Director Lear deBessonet chose wisely in the first production of her inaugural season as artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, resurrecting the great, if flawed, musical. Ragtimefirst staged on Broadway in a bloated 1998 production. Here, as she did with the recent Encores! production, it gives the musical a second chance to realize its glory, and if we were to judge the revival solely on its first act – including here a glorious staging of the opening number that establishes themes both musical and otherwise – we would credit deBessonet with an utterly dazzling recovery.
But it is Ragtime’El Doctorow’s second act has always been problematic, as one power ballad follows another and Terrence McNally’s book struggles to rationalize the sprawling masterpiece that is EL Doctorow’s 1975 novel. If deBessonet and his marvelous cast – including the imposing Joshua Henry – are close to making all the necessary corrections, Ragtime remains an imperfect masterpiece of its time.
With an often ravishing score by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, Ragtime contains some big, catchy tunes that can still grip and refuse to let go, none more so than the magnificent opening number which introduces us to both the Ragtime the musical theme – which will recur throughout the musical – and McNally’s (and Doctorow’s) main subject, which is nothing less, America itself. Remaining faithful to Doctorow’s novel, even if he never achieves mastery, Ragtime aims to illustrate the grand notion of America as a melting pot, a place where, in the early 1900s, the country still offered the hope or ideal of something like justice and equality.
We are introduced in the prologue to the three main groups of characters who will intermingle, with varying results, throughout the musical: a well-off white family from New Rochelle, a black community from Harlem, and the newly arrived Jewish immigrants to the Lower East Side from the shtetls of Eastern Europe. In Ragtime‘s most impressive achievement, these three groups (and their musical motifs and dance choreography) are featured in the astonishing opening number, separately at first, then blending together as if to illustrate the cauldron that New York City was and is. Some mixtures will take root, others will not.
The intertwined plots are as follows: an upper-middle-class white family in New Rochelle (the father, played by Colin Donnell, the mother, played by Caissie Levy, the younger brother played by Ben Levi Ross, and little Edgar played by Nick Barrington) are confronted with the harsh realities of black America when their mother finds a baby half-buried in her backyard, the baby abandoned there by a Sarah desperate (Nichelle). Lewis), the lover of Harlem ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker (Henry). While her father goes on an expedition to the North Pole (first world problems indeed), a compassionate mother takes Sarah and her child in, linking the fate of the New Rochelle family and Coalhouse Walker’s Harlem community.
Meanwhile, Jewish immigrant and artist Tateh (a very good Brandon Uranowitz) and his young daughter (Tabitha Lawing) struggle to build a life in the tenements of New York, a situation of poverty so dire that neither Tateh nor the audience can be certain of the little girl’s survival. Ultimately, Tateh’s story will find its place in the lives of the New Rochelle family and that of Coalhouse Walker.
Even more than Miloš Forman’s 1975 film adaptation, the musical honors Doctorow’s splendid conceit of placing real-life historical figures – the anarchist Emma Goldman, the illusionist Harry Houdini, the scandalous vaudeville star Evelyn Nesbit – in the fictional world of Ragtime. This meeting between reality and fiction is, I think, RagtimeThis is why it lands so successfully.
Emma is played here by Shaina Taub (Suffer), just one of the many remarkable performances that give this Ragtime its power. Flaherty and Ahrens have endowed the musical theater with some of the most searing numbers in modern memory, including this opening number (“Ragtime,” the show’s theme, is impossible to purge from memory once it sets in), the heartbreaking “Your Daddy’s Son,” sung here by a chilling Lewis, and “Wheels of a Dream,” the song that places Ragtime in the pantheon, performed here by Henry and Lewis).
To simplify Doctorow’s novel (which the musical does), the plot is this: New Rochelle mother discovers abandoned baby; musician Colehouse Walker comes calling to find his lover Sarah and her newborn son; Tateh, a poor man, and his daughter cross paths with the wealthy mother and her young son Edgar only to meet again in a more meaningful way years later. All this mixing is announced in the extraordinary opening number, which establishes the specific musical and dance motifs associated with each group.
The great achievement of Flaherty-Ahrens’ score is how it fuses each group’s representative sounds – operetta for New Rochelle’s white residents, gospel and ragtime for the Harlem contingent, klezmer for the Jewish immigrants – into a wonderful whole. We hear the distinct notes while listening to the whole “melting pot”.
Loyal to its Encores! the roots, the Broadway Ragtime plays out on a mostly free stage, with David Korins’s scenic design making good use of wheeled staircases for a number of stage settings (Father and Tateh on their bows as their ships set sail, for example, or Emma Goldman speaking on a stage at her historic Union Square rally). The projections (from 59 Studio) provide a mix of impressionistic sets for each scene, sunset colors where necessary, images of flags elsewhere, purples and blues as well. Linda Cho’s costume design is always perfect.
While Ragtime’s second act stumbles, both in song – the sense of repetition and sameness is undeniable – and in storytelling, the musical compensates with some truly great numbers: “The Night That Goldman Spoke At Union Square”, “Till We Reach That Day”, “Sarah Brown Eyes”, “He Wanted To Say”. That’s not to say there aren’t any snaps, including a pleasant baseball number to take to the ballgame that completes the second act, but Flaherty-Ahrens’ score was and still is Ragtimethe flagship achievement of .
While deBessonet could have better provided some direction or perspective – RagtimeThe telling of America’s immigrant story is, at this point in the story, ripe for the picking – it certainly brings out the best in its uniformly splendid cast. Henry (Carousel) proves once again that there is no better singer on the Broadway stage, while Lewis, as the tragic Sarah, leaves a lasting impression even if his contemporary singing style doesn’t quite mesh with Henry’s classicism. Levy as the mother is top-notch as always, Uranowitz is poised to steal the show from the formidable Henry, and Taub is so winning as Emma Goldman that she once again makes us wonder why the show’s writers didn’t follow Doctorow’s lead by including the anarchist-meets-showgirl (a seductive Evelyn Nesbit) plot by Anna Grace Barlow), a missed opportunity if ever there was one.
But whatever its flaws and near misses, Ragtime has always been, like his 90s contemporaries Titanic And Paradean opportunity for rediscovery. DeBessonet takes on the challenge and wins, rescuing a near-classic from the excesses of the 1990s to prove, once and for all, that Ragtimeimperfect as it is, deserves a place among the most significant musical theater achievements of this decade.
Title: Ragtime
Place: Vivian Beaumont Broadway Theater
Director: Léar de Bessonet
Book: Terrence McNally, based on the novel by EL Doctorow
Music: Stephen Flaherty
Words: Lynn Ahrens
Cast: Joshua Henry as “Coalhouse Walker, Jr.”, Caissie Levy as “Mother”, Brandon Uranowitz as “Tateh”, Colin Donnell as “Father”, Nichelle Lewis as “Sarah”, Ben Levi Ross as “Mother’s Younger Brother”, Shaina Taub as “Emma Goldman”, John Clay III as “Booker T. Washington”, Rodd Cyrus as “Harry”. Houdini”, Anna Grace Barlow as “Evelyn Nesbit”, Nick Barrington as “The Little Boy” and Tabitha Lawing as “The Little Girl”.
Operating time: 2h45 (intermission included)
