Ragtime (review)

Coalhouse Walker, Jr. (Brian Stokes Mitchell) in Livent’s production of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, book by Terrence McNally, music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, directed by Frank Galati. Ford Center for the Performing Arts, New York City. Photo: Catherine Ashmore.

Members of the cast in Livent’s production of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, book by Terrence McNally, music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, directed by Frank Galati. Ford Center for the Performing Arts, New York City. Photo: Catherine Ashmore.

Although Ragtime made its Broadway debut on 18 January 1998, the musical has been a part of theatrical consciousness since 1995, with two public readings, a workshop production, and a CD release months before the show premiered in Toronto in December 1996 and in Los Angeles in June 1997. Ragtime’s systematic development, its enthusiastic reception in Toronto and Los Angeles, and the producer’s creation of a new Broadway theatre in which to present it, have all contributed to a critical backlash, the likes of which have not been felt on Broadway since Disney’s Beauty and the Beast premiered in 1994.

Ragtime is certainly too slick and overproduced for its own good, particularly given the story’s socialist underpinnings. It is likely that most audience members never feel very deeply for any one character as there are so many whose lives are woven into this epic American tapestry. Nevertheless, Ragtime achieves much, challenging us to consider who we were, as Americans, during the first two decades of this century and what, over the ensuing generations, we have become. Presenting a panoramic view of the dawning of the twentieth century from the perspective of millennium’s end, Ragtime addresses such issues as immigration, racism, socialism, women’s rights, industrialization, and the labor movement. Seeking to identify the forces that have shaped America over the past one hundred years, it utilizes such loaded images as the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the Model T, the railroad, the boardwalk, the ball park, and the assembly line to jog our collective memories.

Ragtime’s design team (sets by Eugene Lee, costumes by Santo Loquasto, lighting by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, projections by Wendall K. Harrington, and sound by Jonathan Deans) frames the action in New York’s old Pennsylvania Station. Flanking both sides of the proscenium are cast-iron staircases, framed above by a steel-latticed truss under which hangs an immense lighted clock without hands. Suspended in front of the proscenium is an enormous wooden stereopticon. On the raked floor below sits an identical life-size one. As the house lights dim, the large stereopticon ascends, and The Little Boy enters from an upstage door. As a piano begins to play a ragtime tune, identical images of a Victorian house appear on screens upstage left and right. The boy peers into the stereopticon, and the screens cross and travel off, revealing behind them an identical three-dimensional house. In front of it are posed the white, upper-middle-class residents of New Rochelle, dressed in cream-colored Victorian costumes. They sing, “Ladies with parasols, fellows with tennis balls / There were gazebos, and there were no Negroes.” In response, the people of Harlem sweep onstage, dressed in earthen colors. From this image of monochromatic harmony erupting into black-and-white discord, choreographer Graciela Daniele builds a breathtakingly theatrical prologue, introducing a third group—a ragtag band of immigrants. During this sequence, all of the story’s principal characters are introduced (Mother, Father, Mother’s Younger Brother, Coalhouse Walker, Jr., Sarah, Tateh), as well as its iconic ones (Booker T. Washington, Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit, Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford). As the historical figures watch, the three groups—whites, blacks, and immigrants—circle one another in a tense, tremulous dance—advancing, retreating, but never mixing.

Ragtime’s prologue is a...