Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without booms?

Where would we be without good?

No, into the bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm very happy to have us my guests, the director, John Collins, and the star, Scott Shepard,

and together they worked on the elevator repair services

production of Gats, which is a staged version of the entirety.

I mean, every word of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

It's really a thrilling evening of theater. To do an entire

novel on stage takes around seven hours, but I was not unhappy or bored or didn't want to move

even during the dinner break. I was so transfixed by what had been discovered in this great classic American novel.

Now tell me why Gatsby? Wow, okay. Well, Gatsby came to us as, well, Steve Bodo came in with Gatsby.

We had done a show about old New York, and I think we wanted to go back to that material again.

Just we're looking for a story about Old New York.

And we started playing around with the Great Gatsby, and at that time, we didn't have a plan to do the entire book.

We were just going to mine it for some sort of...

We didn't have much of a plan of any kind.

Yeah.

...