#noah j ricketts

[jesterlesbian]

NOAH J. RICKETTS as Frankie Hines in Fellow Travelers (2023)

[bethccassidy]

FELLOW TRAVELERS 1x05 “Promise You Won't Write” (2023) Dir. James Kent

[b3y0ndm3asur3]

fellow travelers + reductress part 2

part 1, part 3, part 4

[vivitalks]

Last night I saw the Great Gatsby musical. Before I went, I reread the Great Gatsby book (for the first time since 11th grade!) to get a refresher on the source material and the original story. Having the book so fresh in my mind made seeing the musical really interesting, and now I am going to do something I never thought I'd do, which is post some lengthy meta about The Great Gatsby. If you haven't seen the musical, this post may still be interesting to read, but it does contain some mild spoilers, so I leave that up to you. If you also haven't read the book, godspeed lol.

There's a lot I could talk about here when it comes to the way the book was adapted for the stage. But there's one particular thing I want to zero in on in this post, and that's the "unreliable narrator" of it all.

In the book, Nick Carraway is our narrator. He's an unreliable narrator practically by default - the idea is that he's retelling events that occurred two years prior, from memory. But even knowing that Nick is probably not reporting all events and characters with complete accuracy, it's hard to know which parts exactly are wrong, or what might have happened in reality, because even though he's an unreliable narrator, he's still the only narrator and this is the only version of events we know. We're forced to take Nick as our surrogate and take him at his word. Until the musical.

(I wondered how the show was going to deal with the fact that the story of Great Gatsby is not only told by an unreliable narrator but also by an outside perspective - generally speaking the events of the Great Gatsby aren't happening to Nick, they're just kind of happening around him. Yet he's the voice of the story, so in that way he's central to it, and I was curious how they were going to balance that fact with the fact that Gatsby is functionally the main character.

I think they struck a really good balance in the end. Nick's beginning and ending lines, lifted verbatim from his book narration, frame him clearly as the anchor of the story - I think that's the best word for it; the audience jumps from scene to scene, many but not all of which contain Nick, but we know that Nick is always going to be where the action is, or that he will at least know about it. He may not be the main character, but he's an essential character. But I digress a little bit.)

The difference between the way the story is imparted to the audience in the book versus in the musical boils down to this: in the book, Nick "plays" every character, so all their dialogue and actions, their mannerisms and the way they're described and reported, it's all informed by the beliefs Nick holds about them. Whether he means to or not, his biases paint certain characters in certain lights, and because he is our eyes and ears to the story, we have no choice but to absorb those biases.

But in the musical, every character is literally played by a different actor. Nick can only speak for himself. Nick can only tell his own parts as they happened. He may be "telling" the story, but we're watching the story. We have the benefit of an unblemished perspective on things - we can watch the events the way they actually unfold, regardless of how Nick believes or remembers they went down.

This difference - between Nick as the narrator and Nick as merely his own voice - is crucial in how the musical develops each character, some of them fairly different from how Nick described them in the book. And there's one book-to-stage change - a fairly small one, all things considered - that, to me, illustrated this difference perfectly.

There's a line towards the end of the Gatsby book. Something Nick says in narration, after his final conversation with Tom Buchanan, talking about how Tom gave away Gatsby's name and location to George Wilson (which ultimately led to Gatsby's death). Nick writes:

"I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…"

When I read this line in the book, I couldn't help vehemently agreeing. Screw those rich assholes! Money does corrupt! Tom and Daisy ARE careless wealthy people! It was easy to side with Nick, not only because he was the only perspective on the situation that I had, but also because he said this in internal response to a conversation with Tom, who, I think we can all agree, is a major jackass and a deeply unsympathetic character.

But in the musical, this line is spoken aloud by Nick. And he says it to Daisy, in her house, as she's packing up to skip town after Gatsby's death. In fact, he doesn't just say it; he shouts it, visibly and audibly outraged at her audacity to lead Gatsby on, ghost him, skip his funeral, and then move away to avoid the fallout. Nick is angry and highly critical of Daisy. But because we're no longer confined to his shoes, we also get to see Daisy's reaction - not as Nick remembers it, but as Daisy actually reacts. And because of that, we're able to really see, and confirm, that "Daisy is rich and careless" is not the full story.

I have to credit Eva Noblezada for a phenomenal performance (duh). Daisy in this scene is emotional, grieving, and it's clear she has been trying to contain these feelings for the sake of her husband and her own sanity. She's remorseful, not that Gatsby is gone necessarily, but that she allowed herself to entertain the fantasy of running away with him, only for it to be torn from her. She is trying to make the best of her unavoidable reality. And then Nick tears her a new one, calling her careless, accusing her of destroying things and being too rich to care.

