Ragtime Is Riches!

RAGTIME

Book by TERRENCE McNALLY
Music by STEPHEN FLAHERTY
Lyrics by LYNN AHRENS
Based on the novel by E.L. DOCTOROW

I saw the show Tuesday night, and it was wonderful! I will put Ragtime in its own special color. I've been listening to the music for about 10 years, since the college days when my sister (blogname Tea Cosy Cassandra) first bought the cast recording. Ragtime is one of those musically grand shows with big choral numbers ("New Music," "Til We Reach That Day," "Wheels of a Dream") and powerful solos ("Back to Before," "Make Them Hear You"), one whose force can hold you still and breathless in your chair, whose poignancy can draw the tears out with each successive rising note, whose sheer liveness makes you want to dance out of your seat.

Ragtime is about 3 different families and the connections they make. In the opening number, all the characters are introduced. First are Mother, Father and their son, Edgar, Grandfather and Mother's Younger Brother, a white family that lives in supposedly idyllic New Rochelle, NY, where, Grandfather says, "there were no Negroes." And then on dance the group in Harlem, featuring Coalhouse Walker, a ragtime musician (whose prop piano was fantastic). And then Grandfather says, "and there were no immigrants," and we meet Tateh and his Little Girl, Latvian Jews coming on a "rag ship" to America. While these three groups move warily around each other on the stage, a few historical characters sing their own stories - Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Booker T. Washington.

The story begins when Father, an amateur explorer, goes off for a year to travel to the North Pole. While he's gone, Mother discovers an abandoned baby boy in her garden. When the police find his mother, Sarah, a young black woman who has herself been abandoned by Coalhouse, Mother breaks all convention and takes both the baby and Sarah into her home, a choice that will bring drastic change to her family. Coalhouse decides to change his life around and comes to the house to try to win Sarah back. Thanks in part to his influence, Mother's Younger Brother devotes himself to social change. Mother, meanwhile, discovers an aptitude for running the family business and the pleasure of thinking for herself. Tateh finds America isn't the dreamland he'd hoped for, and he moves from the tenements of New York City to the textile factories in Massachusetts, doing everything he can to care for his Little Girl. On their way to Boston, Tateh and Little Girl run into Mother and Edgar, and both families find something to like in the other. Coalhouse and Sarah, with their baby, make idealistic plans for their future but are brutally stopped short when bigots destroy Coalhouse's new car, and Coalhouse becomes obsessed with revenge. After Sarah is killed while trying to help him, Coalhouse goes completely over the edge, carrying out a campaign of violence that throws the community into fearful chaos. Mother insists on keeping the baby for Coalhouse, against Father's protests. Mother's Younger Brother decides to place his explosives expertise in Coalhouse's hands. When Father reluctantly agrees to support Mother, he suggests they go to Atlantic City, where the authorities won't be looking for them to take the baby away, and they run again into Tateh and his Little Girl. Tateh has become a wealthy filmmaker at this point, and he and Mother enjoy watching their children play together. Back in New York, Coalhouse is threatening to blow up the J. P. Morgan library. At Father's suggestion, Booker T. Washington is brought in and convinces Coalhouse to stand down, to think of his son and the legacy he wants to leave him. The police shoot Coalhouse anyway. At the end, the characters conclude their stories. Father's next adventure takes him on the ill-fated Lusitania. After a proper season of mourning, Mother marries Tateh, and their family, including baby Coalhouse, make a happy life together in California.

I knew the music already, but of course nothing is better than seeing the actual show - experiencing the whole story behind the songs and getting to know the characters' personalities. Confession: I'm in love with Mother's Younger Brother. Played by Bobby Steggert, he was adorably awkward, vulnerable and big-hearted. Christianne Noll, whose CD Tea Cosy Cassandra and I listened to quite a lot our first year in DC, was a lovely Mother. In "Goodbye, My Love" and "Journey On," she sang longingly and beautifully about her own desire to expand her life. Since first hearing the cast recording, I've revered Brian Stokes Mitchell, but Quentin Earl Darrington did a great job. His "Make Them Hear You" was powerfully moving. I liked all of the singers, actually.

I admit that while Ragtime has some of my favorite Broadway songs, there are also some songs that I skip. I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy the skip songs of the first act. It was the staging that made "Henry Ford" fun to watch. The actors formed an assembly line that flowed up the multiple tiers of the set and were passing props in strict time while they sang. For "The Crime of the Century," it was the melodramatic costumes and Leigh Ann Larkin's portrayal of Evelyn Nesbit. The skip songs in the second act I still would have skipped. There was one bit of staging, right after Sarah is killed, that seemed to be making a political statement instead of telling the story, but the subsequent "Til We Reach That Day" more than made up for it. Live, the songs I like I liked even more. There's nothing that can equal a stageful of people singing their souls out to tell a story.

Seeing the show was a great experience. Now that I've seen it, and seen it done well, Ragtime remains one of my favorites.