Father, upon returning from the North Pole, is stunned to find his very proper household turned upside down. Not everyone in New Rochelle is quite so tolerant, of course. Mother even takes pity when Coalhouse comes courting, opening her home to him Sunday after Sunday until the unforgiving Sarah relents and reunites with the once straying, now repentant Coalhouse. Mother’s Younger Brother (Steven Sutcliffe) wholeheartedly approves, his latent radicalism coming to the fore, while Mother’s Little Boy (Alex Strange) is fascinated by the developments. Kindhearted Mother rescues both the baby and Sarah, providing refuge and understanding. (Brian Stokes Mitchell, in one of the show’s standout performances - the other belongs to Friedman), the (fictional) ragtime pianist who leaves Harlem to track down his beloved Sarah (Audra McDonald), a distraught young servant who, after giving birth out of wedlock to the charming Coalhouse’s baby, buries the infant in Mother’s manicured New Rochelle garden. To illustrate the American Nightmare of racism, “Ragtime” tells the story of Coalhouse Walker Jr. A drawer of silhouettes, the hopeful Tateh envisions neither the cruelties of New York tenements, nor the twist of fate that ultimately transforms his life into the embodiment of the American Dream. We meet the privileged, insular New Rochelle family as stern, unloving Father (Mark Jacoby) embarks on Admiral Peary’s Arctic expedition, with compassionate, quietly love-starved Mother (Marin Mazzie) singing her farewell in the soaring ballad “Goodbye, My Love.”Ĭoming into New York harbor is Latvian immigrant Tateh (Peter Friedman), a Jewish widower who dreams of a better life for himself and his young daughter (Lea Michele). If “Ragtime” has an episodic feel, with its succession of characters and tableaux dominating the stage one after another, the structure is excusable in the first act as the panoply of personalities are introduced and the plotlines delineated. The show’s themes, musically and otherwise, are established with clarity and, yes, beauty.Ī few slow points notwithstanding, the rest of Act I maintains, or comes close, to the promise of that introduction. In a dance set to the lovely (and very catchy) title song (music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens), the three groups move in fluid motion around the sparsely decorated stage, gradually merging in a jubilant melting pot only to segregate by the number’s end. Director Frank Galati and choreographer Graciela Daniele succinctly bring together the three elements of the story - the WASPy inhabitants of New Rochelle, the ragtag Eastern European immigrants of the Lower East Side and the artistically percolating blacks of Harlem just before that neighborhood’s creative Renaissance. That quality is gloriously rendered in the musical’s opening number. Washington, unspooled with the easy grace of a Scott Joplin melody. The intricate plot, mingling fictional characters with such historical figures as Harry Houdini, Henry Ford and Booker T. The novel’s great achievement, like the music for which it’s named, lies in its deceptively airy style, a peerless melding of surface lightness and complex construction. For all of its haunting lyricism, Doctorow’s novel about American society - or, rather, societies - at the turn of the century (the last one) is almost entirely descriptive, with little of the dialogue demanded by the stage. Granted, book writer Terrence McNally had a difficult job. (or Toronto, where the New York production began), surely this is the main reason: “Ragtime,” for all of its skill and polish, is a musical easier to admire than love, its plentiful, rich characters more often than not seeming as distant as the era they inhabit. If box office hasn’t been as strong in L.A. Despite the tinkering, the three-hour “Ragtime” remains a long-winded affair, bloated and more than a little self-important. Whether the three-hour show can keep patrons from fidgeting in those roomy seats is another matter.
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