‘Ragtime’ Broadway Review: Lincoln Center Reclaims A Gem

Director Lear deBessonet has chosen wisely in the first production of her inaugural season as Artistic Director of Lincoln Center Theater, resurrecting the grand, however imperfect musical Ragtime, first staged on Broadway in a bloated 1998 production. Here, as she did with the recent Encores! production, she gives the musical a second chance to realize its glory, and if we were to judge the revival solely on its first act – here including a glorious staging of the opening number that establishes themes both musical and otherwise – we’d credit deBessonet with a thoroughly dazzling reclamation.

But it is Ragtime’s second act that’s always been problematic, as one power ballad follows another and Terrence McNally’s book struggles to streamline the sprawling masterwork that is E. L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel. If deBessonet and her marvelous cast – including a towering Joshua Henry – come tantalizingly close to making all the necessary fixes, Ragtime remains a flawed masterwork of its era.

With an often rapturous score by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, Ragtime contains big, rousing numbers that can still grab and refuse to let go, none more so than the beautiful opening number that introduces us to both the Ragtime theme music – which will recur throughout the musical – and McNally’s (and Doctorow’s) primary subject, which is, no less, America itself. Staying true to Doctorow’s novel, if never quite achieving its mastery, Ragtime sets out 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 the ideal of something like justice and equality.

We’re introduced in the prologue to the three main groups of characters that will comingle, with varying outcomes, throughout the musical: A well-to-do white family of New Rochelle, a Black community in Harlem and the Jewish immigrants newly arrived to the Lower East Side from the shtetls of Eastern Europe. In Ragtime‘s most impressive achievement, those three groups (and their musical motifs and dance choreographies) are introduced in the astonishing opening number, separately at first but then blending together as if to illustrate the cauldron that was and is New York City. Some of the blending will take root, some won’t.

The intermingling plotlines are these: A white upper-middle-class family of New Rochelle (Father, played by Colin Donnell, Mother, played by Caissie Levy, Younger Brother portrayed by Ben Levi Ross and little Edgar played by Nick Barrington) is confronted with the harsh realities of Black America when Mother finds a half-buried infant in her garden, the baby abandoned there by a desperate Sarah (Nichelle Lewis), the lover of Harlem ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker (Henry). With Father away on a North Pole expedition (first world problems indeed), a compassionate Mother takes in both Sarah and her child, tying in the fates of both the New Rochelle family and the Harlem community of Coalhouse Walker.

Meanwhile, the Jewish immigrant and artist Tateh (a very fine Brandon Uranowitz) and his young daughter (Tabitha Lawing) are struggling to build a life in the tenements of New York City, an impoverished situation so dire that neither Tateh nor the audience can be certain of the little girl’s survival. Eventually, Tateh’s story will find its way into the lives of both the New Rochelle family and that of Coalhouse Walker.

More so 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 – into the fictional world of Ragtime. That fact-meets-fiction is, I think, Ragtime‘s secret weapon, the reason it lands as successfully as it does.

Emma is played here by Shaina Taub (Suffs), just one of the many remarkable performances that gives this Ragtime its power. Flaherty and Ahrens have gifted musical theater with some of the most soaring numbers to hit the stage in modern memory, including that opening number (“Ragtime,” the show’s theme, is impossible to purge from memory once it takes hold), the gut-wrenching “Your Daddy’s Son,” sung here by a bone-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 reunite with his lover Sarah and newborn son; impoverished Tateh and his daughter cross paths with wealthy Mother and young son Edgar only to reunite in a more significant manner years later. All intermingling is foretold in the extraordinary opening number, which establishes the specific musical and dance motifs associated with each grouping.

The great achievement of the Flaherty-Ahrens score is the way in which it melds the representational sounds of each group – operetta for the white New Rochelle residents, gospel and ragtime for the Harlem contingent, klezmer for the Jewish immigrants – into a wonderful whole. We hear the distinct strains even as we listen to the “melting pot” whole.

In keeping with its Encores! roots, the Broadway Ragtime is played out on a mostly spare stage, with David Korins’ scenic design making fine use of wheeled staircases for any number of establishing scene-settings (Father and Tateh on their prows as their ships take to the sea, for example, or Emma Goldman speaking on a stage at her historic Union Square rally). The projections (by 59 Studio) provide a wash of impressionistic backdrops for each scene, sunset colors when called for, flag-images elsewhere, purples and blues too. Linda Cho’s costume design is never less than spot-on.

While Ragtime’s second act stumbles, both in song – the sense of repetition and sameness is undeniable – and storytelling, the musical compensates for itself with some truly terrific numbers: “The Night That Goldman Spoke At Union Square,” “Till We Reach That Day,” “Sarah Brown Eyes,” “He Wanted To Say.” Not to say there aren’t some clunkers, most notably a jokey take-me-out-to-the-ballgame baseball number that pads the second act, but the Flaherty-Ahrens score was and is Ragtime‘s signature achievement.

While deBessonet could have better provided a certain focus or point of view – Ragtime‘s telling of America’s immigrant tale is, at this point in history, ripe for the picking – she certainly brings out the best in her uniformly splendid cast. Henry (Carousel) proves yet again that there’s no better singer working the Broadway stage, while Lewis, as the tragic Sarah, leaves a lasting impression even if her contemporary singing style doesn’t quite meld with Henry’s classicism. Levy, as Mother, is top flight as always, Uranowitz comes close to stealing the show away from the formidable Henry, and Taub is so winning as Emma Goldman that she makes us wonder all over again why the show’s authors didn’t follow Doctorow’s lead by including the plot line wherein the anarchist meets the showgirl (an appealing Anna Grace Barlow’s Evelyn Nesbit), a missed opportunity if ever there was one.

But whatever its faults and near-misses, Ragtime has always been, like its ’90s contemporaries Titanic and Parade, an opportunity for rediscovery. DeBessonet takes the challenge and wins, rescuing a near-classic from the excesses of the 1990s to prove, once and for all, that Ragtime, imperfect as it may be, deserves a place among the most significant musical theater achievements of that decade.

Title: Ragtime
Venue: Broadway’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre
Director: Lear deBessonet
Book: Terrence McNally, based on the novel by E.L. Doctorow
Music: Stephen Flaherty
Lyrics: 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.’
Running time: 2 hr 45 min (including intermission)