It’s been 26 years since Ragtime premiered on Broadway, and I’m still baffled by one thing. How didn’t it win the 1998 Tony Award for Best Musical? Yes, it won Tonys for its book, score, orchestrations, and featured actress (Audra McDonald, the original Sarah), but what made voters pick a super-fancy puppet show over this sweeping slice of Americana, a stirring salute to melting-pot life in turn-of-the-20th-century New York?
Of course, The Lion King is still going strong at the Minskoff Theatre (“ain’t no passing craze,” as they sing in “Hakuna Matata”). And now thanks to Encores!, Ragtime is back for a brief run at New York City Center with a superb 32-person cast and a 28-piece onstage orchestra performing William David Brohn’s sumptuous original orchestrations. Only an Encores! concert staging could deliver a cast and orchestra of such magnitude, as they did with their similarly grand production of Titanic in June.
In his adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel, playwright Terrence McNally (Master Class, Love! Valour! Compassion!) begins the multiethnic 1906-set story with lily-white suburbanites in New Rochelle; then he brings in the Black community in Harlem; and then Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side. Composer Stephen Flaherty also has assigned each respective group its own distinct sound: light, bright, and airy choral sounds; syncopated ragtime rhythms, heavy on the piano; woodwind- and string-heavy Yiddish folk style.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★★ review here.]
Director Lear deBessonet—who helmed the Encores! and subsequent recent Broadway transfers of Into the Woods and Once Upon a Mattress—moves each group onstage, first individually and neatly; then she mixes them, slightly chaotically, and not without visible hesitation. This is where we meet our main characters: Father (Colin Donnell), who was “well off, very well off,” Mother (Caissie Levy), who “often told herself how fortunate she was to be so protected and provided for by her husband,” their Little Boy (Matthew Lamb), and Mother’s Younger Brother (Ben Levi Ross), “a young man in search of something to believe in”; Harlem entertainer Coalhouse Walker Jr. (Joshua Henry, perfection) and Sarah (The Wiz’s Nichelle Lewis), who fell in love with Coalhouse when he played piano; Tateh (Brandon Uranowitz) and his Little Girl (Tabitha Lawing), aboard a rag ship from Latvia on “a long journey, a terrible one” to America. Also making celebrity cameos: Black educator/orator Booker T. Washington (John Clay III), financial magnate J.P. Morgan (John Rapson), auto industrialist/assembly line inventor Henry Ford (Jeff Kready), illusionist and immigrant Harry Houdini (Rodd Cyrus); revolutionary and immigrant Emma Goldman (Shaina Taub); and chorus girl–turned–scandal star Evelyn Nesbit (Stephanie Styles). Incredibly, this all happens in the opening title song.
It’s hard not to be instantly drawn to Tateh’s story: an immigrant who arrives on our shores dreaming of a better life and starts his own business making silhouettes, only to be crushed by tenement life; he ultimately resorts to working in a textile mill—64 hours a week for 6 dollars. You’ll want to join Younger Brother at Emma Goldman’s rally for the workers. Taub, on leave from Suffs where she plays another fiery activist, women’s suffrage leader Alice Paul, and Ross (star of Jason Robert Brown’s musical The Connector) are that persuasive. And Tony winner Uranowitz (Leopoldstadt), recently seen as the uppity ship owner in Titanic at Encores!, is shattering as Tateh, who later reinvents himself brilliantly as the filmmaker Baron Ashkenazy.
Coalhouse and Sarah’s too-brief romance, his quest for justice after his beloved Model T is vandalized in a heinous racist incident, and his anger and the aftermath are the incidents that loosely link the characters. After Sarah and her baby are taken in by Mother, Coalhouse visits New Rochelle to win his love back, with the gorgeous “New Music,” arguably the best song in the top-tier score: “His fingers stroke those keys/ And every note says, ‘please’/ And every chord says, ‘turn my way.’” If those Lynn Ahrens lyrics don’t make you swoon, check your pulse. All it takes is four lines—“Sarah, my life has changed/ Sarah, you’ve got to see/ Sarah, we’ve got a son/ Sarah, come down to me”—for Henry’s Coalhouse to melt Sarah’s, and our, hearts.
As for Coalhouse’s frustrations and the fallout, it’s an all-too-familiar refrain. “Guns were going off everywhere,” says Younger Brother, talking about a political rally. And in “Till We Reach That Day,” note the lyrics “She was nothing to them, she was a woman” and “What is wrong with this country?” In 2024, Ragtime should feel dated. The fact that it doesn’t is disheartening—and it gives even more power to the show.
Ragtime opened Oct. 30, 2024, at New York City Center and runs through Nov. 10. Tickets and information: nycitycenter.org
