The Underclassman Theater Review

Before Scott and Zelda there was Scott and Ginevra, she being one of Chicago’s “Big Four” debutantes during World War I, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was a Princeton undergraduate and Ginevra King was at the posh Westover School in Connecticut. Their romance, much of it epistolary, was doomed by class and financial differences, but it became fodder for Fitzgerald’s writing, including his novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), and The Great Gatsby, where Ginevra was probably Daisy Buchanan’s prototype. Using This Side of Paradise as their primary source, but mingling it with biographical material, Cara Reichel (book/direction) and her husband, Peter Mills (book/lyrics/music), recount the Scott-Ginevra affair in the ironically titled The Underclassman, the Prospect Theater Company’s ambitious and often surprisingly refreshing musical that looks at social class, friendship, and an all-male Princeton in the 1910s. License has been taken, but most characters bear the names of actual persons, including Scott’s friends, Edmund “Bunny” Wilson (Billy Hepfinger, imposing) and John Peale (“J.P.”) Peale (Marrick Smith, capable), both later famous men of letters. The show, a decade in development, and given a 2005 production as The Pursuit of Persephone, remains imperfect, but has much to recommend it.