Making Great Grand!

Making Great Grand!

Susan Ferley has been spending a lot of time in the Jazz Age -- and it feels great.

Appropriately, it also feels grand.

The Grand Theatre artistic director is directing the Canadian premiere of an adaption of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic American novel The Great Gatsby. The Grand Gatsby opens on Friday.

American theatre creator Simon Levy's take on the 1925 Fitzgerald classic and the tragic entanglement of self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby (Mike Shara) with the elusive beauty Daisy Buchanan (Christine Thorne) is already finding timeless moments for Ferley.

Ferley only read The Great Gatsby in recent years. She'd learned about the availability of the Levy script, which won raves in U.S. productions. She quickly became an admirer of the novel and the play - and, now, of the Grand cast.

"I don't usually talk about this but there was a moment in the run (Sunday) . . . where it just took my breath away. (Shara) claimed a moment," Ferley said Monday. "There was this beautiful moment between (Gatsby) and Daisy which obviously takes two people, Christine and Mike working so beautifully together."

Ferley praised the main stage production's "strong ensemble." As the title character, Shara brings star turns at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in everything from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest to Harold Pinter's The Homecoming.

Ferley's Daisy Buchanan is Toronto actor Horne, who has starred opposite Ellen Burstyn in the film of The Stone Angel and played Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay on the stage.

Levy's script follows Fitzgerald in having the Gatsby-Daisy world seen through the innocent eyes of the young narrator, Nick Carraway.

National Theatre School grad Greg Gale is Carraway at the Grand.

"He's a wonderful young actor," Ferley said. "I saw him this summer. He was in the production of Vimy at Blyth. I was very intrigued by him."

The Grand is also adding an era-appropriate score as an atmospheric soundtrack for the Fitzgeraldian world of love, death and the American dream.

In that quest, Ferley has found echoes of her involvement in the Grand's recent workshopping of London playwright David Scott's Lombardo-themed play-in-progress The Sweetest Sound. Like Gatsby, the Scott play and the Lombardo music it celebrates are centred in the 1920s a.k.a. the Jazz Age.

"We were doing musical research for 'Lombardo' and all of a sudden, I'm going, 'Oh, my goodness, this is crossing over - the blues and the jazz and the different styles, the ragtime, that are referenced in the script for Gatsby," Ferley said. "We were immersed in this world and we have been for the last little while."

Music co-ordinator and composer Floydd Ricketts, a Beal secondary school theatre grad and The High School Project at the Grand, is finding inspiration in the sounds of the 1920s. Jazz Age tragic figure Bix Beiderbecke's piano piece In the Dark may be finding its Grand home as the Ricketts-styled theme for Daisy.

Gatsby is set in a fictionalized version of Long Island about 90 years ago. Still, The Great Gatsby has the sense of today's global truths about wealth, fame, dreams and values through it.

Ferley has noticed how 2012 is becoming the year of Gatsby with interest in film, opera and stage versions buzzed about.

"There is a resonance in terms of our recent financial crisis . . . it's resonant of some of the things we've been encountering of late," Ferley said.

Click here to watch The London Free Press' video of The Great Gatsby.