E.L. Doctorow’s wonderful Ragtime celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. As an avid teen reader and movie lover who consumed every novel in advance of its film adaptation (what a time that was!) I was eager to see how Doctorow’s witty, imaginative, kaleidoscopic prose, blending fact and fiction at the turn of the (last) century, would translate to the screen in 1981. Other than a best-that-money-could-buy production and some good moments, however, I was disappointed, feeling that it captured the main plot and a few of its fascinating strands but was stodgy overall. It has a lyrical, Oscar-nominated Randy Newman score but little of the book’s music, poetry, enchantment, and passion.
The stage musical of Ragtime, which opened on Broadway in 1998, has all that, courtesy of its Tony-winning score (music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens) and book by Terrence McNally. From the incredible ten-minute prologue, where the cast of characters introduces themselves in a stunning tableau, to the final notes it’s one banger after another, as the 21st century theater kids might say. It’s a breathtaking achievement in musicals and good for business as I recall; the theater trade magazines I worked for (what a time that was, too!) feasted on the $10 million production, which included live fireworks, planes, trains, and a Model-T. But on balance all that stagecraft blunted the overall impact of the show, which didn’t need the extra pomp. The sublime score, beautifully reproduced on the cast album, was muffled onstage, obscured by the design.
A 2009 revival took it down a notch, making the show a kind of live diorama. The new production, which was first seen at City Center before moving uptown to Lincoln Center Theater, is a further reduction in the capable hands of the venue’s new artistic director Lear DeBessonet, following her excellent productions of Once Upon a Mattress and Into the Woods. The Model-T (a character in the show, representing progress and its discontents) is there but the design and mood are spare and stripped-down in the mode of Hamilton, with that show’s designer, David Korins, working subtly. (A big expanse of stormily billowing fabric that expands over the stage is as grand as it gets.) With the exception of Linda Cho’s finely detailed costumes this Ragtime is more for the ear than the eye, and on that count it is glorious, with the focus on the large cast and well-appointed orchestra.
As befits a show that has Harry Houdini as a character Ragtime is a spinning plates, sleight-of-prose kind of extravaganza. There is a well-to-do family in New Rochelle, NY, with a Mother (Caissie Levy) and Father (Colin Donnell). There is a Harlem musician, Coalhouse Walker, Jr. (Joshua Henry), and Sarah (Nichelle Lewis), the woman who loves him. There is Tateh, a Latvian immigrant (Brandon Uranowitz), and his daughter. All will be swept up in the tides of history, and intersect in ways that involve Houdini (Rodd Cyrus), scandalous showgirl Evelyn Nesbit (Anna Grace Barlow), anarchist Emma Goldman (Shaina Taub), Black leader Booker T. Washington (John Clay III) and other real-life figures. Father leaves home for an Arctic expedition, as proper Mother slowly embraces an inner wanderlust; the proud Coalhouse rises above what is considered a Black man’s place, loses everything including Sarah and his prized car, and is reborn into vengeance; and Tateh, at the lowest rung, finds a ticket upwards in the new medium of the movies. As Nesbit basks in the celebrity of “the crime of the century” (her unstable husband has killed her wealthy “benefactor”), Goldman reminds us that there are 94 years left in the 20th. Racism and repression will accompany every new advance, and so it goes, time being a flat circle, the past being neither dead nor past, and all that. Back then we related Ragtime to O.J. and the Clinton era; now, well, just look at the dismaying headlines, which Goldman and Washington could scarcely have imagined. To cite just one example, Mother’s Younger Brother (Ben Levi Ross), a dilettante-turned-domestic terrorist who eventually aids Coalhouse, might have been a Patty Hearst type in 1975, the Unabomber in 1998, and today is just a click away on your smartphone.
But the music is truly timeless, one enchantment after another as the early jauntiness gives way to terrible tragedy. Not one number is disposable in the three-hour show (though the Houdini bits, as he seeks transcendence, have never really worked). “What a Game” might seem like a flippant charm song about baseball, but it shows Father’s exasperation with the lower orders as he reckons with class warfare on a smaller scale than what he will soon reckon with. “Wheels of a Dream” consolidated the stardom of Tony nominee Brian Stokes Mitchell and Tony winner Audra McDonald as the doomed Coalhouse and Sarah, and looks set to do it again for Henry and Lewis, who mid-song at the preview I attended got standing ovations for their towering performances. (I joined in, though Kai Harada’s audio design needed fine-tuning I’m sure it got before opening.) Henry in particular is raising the roof, holding one final note for an almost supernatural length of time that got us on our feet again. Then again the cast has no weak links, with Levy, Donnell, and Uranowitz firmly anchoring their parts of the show, and I was amused to see Taub, creator and star of the Ragtime-adjacent musical Suffs, repaying the debt as it were as Goldman. As America careens uncertainly toward a 250th anniversary led by a president whose preferred entertainment is cage-fighting Ragtime brings us our shared experience in all its colors, its glory and its terror. Go.
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