The Roaring '20s revisited

Some things get better with age. Septime Webre's The Great Gatsby certainly has. In 2010, Webre, then the artistic director of the Washington Ballet, had adapted F Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel for the stage. Having joined Hong Kong Ballet as its artistic director in 2017, Webre staged Gatsby with HK Ballet dancers in 2019, but retained the original production's music ensemble - Billy Novick's Blue Syncopators jazz band, and lead female vocalist E Faye Butler, whose full-throated rendering of Jazz Age classics such as the Lemuel Fowler-composed He May Be Your Man packs power enough to switch on the house lights.

Last week, HK Ballet brought back Fitzgerald's time-honored tale of love, longing, betrayal and jealousy to the Hong Kong Cultural Centre for a limited run. Set in the super-rich Long Island milieu of the 1920s - and partly in the working-class "Valley of Ashes", a sprawling garbage dump in the north of New York City (since reinvented as Flushing Meadows) - Gatsby is a study in contrasts. The pursuit of the American Dream ends differently for the story's narrator, Nick Carraway, and its protagonist, Jay Gatsby, the self-made multimillionaire who acquires everything money can buy and more but is consumed by his unrequited love for the shallow and self-absorbed socialite Daisy Buchanan.

The tone is set in the opening scene, as the curtains part to reveal the monumental art deco gate of Gatsby's estate. Nick, who is nowhere near as rich as Gatsby or the Buchanans, is often shown to be on the wrong side of this intricately designed cast-iron beauty with jumping-deer patterns.

The set and costumes by Academy Award-winner Tim Yip underscore the conflict between old wealth (a lone pin-tucked sofa is enough to suggest the living room of Daisy and Tom Buchanan's home on Long Island's East Egg, complemented by French windows looking out on a serene, digitally animated sea) and the nouveaux riches. Gatsby's West Egg residence comes with an indoor fountain, and a giant, digital screen for a ceiling, with splashes of loud colors making kaleidoscopic patterns on it.