And as I watched that scene, I was no longer wholly on Nick's side. I understood that this situation was so much more complex than Nick's chastisement acknowledged. Sure, Daisy wasn't innocent, but she also wasn't the callous rich girl Nick made her out to be. She did love Gatsby. And she also had a whole life with Tom. She had a daughter. She was a woman in the 1920s! That's a kind of life sentence even wealth can't erase.

The way Daisy responded may not quite have landed with Nick (if we consider the kind of fun possibility that the musical is the events as they happened and the book is Nick retelling those events as he remembers them two years later, then clearly Nick's disdain for Daisy's actions overtook whatever sympathy he felt for her), but the musical gave Daisy the opportunity to appeal to us. The audience. Having this omniscient perspective of things allowed us to draw our own conclusions, and I found myself a lot more sympathetic towards Daisy when I could both see and hear how she responded to Nick's verbal castigation.

In the book, Nick is the narrator. In the musical, Nick is a narrator. But he's no longer the sole arbiter of the story. The audience got to make our own judgements on the events as we witnessed them. Every one of us was a Nick - beholden to our own biases, maybe, but at least not beholden to his.

[theonlyadawong]

The Great Gatsby

Paper Mill Playhouse, 2023

Dir. Marc Bruni

(Photos by Jeremy Daniel)

[john-cardoza]

tick, tick…BOOM! at Bucks County Playhouse

[jdsmineralwater]

lads does anyone have a great gatsby slime tutorial with video??? im willing to trade

[livevamarias]

bwaygatsby: THE PARTY BEGINS IN ONE WEEK 🥂 Rehearsal Room 📷 by Matt Murphy

[i-eat-homeless-people]

GUESS WHO JUST SAW GREAT GATSBY

(review under the cut)

IT WAS SO FANTABULICIOUS OMG

Eva Noblezada and Sam Pauly were out😔 but their understudies were great! I didn't really like Eva's understudy that well but she was great.

There was no Natsby whatsoever, but i think (particularly at the end) they did a good job portraying how Gatsbys "love" was more of an obsession.

THINGS THAT I LIKED LOVED:

Jeremy Jordan😍😍

Noah J. Ricketts was actually CARRYING this show.

Noah's crying at the end😭😭😭 HOW DOES HE DO THAT ITS SO RAW

The sets were GORGEOUS!!!!!!!!

It was actually very funny (act one)

THE FLASHING GREEN LIGHT AFTER MY GREEN LIGHT

the beginning and end parallels

The way Jeremy falls into the pool!!!

HOW DO THEY DO THE CARS. PLEASE SOMEBODY TELL ME

Myrtles onstage-half-a-second quick change during secondhand suit was FIRE

The billboard😍😍

Jordans and Nicks interaction after Only Tea😭😭😭😭😭😭 IT WAS HILARIOUS

*deep voice* "I was attracted to your looks but fell in love with your mind"

*high noel gruber gasp* "AUGH!! I would marry you event if you were penniless! 😍🎀"

ONLY TEA. that's it that's the point

JerJor's jump over the fence😭

THE CHANDELIER I WAS LAUGHING SO HARD

shady was fire 🔥

"SUMMER!!" *tosses shirt* "SPRING!!!" *tosses more shirts*

all the sexual stuff (my ace ass could NOT handle that lol)

I was actually SO HYPED beforehand

it was AWESOME 10/10 recommend how did it not get best musical tony istg

[talesaroundthefire]

listen i love my little showtunes so much but only tea has actually been ON LOOP in my head all day (i’m talking 13 hours) and i’ve listened to it at least 10 times now. i don’t know what can be done about this. i couldn’t even tell you why i love it so much, it’s inhibiting my ability to articulate thoughts that complicated

[eekub988]

noah j. ricketts has such a nice voice ESP in this part it’s not appreciated nearly enough

absolute icon

[jesterlesbian]

JELANI ALLADIN as Marcus Gaines and NOAH J. RICKETTS as Frankie Hines in Fellow Travelers (2023)

[bethccassidy]

FELLOW TRAVELERS 1x07 “White Nights” (2023) Dir. Destiny Ekaragha

[kdlavs]

24 Days to goooo 💥

Fellow Travelers Trailer ✨

[b3y0ndm3asur3]

hello??? i need this to happen asap!

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