The Roaring '20s revisited

HK Ballet rotated the dancers playing the seven main parts this season, with each role played by at least three different members of the company over eight shows. Going against convention, soloists and coryphees, rather than principal dancers, appeared in some of the meatiest of roles. Zhang Xuening, a coryphee playing Tom Buchanan's mistress, Myrtle Wilson, is a fine example. Seeking relief from her unexciting marriage to the owner of an unsuccessful auto-repair business, Myrtle ends up in an abusive relationship with Tom, sullying her reputation in the process. She is taken for a loose woman. Repeatedly thrown into the air and caught in the arms of the male guests at a party, Zhang plays one of the most physically demanding parts in Gatsby with amazing clarity.

The meticulously detailed scenes set in the streets of New York are a joy to watch. Some of the vignettes - a couple of robbers outsmarting the cop on their heels and the parade of earnest-looking school girls led by a nun, for example - provide some of the lighter moments in a piece where the default scale is larger than life.

Wong Tan-ki's tap-dancing number is a virtuoso act, though it comes across as a standalone solo, with no apparent connections to the plot.

James Seol plays the narrator and also sings the male parts. His hauntingly beautiful rendition of the 1923 Irving Berlin number What'll I Do? bookends the production. A throwback to Jack Clayton's 1974 film adaptation of the novel, the song is likely to leave a searing imprint on the minds of all those who have loved and lost.