F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise inspires a new musical from Prospect Theater Company

Who knew that the great American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald began his literary career in musical theater? According to Prospect Theater Company’s newest offering, The Underclassman, a musical based on Fitzgerald’s debut novel This Side of Paradise, the stage was all that the strapped sophomore had on the brain. That, and Ginevra King — a debutante extraordinaire whose romantic relationship with the young writer served as inspiration for his Great Gatsby socialite, Daisy Fay Buchanan. The musical is now running at the Duke on 42nd Street. Composer Peter Mills has built a score fit for the famous wordsmith, with clever lyrics and timely melodies that capture Fitzgerald’s playful and posh surroundings as a Princeton undergrad in the early 20th century. We meet Fitzgerald in 1915, his second wasted year as an Ivy Leaguer and member of Princeton’s cross-dressing musical-comedy troupe, the Triangle Club. So far his education has amounted to nothing more than a pile of blue failing notices that he cavalierly collects while waiting for some kind of life-shaking joy or sorrow to inspire the literary masterpiece he knows he has inside of him. Soon enough, at a dance following a Triangle performance, both sides of this coin come to him in the glamorous package of the aforementioned Ginevra King — a “top four debutante” of her day known to college boys far and wide as single and ready to mingle. What begins as a romantic game winds up a powerful love connection, verging on obsession for Fitzgerald.