"My Green Light" from The Great Gatsby: A New Musical

This is the full text from my submission to WCRB's Instant Replay: 075, which had been adapted for the WCRB website.

I've spent a good chunk of July in New York City where, thanks to rush/lottery tickets, I was able to see a whopping 10 Broadway shows in the span of like 2 weeks. One of those shows was The Great Gatsby. 

During the show, I was sitting in the front row of the uppermost balcony with a railing directly in front me. I was one of three in that row, seated right next to a mom and her daughter who were visiting New York from Germany. The daughter spoke English well enough, and could mostly follow along with the show. Her mom, however, could not. At various points throughout the show and after every song, the mom would turn to her daughter and ask for a quick summary of whatever just happened, or what the previous song was about. The daughter would occasionally turn to me to confirm before then translating everything back to her mom.

Now mind you, I have two favorite music genres: 80s power ballads, and Broadway power ballads. I am a simple man, and that man is a gigantic sap.

Cue the Act I closer. 

This song has everything. Grandiose declaration of a love that persisted against all odds? Check. Eva Noblezada in the original Broadway cast recording? Check. Jeremy Jordan also in the original Broadway cast, and singing in a range I can actually kind of match?? Check, check, and check. I have not only been listening to this on repeat for the past few weeks, I have been trying (in vain) to belt along to it as well. My neighbors here in NYC knocked on my wall at 8am one morning as I did so to remind me that it was, in fact, 8am, and that they do, in fact, have a baby they were trying to put down for a nap. 

But anyway.

The very first time I heard that song was in the theater during the live show. Over the course of the song, the mother, her daughter, and I had moved as far forward in our seats as physically possible, with our hands and chins rested in starry-eyed anticipation and awe on the balcony railing in front of us. 

By the end of this song, as the lights went on and the audience broke for intermission, instead of asking her daughter to translate what just happened, the mom just turned to us both and said “wow”.