Ragtime
Look, up on the stage of the renovated, Persian-rococo Oriental Theatre. It’s a musical. It’s an opera. No, it’s a pageant–a panoramic, patriotic parade of history and speculation. As corny as an old-fashioned Fourth of July fireworks display and as timely as the latest performance-art experiment, Ragtime is a triumph of slick but not overspectacular stagecraft, perfect fare for any family that can cough up the bucks. (Regular prices are $27-$75, and “VIP Suite Service” tops out at $125.) It’s a rousing, unabashedly sentimental portrait of life at the start of “the American century,” etched in simple, confident strokes for audiences trying to make sense of the era’s uncertain end. The narrative–a crisp distillation of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel–is generally faithful to its source, though it mutes the book’s underlying darkness, creating a focus-group-tested, feel-good optimism trailing just a faint odor of white-liberal condescension.
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Conceived by Garth Drabinsky–the visionary but reckless Canadian entrepreneur recently ousted from his own production company, Livent, pending an investigation of financial irregularities–the show is the handi-work of a creative team he assembled with remarkable shrewdness, utilizing their artistic strengths and minimizing their weaknesses. Playwright Terrence McNally is sometimes shallow–but he’s well suited to musicals (as he demonstrated in Drabinsky’s Kiss of the Spider Woman), where song or dance numbers can bolster skimpy dramaturgy. Previous efforts by songwriters Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, such as the faux-calypso Once on This Island and the Agatha Christie spoof Lucky Stiff, have been derivative hackwork–but their knack for borrowing from better composers is ideally suited to Ragtime, whose period-pastiche songs aptly evoke the quaint turn-of-the-century setting.
But Ragtime the show, more than the novel, mostly focuses on three fictional families. Set primarily in turn-of-the-century New York, the story ranges from the Hester Street immigrant ghetto on the Lower East Side to all-black Harlem to suburban New Rochelle, where “everyone’s a Christian.” There an unnamed, affluent WASP family finds its complacent insularity disrupted when Mother, a lovely young woman only dimly aware that female privilege carries with it an essential powerlessness, discovers a black baby abandoned in her garden. Soon she locates the child’s parents: Sarah, a neighbor’s servant, and her lover, Coalhouse Walker. Coalhouse begins visiting the New Rochelle home, entertaining the family with his ragtime piano playing–until he and Sarah run afoul of some local bigots, an incident that transforms Coalhouse into a militant anarchist whose gang comes to include Mother’s idealistic Younger Brother. The third plot strand concerns the Jewish immigrant Tateh, who starts out as a street artist and ends up in Hollywood making Our Gang-like comedies; tying the stories together is Tateh’s growing relationship with Mother, whose marriage is strained by Father’s frequent absences–an amateur explorer, he takes part in Admiral Peary’s arctic expedition–and his conservative reaction against Coalhouse.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): theater still by Joan Marcus.
