The new revival of the 1998 Broadway musical Ragtime gives us a good idea of what the 1981 film adaptation of EL Doctorow’s critically acclaimed 1975 best-seller would have been like if Steven Spielberg had directed it – and not Milos Forman.
At the time, many critics thought and wrote that the film version of “Ragtime” should have been credited to Robert Altman. Doctorow’s profile of a racially diverse America and its new immigrants is not so much panoramic as kaleidoscopic. Doctorow created unlikely but fascinating connections between real people like illusionist Harry Houdini and activist Emma Goldman and fictional characters like ragtime composer Coalhouse Walker Jr., who impregnated a desperate young black woman, Sarah, who is essentially adopted, along with her baby, by a wealthy white woman named Mother.
Altman had handled these fluid, multi-colored, multi-layered stories brilliantly in films like “Nashville” and “A Wedding,” but he had recently directed the expensive flop “Popeye.” Forman, meanwhile, had made two hits, “Hair” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Forman flattened and simplified the story, but retained much of Doctorow’s absurdist humor that fuels the narrative.
The “Ragtime” that opened Thursday at LTC’s Vivian Beaumont Theater is as if Spielberg’s “Lincoln” had been turned into a musical. It’s big, reverent, beaming with nostalgia, chauvinistic in its patriotism, filled with stirring anthems and heavy enough to do battle with “Les Miserables,” the 1980 European musical that had obviously inspired writer Terrence McNally, composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens to write the musical version of “Ragtime.”
Doctorow gave his novel at least five major protagonists, each of whom displays a distinctly absurdist streak, giving the work its dazzling and irreverent humor. Against all the conventions of the beginning of the 20th century, Mother welcomes Sarah and her baby, whom she finds in her flower garden. When Coalhouse shows up at Sarah’s court, she refuses to see him on several occasions, pushing her mother’s hospitality to ridiculous limits. When Coalhouse’s Model T car is destroyed by racist firefighters, this ragtime composer behaves like a white man and demands justice even though he is thwarted at every turn. (In the novel and film, his plight requires several scenes; in the musical, it is dealt with too effectively in a single song.) Tateh, a newly arrived Jewish immigrant, improbably launches an entirely new art form (cinema) through his illustrations. And a character called Mother’s Younger Brother throws away her white privilege and wealth to become an anarchist. Each of these characters in the novel has a slightly crazy heart and, in their choices, defies all ordinary logic. And that’s why they fascinate us.
In the current “Ragtime” revival, there are only flashes of humor in Brandon Uranowitz’s Tateh and Ben Levi Ross’s Younger Brother. Ross, in fact, elicits two of the show’s biggest laughs. They occur when he calmly tells the fugitive Coalhouse: “I know how to blow things up” and, at the end of the series, when he announces that he is going to fight Emiliano Zapata in Mexico.
Tateh’s character is so pathetic that he has to walk around New York City tied with rope around him and his daughter (Tabitha Lawing) so he doesn’t lose her. However, once he sells one of his “movie books”, with its series of printed illustrations, he sings the magical “Gliding” to let his starving daughter know that, against all odds, they will become extremely rich and famous in this new, often cruel country.
“Gliding” is one of the few songs on “Ragtime” whose original orchestrations by William David Brohn don’t devolve into a very important, very loud statement about justice, equality, racism, or growing petunias in the city. Time and again, a simple ballad begins quietly, promisingly, only to become gargantuan a few verses later. Besides “Gliding,” the other thing that keeps “Ragtime” from sinking under its own pomp is Stephen Flaherty’s recycling of sparkling ragtime tunes from Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha.”
McNally’s book turns many major characters into stick figures, and Lear DeBessonet’s direction works hard to eliminate any remaining interest. The black characters are noble and sassy, the Jewish characters are noble and schmaltzy, and the white characters have a silver spatula stuck up their butts.
“Ragtime,” like “Les Miz,” gives anthems a very bad name. DeBessonet highlights their excess by asking his actors, particularly Joshua Henry as Coalhouse, to keep a note well past its expiration date. It’s hard to tell if people are clapping in the middle of a song because they’re impressed by Henry’s lung power or if they just want him to drop the note and finish the song. DeBessonet’s brutal direction only makes us applaud before the actors have finished singing.
It’s the numbness of the Broadway musical, now held hostage by “American Idol.” It doesn’t matter if people clap at inappropriate times, because amplification allows it, even encourages it.
Kai Harada’s “Ragtime” sound design is particularly unfortunate since the Lincoln Center Theater under the former artistic director of Andre Bishop had used amplification only to support the music coming from the actors and orchestra. Now, with this “Ragtime”, LTC has become completely Broadway: amplification completely supplants all live sound generated on stage. Henry, along with Cassie Levy as Mother and Nichelle Lewis as Sarah, are vocally strong and deserve better. Female vocals are particularly underserved since the sound design places too much emphasis on high notes, giving them a harsh sheen that pushes them sharp.
When it opened on Broadway in 1998, “Ragtime” received mixed reviews and lost the Tony for best musical to “The Lion King.” Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens’ over-reliance on hymns has always been a problem, but the weakness of Terrence McNally’s book is now more evident. The story is not so much dramatized as it is told to us in a series of Wikipedia lectures. And the historical figures of Harry Houdini (Rodd Cyrus), Evelyn Nesbit (Anna Grace Barlow), Booker T. Washington (John Clay III) and Emma Goldman (Shaina Taub, recycling her performance of “Suffs” without the humor) seem to have come from another, far more intriguing show.
