The most arresting change in the exhilarating/exhausting Broadway revival of “Ragtime,” the musical about the challenges facing three American families in a dizzying new era, is not something you can see on the stage, but it is a story big and bizarre enough — American enough — that it would fit right in: The sole producer of the original Broadway “Ragtime” a dozen years ago was Livent, a megamusical factory based in Canada and run by the megamogul Garth Drabinsky, who created the second largest Broadway theater out of two smaller unused ones to house the show. Livent went bankrupt; the theater, which was named after the Ford motor company, is now named after the Hilton hotel chain; and Drabinsky, accused of fraud, became a fugitive from justice. He was finally convicted and sentenced just last March to seven years in prison.

The new production, which has now opened at the Neil Simon Theater, comes from the non-profit Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and the risk this time has been spread among some two dozen other producers, who are reportedly spending less money (despite inflation) than the original and presumably spending it more cautiously.

Streamlined? Yes, The Set.

The most visible change on the stage is the set, a single sky-high metal contraption — with walkways and balconies on three levels — which seems inspired by such monumental architecture as the Eiffel Tower, the Great Hall at Ellis Island, the old Pennsylvania Station. But this represents a scaling back from the original 1998 “Ragtime” on Broadway, which had one expensive set after another and employed such embellishments as an actual working Model T Ford. For the 2009 “Ragtime,” there is a car-sized prop that suggests an automobile, and a prop here or a sign there or just a change in lighting to suggest a nightclub or an ocean liner or a tenement.

It is easy to consider this an improvement, thanks to director Marcia Milgrom Dodge’s choreography (more posing than dancing, but done well); to the eye-catching costumes of Santo Loquasto (who was the costume designer for the original production as well); and to Donald Holder’s lighting of dark reds and rich blues and sunset shades. The set allows for some deeply beautiful tableaux vivants, and is a great frame for the remarkable moving picture that is the opening number, the title song, presenting the entire cast in proper white parasols or frayed prayer shawls or jazzy brown derbies. The set even helps underscore some of the themes of the musical, which is based on the puckish popular 1974 novel by E.L. Doctorow about the convulsive social, economic and technological changes that wracked the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The set evokes the over-sized factories of the new assembly-line era. It also looked to me like so much scaffolding — as if scenic designer Derek McLane is telling us that the sweeping tale of individual characters both real and imagined is really the story of an America still under construction.

All this fits in with the producers’ promise that this “Ragtime” is more “streamlined”. The show itself is shorter than the original (which was more than three hours), and is said to move faster. There are certainly enough lively moments to fill more than one one-minute montage:

But “streamlined” is not the first word that would come to mind about this production to anyone except a theatergoer who remembers the original, or a producer who is hoping that once-inhospitable critics will forget the original. The numbers are not small: a 28-piece orchestra, 30 songs, a cast of 40, a running time of some 150 minutes.

What Do Critics Know?

When the original “Ragtime” opened on Broadway in January, 1998, Ben Brantley’s review in the New York Times began: “Blessed with beauty, ambition, a smashing wardrobe and a social conscience, ”Ragtime” would seem to be the kind of musical that brings Broadway audiences to their knees in adoration. Then why does [it] …feel so utterly resistible?…There is much to admire in ”Ragtime,”… But there is finally little to fall in love with.” The show, he wrote, had “the aura of something assembled by corporate committee.”

“Ragtime” went on to be nominated for 13 Tony Awards, winning four – best book of a musical; best original musical score; best orchestrations; and Audra McDonald for best featured actress in a musical — and ran for two years and 834 performances… a hit by almost any measure, except financially; it wound up losing money.

Twelve years after Brantley’s review, when the new version opened in Washington D.C. this past April, Peter Marks, the theater critic of the Washington Post, wrote a positive review, although not as positive as the ads would have you believe: Yes, he thought it a “stirringly intelligent revival” and viewed it as more successful than the original, but he also wrote that it “remains at times a victim of its own grand ambitions.”

My take on the original (to the extent that I remember it) was that, for all its wonderful and impressive moments, it was too big and too long and too self-important, not playful enough or soulful enough, almost intimidating. Whether you see the new “Ragtime” as a corrective or a continuation — as exhilarating or exhausting, stirring or stupefying…or your reaction, like mine, contains a bit of both extremes — will depend, I suspect, largely on your taste for the score.

Update: As a public service, I include links to several other reviews, including what Ben Brantley says now. Scroll to the bottom of the page.

A Romp Through Turn-of-The-Century America

E.L. Doctorow’s novel “Ragtime” is a rapid-fire montage of a pivotal moment in American history, with cameos from the celebrities of the era. The musical re-creates the novelist’s focus on three fictional families, one whose story ends tragically, another happily, the third ambiguously.

An old-line WASP family in New Rochelle sees their insular way of life blown apart, which is distressing for some members of the family, liberating for others, but disorienting for all to live through (as a lyric from “Coalhouse Demands” puts it) “an era exploding, a century spinning.” The characters’ lives begin so generically that Doctorow did not give them any names — they are Mother and Father, Mother’s Younger Brother, The Little Boy. It is as if the events of the era push them into becoming individuals.

