“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
Premiered in 2018 at the Avignon Festival, as part of France Culture’s public productions at the Calvet Museum, Le Magnifique is a musical adaptation of Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece (The Great Gatsby, published in 1925) at the crossroads of jazz, classical music, pop and hip hop, with Sofiane Zermani.
Gatsby wants to escape his ‘poor’ condition. He wants to ward off fate. He invents another life, a character, an ideal, and he does everything to resemble it point by point. He succeeds. Except that, in his frantic race towards the perfection of his dream, he forgets reality. And he collides with it, crashes into it, is torn apart by it. As a witness to this shattered destiny, Nick Carraway recounts his meeting with Gatsby in West Egg, Long Island, in the summer of 1922. Years later he tells his story, as if still haunted by what he experienced that summer, by what he saw and understood about society, its codes and its violence. He is a narrator who never ceases to tell us his disgust while sublimating his friend Gatsby, by imbuing him with a power, a mystery, a magic. By giving us to see at every moment how magnificent Gatsby was that summer.
Pauline Thimonnier and Alexandre Plank
