Ragtime, the Tony-winning musical by Stephen Flaherty, Lynn Ahrens, and Terrence McNally, has triumphantly returned to Broadway after a staggering sold-out extended run at Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.Based on E. L. Doctorow's 1975 novel of the same name, Ragtime begins in 1906, juxtiposing the affluence of a resident American family with the impoverished hardship of an immigrant Jewish family and a jazz pianist in Harlem dealing with racial injustice. The stories of the three fictional families mingle with real-life personas such as Harry Houdini, Booker T. Washington, and Henry Ford, among others.
The original 1998 Broadway production was notable not only for its soaring score but also for the production design which included a car, a mammoth staircase, and larger-than-life backdrops of famous landmarks. For the Kennedy Center production, director Marcia Milgrom Dodge streamlined the focus of the show onto the relationships between the characters, and she has brought that same aesthetic to the Broadway revival.Ragtime is the latest in a line of recent Broadway shows featuring a large cast and orchestra. With 40 performers on stage and 28 musicians in the pit, the future of legitimate Musical Theatre seems stunningly bright indeed. The award-winning production team includes Derek McLane (scenic design), Santo Loquasto (original costume design), Donald Holder (lighting design), James Moore (musical direction), and William David Brohn (original orchestrations).
With an African-American President in the White House and the
grass-roots efforts for marriage equality, Ragtime's story of justice, revolution, and the pursuit of the quintessential American dream is perhaps more relevant today than when the book or the musical originally premiered. Settling in for a long run on Broadway, fiction and fantasy intermingle to remind us what is possible in "Their Time, Our Time, Ragtime."
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