Frome Ragtime, at Lincoln Center Theater.
Photo: Matthew Murphy
In Ragtimeit looks as if the sun is always rising or setting inside the Vivian Beaumont Theater. It’s a vast room, squat and wide—it can act, quite naturally, as a cavern—and in transferring her production of the Ahrens-and-Flaherty American musical epic from its bare-bones run at Encores! last year, the director Lear deBessonet has not gone to great lengths to fill the stage with scenery. David Korins’s design has scaled up some of the key elements of the story, providing the Model T that is the Black musician Coalhouse Walker Jr.’s prized possession and the carved Victorian house of the white family in New Rochelle who become his unlikely fellow travelers. But this is a production that tends to let the eye wander towards a horizon line, and which cloaks its actors, in Adam Honoré and Donald Holder’s lighting design, in shades of purple and orange as their voices echo across the stage. It’s a fitting dynamic for a show whose plot knots together a series of turn-of-the-century coincidences, largely in New York City and along the Atlantic coast, while dreaming through its score of the expansiveness of the rest of the continent. When Coalhouse sings that he’ll show his son America, in the rousing “Wheels of a Dream,” the strength of Joshua Henry’s voice could carry you straight through to California, never mind the fact his character will never make it there himself. The fantasy of endless space is what matters, a great chimeric promise, this production understands, that both sustains the nation and goes unfulfilled. Even America has an end.
Ragtimewith its thudding sentimentality, is not a truly great musical, but deBessonet has enough finesse to convince you that it might come close. It arrived in a spate of late-’90s Broadway epics of Americana, like Parade and Titanichomegrown responses to mega-musicals like Les Miz and also the tastes of the Toronto theater impresario Garth Drabinsky, who has a fondness for both pageantry and fraud. (Before Ragtimehe produced a splashy revival of the ur-American musical Show Boatwhose influence you can feel here; after Ragtimehe went to Jail in Canada; much later, he tried to come back with Paradise Square.) Although deBessonet’s production strips away a lot of the bunting, Ragtime has a stolid and demonstrative core and an educational tone worthy of EPCOT. Three groups of Americans—Black, white, and Jewish immigrant—converge onstage, and as the nation roils with the energy of the early 20th century, the characters intermix, like the braided and syncopated chord progressions of the title. By the end, although great loss is experienced, we forge towards a more hopeful dawn. Terrence McNally’s book, like the EL Doctorow novel, sprinkles in real personages of the era among the fictional characters, including Houdini (Rodd Cyrus, rocking some great retro swimwear), Emma Goldman (Shaina Taub, which resonates nicely with Enough), and the scandalous Evelyn Nesbit (Anna Grace Barlow, giving Addison Rae as “the girl on the swing”). A few of Doctorow’s ironies get shaved down—the fact that the white characters are profiting from a boom in patriotism by operating a fireworks factory is underplayed, even if those explosives are crucial to the plot—though phantom limbs of the novel’s oddities remain, as when a young boy has visions of the start of World War I and urges Houdini to “warn the duke!” (Yes, he means Franz Ferdinand.)
When this version of Ragtime premiered in a short run at City Center last fall, it was programmed—opportunistically, I thought at the time—for maximum impact in the weeks surrounding the presidential election. There, deBessonet presented a grand and agnostic take on the show, adaptable to any result in the polls, which made the undigested aspects of the material stand out. The emotional impression it left depended on an audience that was either stressed in anticipation of the result or, later in the run, mourning it. Eleven months on, this Ragtime has grown into itself. The show’s center-left end-of-the-millennium values, its love of immigrants who do good through capitalism, its hope for transracial solidarity by opening the heart of a sympathetic privileged woman, look all the more radical now. But it’s also that deBessonet and her collaborators have wrestled more deeply with how they want to depict Ragtime‘s dreams of America onstage. Where the show’s values were once given, almost diorama labels, now they’re presented as more fugitive and unstable, what its characters would hope the world to be.
DeBessonet’s production opens schematically, with the various factions at play marching around each other. She’s a merely competent director of a large ensemble, and Ellenore Scott’s choreography, especially in a later scene at Henry Ford’s factory where people’s arms act as machinery, is overliteral. butt Ragtime settles into a richer and more internal mode quickly, in a large part due to the textured performances of its leads and the thought they’ve applied to Ahrens and Flaherty’s score. As Coalhouse, a character first introduced as a virtuosic pianist who later goes on a quest for violent revenge, Henry is stunning; his voice is its own internal combustion engine, and he’s able to accelerate a phrase into high-velocity feeling with remarkable ease, but he also carries within the character a deep sadness that leaves the character’s flights of emotion. Although Henry’s technique is impeccable, he achieves the sensation that Coalhouse is always reaching and never quite grasping what he desires. His fire lies in contrast to Caissie Levy’s melting glacier (she did play Elsa, after all), a New Rochelle matriarch, identified only as Mother, who goes on a proto-feminist journey of self-actualization after taking in Coalhouse’s lover, Sara (Nichelle Lewis, who has refined her character’s anger but is still stretching herself vocally). Levy’s timbre is more contemporary than that of Marin Mazzie, who in originating the part took Mother on a journey from soprano to beltress, which sets her version of the character on a slightly different trajectory. Her warmth as a performer is always present, so it’s more that Mother’s agency has been suppressed, rather than undiscovered. She’s encased in Linda Cho’s intricate lace costumes in the first act, and then slowly given more space to breathe until she’s finally barefoot on the beach, let loose to break your heart with her “Back to Before.” There’s Brandon Uranowitz, too, as the third prong of Ragtime‘s central trio, leaning on his Eastern European immigrant Tateh’s impossible optimism in the first act and then, after his transformation into a film director in the second, maintaining both his charm and the defensive armament of a man who has seen hard times. There’s also finely wrought work from Ben Levi Ross, as Mother’s impassioned, misguided, and finally revolutionary Younger Brother. In a meeting with Coalhouse in the second act, where Younger Brother commits to helping out with a bombing — a scene narrated by Taub’s Emma Goldman — Ragtime is at its combustible best, achieving a vision of two men finding that in the darkness of disillusionment with their nation, “for a moment, they’re the same.”
High points like that, when those voices combine with James Moore’s sumptuous orchestra and crystallize into an omnisensory wallop, make this Ragtime impossible to dismiss, even if it’s awfully easy to quibble with. And I could keep quibbling: It’s a bummer, for example, that the set design does rely so much on a screen at the back of the stage, especially when one particular image of the Statue of Liberty makes you feel like you’re underwater at an aquarium. And it’s too bad that, when you could once expect an actual ship to trundle ashore at Lincoln Center, here we only get ladders. And also, every use of an American flag in the set is obvious and annoying. Yet the production is so powerfully sung and deeply felt that it overwhelms. Maybe these characters have false dreams, and maybe the show’s idea of hope is impossibly naive, but it lingers. The musical’s bounded by the introduction and reprise of the title number, which captures “the sound of something beginning,” and, by the end of the show, the end as well. There you are, in a nation’s transitional twilight. The green flash that imprints on the back of your eyes, right as the sun dips into the horizon—that’s Ragtime.
Ragtime is at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center.
