IT’S MORE THAN A BALLET, IT’S A ✨ SHOW ✨ Kansas City Ballet Presents The Great Gatsby
This preview is brought you by the Kansas City Ballet.
“Men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line describes the flappers and sheiks of the Roaring 20s, and that’s the world Kansas City Ballet is about to conjure onstage. Audiences will step into a Jazz Age fever dream: a city of lights, excess and restless motion, where parties tilt toward delirium and desire flickers at the edges of every scene.
Kansas City Ballet presents The Great Gatsby May 8 to 17 at the Muriel Kauffman Theatre, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.
Kansas City Ballet’s new production, choreographed by Septime Webre, will feel less like a ballet and more like a full‑scale cultural event—an Art Deco apparition arriving by ship from across the Pacific, carrying with it the shimmer, moral ambiguity, and restless velocity of the 1920s, a world that still feels strangely close to our own.
Artistic Director Devon Carney searches for a word big enough to describe it.
“Wow,” he finally concedes. “That is Coming at the tail end of the novel’s centennial year, Carney finds the moment both uncanny and invigorating. “Can you believe it was 100 years ago?” he said. “It’s really cool to be able to celebrate the Art Deco period and the Jazz Age, and to do that here in a city that’s so well known for its jazz.”
Kansas City is, after all, one of the few American cities where the Jazz Age never fully receded. It can be found at 18th and Vine, of course, but it also lingers in the vestiges of Art Deco architecture, in the neon, in the way the streets still hum after midnight. Although Gatsby takes place on Long Island, it’s perfectly fitting to stage a ballet about literature’s most famous bootlegger here in Tom’s Town
Coming at the tail end of the novel’s centennial year, Carney finds the moment both uncanny and invigorating. “Can you believe it was 100 years ago?” he said. “It’s really cool to be able to celebrate the Art Deco period and the Jazz Age, and to do that here in a city that’s so well known for its jazz.”
Kansas City is, after all, one of the few American cities where the Jazz Age never fully receded. It can be found at 18th and Vine, of course, but it also lingers in the vestiges of Art Deco architecture, in the neon, in the way the streets still hum after midnight. Although Gatsby takes place on Long Island, it’s perfectly fitting to stage a ballet about literature’s most famous bootlegger here in Tom’s Town.
A Ballet With a Passport
Webre’s Gatsby has traveled widely. Created in 2010 for Washington Ballet, the work was later reimagined with new sets and costumes during Webre’s tenure at Hong Kong Ballet. Carney followed its evolution closely.
“I had seen his production in Washington and then again on video from Hong Kong,” he said. “After which, I just thought, ‘We really need to get this ballet to this country.’”
The challenge was daunting. The production is massive—sets, costumes, LED backdrop and a jazz band that functions as a character in its own right. Shipping it from Hong Kong required a consortium: Cincinnati Ballet, Kansas City Ballet, and Atlanta Ballet joined forces to bring the work stateside. Cincinnati performed it last fall; and now it’s Kansas City’s turn.
Why Gatsby Works as Ballet
Fitzgerald’s novel is famously interior—Nick Carraway’s gaze, Gatsby’s longing, Daisy’s evasions. But Carney argues that the shifting emotions translate naturally into movement.
“It’s quite a story for starters,” he said. “There’s plenty of plot twists and multiple plots simultaneously going on. It lends itself to lots of duets and big parties and intrigue and love.”
And the Roaring Twenties are so associated with dance. The Charleston, the Black Bottom, the shimmy—social dances that broke decisively from Victorian restraint. Webre’s choreography leans into that kinetic liberation.
“People were really cutting loose in the twenties,” Carney says. “Even the styles of dress lent themselves to a more movement‑based society… sparkles and bangles and things that shimmered and shook.”
Carney has seen several Gatsby ballets over the years, but Webre’s struck him as the most theatrically coherent. “This is the one I’ve enjoyed the most and feel like it’s the one that can tell the story most succinctly and be entertaining at the same time.”
In an interview with Hong Kong’s Zolima City Mag, Webre spoke about how Gatsby was written at a time when certain cities were experiencing a financial and creative explosion. “This was a period when select urban centres around the world had this special kind of renaissance,” Webre said. “Certainly in New York, where the story is set, there was a financial renaissance that gave us the world of The Great Gatsby, but also the Harlem Renaissance. Paris had Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Picasso. And Shanghai was similar.”
And Kansas City. There was a reason why native son Virgil Thompson called his hometown “Paris of the Plains.” Boss Tom Pendergast and his corrupt political machine kept the booze flowing throughout the prohibition, allowing a thriving nightclub and jazz scene to boom. And in an era when railroads dominated cross-country transportation, Union Station, the third largest train station in the country, made Kansas City America’s crossroads and an important stop on the vaudeville circuit. W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers and many other stars put on shows here. Even the Ballets Russes with Vaslav Nijinsky performed in Kansas City.
A Jazz Band in the Pit and Kansas City Voices on Stage
Gatsby will be performed with a seven‑piece jazz band, Billy Novick’s Blue Syncopators, a Boston‑based ensemble that has played the score since the ballet’s inception.
“This is not your normal ballet,” Carney says. “This is a show, and a big show.”
The production also features three larger-than-life local performers: Tanner Rose, who will narrate the role of Nick Carraway; Eboni Fondren, whose offstage vocals and onstage presence anchor the party scenes, and Lonnie McFadden, Kansas City’s tap legend, whose cameo is sure to add an unforgettable spark.
Carney lights up when he talks about the first day these artists walked into the studio. “They were just completely in awe of what the dancers are doing,” he said. “And likewise the dancers were completely in awe of their capabilities.”
Light, Screens and Spectacle
The production’s visual world is equally ambitious. The sets and costumes were designed by Tim Yip, who won an Academy award for Best Art Direction for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Tim, a Hong Kong artist who espouses what he calls “New Orientalism,” gives his Gatsby production a touch of the Shanghai Art Deco aesthetic.
Lighting designer Trad A Burns—Carney’s collaborator for more than two decades—returns to sculpt the stage in what Carney calls “an invisible art form.”
“The way he brings a performance to light gives you the opportunity to feel the emotions of any particular scene.”
But the most striking element may be the LED architecture: a full back wall of LED screens that replaces the traditional backdrop, shifting continuously from scene to scene. Above it floats a triangular cluster of smaller LED panels, an abstract Art Deco constellation that glows and morphs throughout the evening.
“It’s like a giant abstract painting that’s always slowly, quietly changing shape,” Carney says. “All of these things combined… this is something our Kansas City community has never seen or experienced before.”
The effect is immersive, cinematic, and strangely intimate, Fitzgerald by way of digital fresco.
Calling All Flappers and Sheiks
Carney encourages audiences to lean into the period.
“Dress up when you come to the show,” he says. “Feel free to have fun and try to figure out something from the 1920s to wear.”
At Cincinnati’s performances, he saw flapper dresses, bob‑cut wigs, headbands with fringe, straw boaters—the whole spectrum of Jazz Age cosplay. Kansas City, with its flair for occasion, is likely to rise to the challenge.
For all its glitter, Gatsby remains a story about longing, illusion, and the moral decay of America.
“You can change the names and the faces and the time period, and it could be about today as well,” Carney said.
That’s the quiet power of this production: beneath the Charleston and the champagne towers, the novel’s ache remains intact. It is, in Carney’s words, “a truly unique experience”— a rare chance to see a major international production given a unique flavor by performers in a city that is steeped in the era and the music.
And yes, “wow” is exactly the right word.