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Unless you’ve recently read the novel, the effect is confusing: sketchy on plot and overstuffed with filler (including somewhat anachronistic songs and dances, less period than exclamation point). Unlike Elevator Repair Service’s epic Gatz, which staged the text of Fitzgerald’s novel in its entirety, Wright’s version is consumable only in bits and pieces what you see of the story depends on where you happen to have been led. That was, grosso modo, my experience of this Gatsby as a whole. The Great Gatsby | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus

I can’t say I understood what was happening or why, but I also can’t complain. Individual audience members may also be given particular roles to play at one point, for example, I was tasked with helping Gatsby (a dashing Joél Acosta) change into a new suit behind a screen on the steps of the ballroom. Ten actors wander among the spectators, who are divided into groups and guided to different locations to watch side stories unfold, then periodically reassembled in the central space to witness important moments. Set designer Casey Jay Andrews has transformed the hotel’s ballroom and multiple adjacent spaces to evoke the Art Deco glitz of Long Island arriviste Jay Gatsby’s bedeviled West Egg mansion the atmosphere is enhanced by costumer Vanessa Leuck and lighting designer Jeff Croiter. Having run for years in the United Kingdom, the production has now Lindy Hopped across the pond to set up shop at midtown’s Park Central Hotel-the very spot where mobster Arnold Rothstein, who inspired the book’s character Meyer Wolfsheim, was rubbed out in 1928. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” This is one of many lines that director Alexander Wright has retained in his immersive theatrical adaptation of F. “I like large parties,” says the breezy lady golfer Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby.