The multi award-winning new musical, The Great Gatsby, which opened at New York's Broadway Theatre in April 2024, successfully transferred to London's West End at the London Coliseum in April 2025 for a limited summer run that lasts until September.

Produced by Chunsoo Shin and directed by Marc Bruni, The Great Gatsby is set in -- and helped to define -- the Jazz Age of the 1920s, with millionaire Jay Gatsby's world one of lavish opulence and glitzy parties.

The new musical features music by Jason Howland, choreography by Dominique Kelley, book by Kait Kerrigan and lyrics by Nathan Tysen. The scenic and projection design and lighting are handled by the decade-long collaborative partnership of Paul Tate dePoo III and lighting designer, Cory Pattak.

Pattak talks to PRG UK, the lighting, control and atmosphere supplier for the London production, about his inspirations and vision for the show and PRG UK's part in transferring it to the West End:

"Everyone has their own idea of what Gatsby should be," Pattak says. "In America especially, people have a strong connection to the story with its many themes and nuances, and arrive at the theatre with their own preconceived ideas. But first and foremost, they all expect the opulence and lavishness of Gatsby's parties. We realized early on that it's impossible to please everyone, so we decided to make the version we would want to see, and we seem to have satisfied the audience's expectations."

Bucking the current Broadway trend for minimalist sets, DePoo and Pattak adopted a maximalist approach to deliver a production of great scale and size, ensuring the audience receives "value for money" and experiences that opulence and extravagance that they expect from Gatsby. "There's no subtlety," states Pattak. "This show does not hide in the shadows!"

The team says they are are very proud to have a full set of physical scenery which is supplemented and extended by the video and augmented by cohesive lighting so that the audience can barely tell where one finishes and the other starts. "One of our reviews announced 'Big Broadway is Back!' and it's become a favorite mantra of ours!"

On stage, The Great Gatsby is a glowing world lit up in golds, warms, and tungsten where Pattak and DePoo use lighting to extend the scenery, and spill the video content into the scenery, blending all those elements together to make Gatsby's world feel gold-encrusted and endlessly tall and wide, disappearing up into the flies and out into the wings.

"On top of this we play with a lot of teals, blues and greens amid many references to the Bay (the other side of which lives Gatsby's unattainable object of love, Daisy Buchanan) and the swimming pool (the cold light of which emanates up from the orchestra pit) which plays a critical role in the story. We augment this with lots of refractions and reflections.

"As the teals and blues work their way into Gatsby's world of gold and tungsten, becoming more pronounced as the show goes on, they symbolize the encroachment of reality into his world. As Gatsby stares into the green light that marks the spot of Daisy house on the opposite side of the bay, it becomes a manifestation of his obsession with trying to win her back. This in turn is a larger reflection of the pursuit of the American Dream -- something unattainable which nevertheless people strive for. There is a dark underside to ambition and we show this by playing subtly with the green light."

However, somewhat controversially, the overriding mood is that of one big party or romantic period piece in which only the discerning spot those undercurrents. "It's important as designers not to be ahead of the characters, but to tell the story as they are experiencing it," explains Pattak. "By the closing of Act 1, with the song 'My Green Light,' Gatsby still believes he is part of a great love story. It is only later that he comes to realize he's in a tragedy. We therefore light this scene with the intensity and veracity befitting the emotions Gatsby is feeling at that moment. It's as if Gatsby was lighting his own love story."

Pattak and his team lost none of this opulence in transferring the show to the West End. "There were no sacrifices from the artistic point of view -- we brought the full production and upgraded it," he says "We were very lucky to find a venue in the London Coliseum that was so befitting Gatsby."

This begins with the architecture of the Coliseum itself: "The Coliseum's beautiful auditorium is quite possibly the most stunning I have ever seen!" states Pattak who experienced it for the first time in November 2024. "I was blown away by the detail of the architecture on the walls -- golden sculptures, busts, medallions, angels, golden chariot riders on top of lions -- it was instantly the most Gatsby-esque room you can imagine!

"We knew we had to take advantage of it as we would never have Gatsby in such a room again, so we devoted a lot of energy and fixtures to lighting all the room details we could find. We put specials on every detail, then bathed the whole thing in a teal wash to tie into the fill curtain. The audience enters to the sound of waves crashing and there are audible gasps from them as they come in. It sets them up for an amazing night from the moment they enter.

"I'm also very conscious of the power of social media so I wanted to give a strong flavor of what the show looks like to those who haven't seen it, with the aim of encouraging others to come along and experience it for themselves. This is the one time the audience can take photos and I want to be sure they can share something really tantalizing: the first thing they see is a green light slowly pulsing on the show drop -- it looks very exciting!"

Unusually, the London Coliseum's stage is a similar size to the Broadway Theatre, so no downsizing was required, leaving room for tweaks and upgrades to the original design. "We are always looking for places to improve, and made a few changes and additions with the help of PRG sourcing what we needed," says Pattak. "Personally I feel the London version is the best looking right now.

"We upgraded the way we controlled the haze, fog and smoke by integrating them into the London deck in a way I'm very pleased with," continues Pattak, the atmosphere now provided by a mixture of MDG ATM APS haze generators, Look Solutions Unique and Viper NT fog generators and Cryo-Fogger low pressure generators.

Due to the Coliseum's extra throw distances and the greater output requirement against the large amount of video wall, the team upgraded its main Broadway lighting fixture, the Vari-Lite VL2600, to the VL3600 for London. "I was happy because it's a brighter fixture and has more features, but there were some lighting positions where we couldn't put a fixture that large, so some of our side light turned into ETC Halcyon Gold Ultrabrights, and some of our balcony rail fixtures became Ayrton Rivale Profiles which are smaller and lighter," says Pattak.

Similarly, the Coliseum's follow spot positions are much further away (125' - 140') but the ceiling is not high enough for traditional followspots, so the team used three Robe iForte LTX long-throw versions (an upgrade from Broadway's Robe iForte). "I believe these are one of the brightest on the market at present," says Pattak, "but at times were barely bright enough against the video content, so we have to double or even triple up."

In general, however, Pattak explains that the brightness of a fixture is less important than the color matching. "We spent a lot of time matching and making custom colors, cue by cue, to blend the virtual scenery with the real scenery and trick the eye into thinking it was all one thing -- it's the lighting that makes that work. It was important, therefore, that we had fixtures in London that were capable of making and matching all these colors to the video, especially when using different fixtures, video tiles and paint treatment on the scenery from the Broadway show.

"Local availability and variations in a new venue always mean a few changes, and Ian Phillips from PRG UK was very instrumental in sourcing the right fixture replacements. He was really receptive to what we wanted -- why certain fixture types were critical and what they needed to do -- and worked with us to ensure that the replacements were physically and technically able to achieve what we wanted artistically.

"I really appreciate the amount of collaboration with PRG UK in tracking down the gear we needed to support the production in the best way possible.

"I've had a longstanding relationship with PRG in the States (the New York branch supplied The Great Gatsby on Broadway) since I was Ken Billington's associate nearly 20 years ago," says Pattak, "so I was happy to keep it in the family when transferring to London and very happy to work with Ian Phillips and Peter Marshall who couldn't have been lovelier! It feels great to have my relationship with PRG extend across the Atlantic to the UK and, by knowing Ian and Peter, to grow that relationship going forward."

"It was brilliant to support Cory and the rest of the team on this stunning musical," confirms PRG's Ian Phillips. "Every member of the creative and production teams we worked alongside made this show the success it is today, and we wish them the very best moving forward with whatever the show has planned next.

"Continuing the fine work done by our colleagues over on Broadway proves that PRG truly is a global supplier to all theatre productions."

PRG's UK director of theatre, Peter Marshall, agrees: "It was an absolute pleasure to work with Cory, Paul and the entire design team on this very prestigious production."

Pattak is also keen to point out the contribution of his West End team saying: "I had a really great UK team to help me and my US Associate Paul Vaillancourt. Tom Johnson and Oliver Thomas are really fabulous West End production electricians, my great UK assistant lighting designer Danny Vavrecka was recently assistant lighting designer on Starlight Express, so was accustomed to working on a big maximalist show, and UK lighting programmer, Dan Street, was also fabulous. We were very happy to work with them all."

The Great Gatsby currently has three full versions running in three countries with the recent opening of a production in South Korea at the start of August, and there are plans for a US tour starting in January 2026, plus more international productions planned to roll out over the next couple of years. "That's very unusual and very exciting to grow the family globally!" says Pattak. "We recently worked out that, on a 2-show day, there's hardly any hours in the day when a Gatsby isn't playing somewhere in the world!" The London production of The Great Gatsby finishes at the London Coliseum on September 7, but there is hope that the show could continue its UK presence in another venue or a national tour. 

Creatives (London):

Lighting Designer: Cory Pattak
Associate LD: Paul Vaillancourt
Assistant LD: Danny Vavrečka
Moving Light Programmer: Dan Street
Production LX: Tom Johnson and Oliver Thomas
Set Electrics: Lamp and Pencil
Show Chief Electrician: Christian Clark
Directed by Marc Bruni
Choreographed by Dominique Kelly
Scenic and Video Design: Paul Tate dePoo III
Costume Design: Linda Cho
Sound Design: Brian Ronan