Ragtime (review)

When the original production of the musical Ragtime closed on Broadway in early 2000, after a two-year run that many fans, including me, called too short, the high cost of running the large-scale, opulent show was blamed. Thus it seemed foolhardy to bring Ragtime, based on the E. L. Doctorow novel, back to Broadway in late 2009, when the economy was only starting to recover after the latest recession—and, in fact, the new production ran for less than two months. Despite this premature closure, the revival of Ragtime offers valuable lessons in how to do a big musical well, even when money is tight. By utilizing regional theatre as a development platform and privileging concept over spectacle and character over star power (both onstage and behind the scenes), Ragtime created a new paradigm for producing large-scale, professional musicals in economically troubled times.

Ragtime's road back to Broadway began in regional theatre during the spring of 2009 with a successful Kennedy Center run, also helmed by director/choreographer Marcia Milgrom Dodge. The musical, which depicts a cross-section of American life at the dawn of the twentieth century and features music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, transferred nearly intact to Broadway, which makes financial sense, since resources like talent, sets, and costumes were effectively recycled and reused. Also, because the Kennedy Center is removed from the higher costs and immediate pressure for success (both artistic and financial) associated with Broadway, it both provided Ragtime with a less expensive and more nurturing development period, and served as an out-of-town tryout that could placate jittery Broadway investors.

The current financial climate played a key role not only in Ragtime's out-of-town development, but also in its production concept and execution. Terrence McNally's libretto already stripped the epic novel to its essentials, and Dodge took that a step further in her vision of a simplified and suggested, rather than realistically represented, story.

The opening tableau of Ragtime. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

Christiane Noll (Mother) in Ragtime. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

This shifted the focus to the gloriously sung music, which clearly depicted both the dawning of a new era (in the haunting "New Music") and the revolutionary power of music to transcend traditional boundaries (in the moving funeral march "Till We Reach That Day"). Unfortunately, Ragtime is long on rousing anthems, and the scaled-back spectacle revealed the structural flaws that caused the pace of the show to drag, particularly in act 2.

Of course, less emphasis on spectacle does not mean that the design was less than impressive; in fact, the set, designed by Derek McLane, evoked a large, arched, multilevel metal structure reminiscent of New York's original Penn Station, which easily stood in for a variety of locations. At times, this style was enormously successful—as when a bare metal frame, rather than an actual Model T Ford, was used as the ill-fated car owned by black ragtime musician turned revolutionary, Coalhouse Walker Jr. Unfortunately, at other times it was far less successful, as when Dodge and McLane chose to reuse certain set pieces to denote multiple places. For example, in the baseball-centric "What a Game!" the bleachers were created by having the cast awkwardly stack together the elegant dining-room furniture just used by the privileged, white Mother and her family, which created a jarring sequence in a number that already felt like it wandered in from another musical. In addition, judicious pruning, presumably in the service of simplification, rendered some sequences, such as Coalhouse's escalating campaign of retribution against the firemen, difficult to follow for audiences not already familiar with the musical. In spite of these weaknesses, however, the simpler approach (probably spawned by the recession) generally improved rather than detracted from...