said, “My goodness, I wish I’d seen that” that we started to think, Oh, well maybe we could do it again next year.

So, in 2016 we restaged the show in a different building in York and had a blast. By then we’d also had some great conversations with VAULT Festival — a beautiful festival in London held in the railway arches beneath Waterloo -— and decided to install the show there for their full festival run early in 2017. That felt like a huge move: physically building the show in a railway tunnel. To our absolute surprise, the whole run sold out before we opened. And so the next conversation started… and it’s been that way ever since.

Since we started, since we had the first idea, we have just kept saying yes to the next idea, kept saying yes to the next thing where we or someone else has said, “You know, you could do this…” And we’ve thought about it for a minute and then set about trying to make it happen.

So many of the people who created that first show in our York pub are still right at the heart of the show. Brian is still the producer, Ollie and Amie who played Gatsby and Daisy are the associate directors, Holly who played Jordan is the choreographer, Phil who played George is the sound designer… It’s a big family, and that sense of adventure in play-making and that feeling of excitement in welcoming an audience in to that world, still fuels it all I think. We haven’t done the show for just seven people in a while, though…

You’ve said you’ve never staged a “traditional” theater show. What is it about immersive theater that you prefer over traditional theater? Why do you think the immersive medium is a better fit for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story than the more traditional alternative?

I think, for me, the most important thing is the live alchemy between audience, story and space. How we are able to invite an audience into a particular space to best experience whatever story we’re trying to tell? If we look at things from that perspective — What’s the best way to tell this story? — you’d be hard pushed to arrive at the pretty peculiar arrangement of traditional theatre, where a large number of people sit in the dark mainly being ignored by a handful of people on a stage. It just doesn’t really make sense to me.

I think the real-life meeting of story and audience is thrilling, so I always find the question of “What’s the best way to tell this story?” such a thrilling thing to investigate! Often the answers look so much more exciting than sitting in the dark for two hours. And, of course, some stories are so well told in that format.

For “The Great Gatsby,” a story so much about people, being able to invite people bodily into the narrative is just a dream come true. The narrative of “The Great Gatsby” is so fuelled by people and their decisions — their wants and hopes and fears — it’s a microcosm of a much bigger society, but in the way Fitzgerald has framed the story it’s a gorgeous and tragic tale really rooted in people. So we really wanted to invite people into that, rather than alienate them from it. These wild and vibrant parties described in the book, it’s such an enticing thing. But the story is much broader and deeper than our 21st century populist image of the Jazz Age. So being able to physically invite audience into one of those enticing parties, and then using the characters in the book, and subsequently their direct relationship with an audience, as the medium to map that much darker and more tragic shift, is just a dream.

Fitzgerald’s book is so enigmatic, and we’ve spent so much care and attention figuring how to adapt that into a real life show for an audience to step into. What’s the best way to tell this story? It’s for us to be able to live in that world for a couple of hours.

About the process of finding a suitable location for the show in New York: What kind of space did you need — and how did you and the team go about finding it? Does being in New York add something to the experience of the show?

New York is such a thriving city — it feels like you’re stood in the center of the universe. There’s such a thrumming energy in Fitzgerald’s novel, a sense that everything is possible and everything is busy being made and created. And I think New York still feels like that. It’s such an urgent and energetic place. We’ve got to know “The Great Gatsby” so well over the years, but arriving in this city, to tell this story, it’s like hearing it all again for the first time. It’s thrilling.

We’ve made the show in so many different spaces, and on so many different scales. Right now it’s also on in Wales in a different empty pub with the brilliant Theatr Clwyd, for an audience of 80 people a night. We’ve done it in empty shop buildings, old converted church halls, stately homes, old factories, railway tunnels… And in each place the story shifts a little because we as an audience naturally respond to space and our route to and through that space. Arriving to an unmarked shutter in a quiet part of London Bridge is so different to walking through the beautiful grounds of Castle Howard.

So, in terms of finding a space that can work, there’s no right or wrong answers. There are some facts — we need to be able to fit all the audience in a central space and we need however many other spaces around that. But we’re pretty inventive and adept at imagining how we might tell the story around certain spaces. And so many of the spaces we’ve worked in already have a heap of character — which is both a blessing and a curse.

But our New York home is different. It’s the first time we’ve installed the show from scratch, where we’ve built almost every part of it. I walked into a massive empty space in December 2021 and thought, Yeah, we can fit it all in here, and we’ll need to build the whole lot, which is a pretty amazing place to be.

There are so many creative things that are a joy about pretty much building the show from scratch. But there is also a heap of practical things that we got to decide which is amazing — the width of corridors, how many ways in and out of different rooms there are, being able to control every single lightbulb in every room — all the things we’ve learnt over the years we got to implement in this build, which is a dream. Our amazing designer, Casey Jay Andrews, did such a wonderful job of carving up a huge space and creating all these smaller worlds we wanted to realize for this version. And I say “for this version,” but actually it feels like The Version. Maybe that’s it — we’ve spent the last seven or so years making sure we know what we’re doing so we can do This. To tell this story, in this city, is a dream come true. But I also stand by that first idea in 2015, to invite people into the very heart of Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age is a thrilling and constant adventure.