A Jewish immigrant and his daughter arrive on a “rag ship” that takes them from a shetl in Latvia through Ellis Island to the Lower East Side, where they struggle to survive, the father selling paper cutout silhouettes of people’s faces. They escape from New York, winding up exploited in a sweatshop in Massachusetts, where they join a strike, clash with the police and escape once again — leading to the plaintive lyrics (from the ironically titled “Success”) “Where’s the America/we were supposed to get?/Was it a silhouette?” Theirs is the standard American success story, with Tateh the father winding up a (pre)Hollywood director.

An African-American ragtime piano player woos the woman who has had his child. The story of Coalhouse Walker Jr. and Sarah is the most tragic and the most explosive of the three, and was the main focus of the 1981 movie of “Ragtime.” (It may be most noteworthy for being the last theatrical film in which James Cagney appeared, coming out of a long retirement to play New York City’s police commissioner, a character who has disappeared in the musical.) Coalhouse is mocked by the racist Irish-American hooligans of a voluntary firehouse, who vandalize his new Model T. His uncontainable anger progresses uncontrollably from catharsis to catastrophe.

The three stories overlap and interweave with one another and with what you could call guest appearances by many of the celebrities of the day – Harry Houdini suspended upside down in the air while he escapes from a straitjacket, Henry Ford standing at the top overseeing his assembly line, arctic explorer Admiral Peary, radical activist Emma Goldman, architect Stanford White, J.P. Morgan, Booker T. Washington.

Overpowering Megamusical Score

It is a vertiginous mix, simultaneously dark and hopeful, violent and sweet, as punchy as an action comic and as grave as an opera. The musical’s book by Terrence McNally did, and does, the job you would expect from the playwright of such gems as “Master Class” in navigating around these varying tones and compressing the page for the stage. The lyrics by Lynn Ahrens are in turns clever and moving. The music by Stephen Flaherty is often tuneful. The musical, however, is called “Ragtime”, yet with the exception of the title song and a few others, the songs are not light and tinkly, neither playfully convoluted rags nor “Tea for Two”-type period pieces. They are not from the 1900’s but from the 1990’s, the era of the megamusical, heavy ballads and full-out anthems.

If you have the CD or otherwise know the score already, and this music appeals to you, there is no reason to stay home; many reasons to go. The cast does it full justice, especially Christiane Noll as Mother. It would be very difficult to top the charismatic Brian Stokes Mitchell and the incomparable Audra McDonald in the original roles of Coalhouse Walker and Sarah, who perform the musical’s second-best-known number (after the title song), “The Wheels of A Dream,” but the new performers, Quentin Earl Darrington and Stephanie Umoh, are revelations in their own right, both lower key but certainly on-key.

As I sat in the theater, though, the cumulative effect of all this good and grand singing felt to me not just powerful but overpowering — and not completely in a good way. The mix became for me a monotone.

For some reason, I felt so guilty about my reaction that when I got home I played the album of the original “Ragtime” (something I don’t think I’ve put on in a decade). I listened to it three times. I thought: there are some really good, well-constructed songs here. And I was wrong about the lack of playfulness. There are definitely some playful songs, such as “What A Game!” about how the genteel past-time of baseball had become the vulgar sport of the masses and “Crime of the Century”, which for the current production sexpot Evelyn Nesbit (Savannah Wise) sings wheee while swinging on a red velvet swing in a fanciful courtroom. Having done my duty, I put on another, unrelated album called Piano Rags, featuring the piano music of Scott Joplin and George Gershwin. My immediate reaction: Wow, this is great.

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Update: Here are links to reviews of “Ragtime” in:
The New York Times
Associated Press
USA Today
Variety
Hollywood Reporter
New York Post
The Washington Post

Ragtime
at the Neil Simon Theater, 250 West 52nd Street
Book by Terrence McNally, Music by Stephen Flaherty, Lyrics by Lynn Ahrens.
Directed and choreographed by Marcia Milgrom Dodge
Music direction by James Moore
Scenic design by Derek McLane, costume design by Santo Loquasto, lighting design by Donald Holder, sound design by Acme Sound Partners
Orchestrations by William David Brohn, vocal arrangements by Stephen Flaherty, music coordinator, John Miller.
Cast:
Ron Bohmer as Father
Quentin Earl Darrington as Coalhouse Walker Jr.
Christiane Noll as Mother
Robert Petkoff as Tateh
Bobby Steggert as Mother’s Younger Brother
Stephanie Umoh as Sarah
Christopher Cox as The Little Boy
Sarah Rosenthal as The Little Girl
With: Jonathan Hammond, Donna Migliaccio, Savannah Wise, Eric Jordan Young, Mark Aldrich, Smayya Ali, Terence Archie, Corey Bradley, Jayden Brockington, Jennifer Evans, Aaron Galligan-Stierle, Carly Hughes, Valisia Lekae, Dan Manning, Michael X. Martin, Mike McGowan, Tracy Lynn Olivera, Bryonha Parham, Mamie Parris, Nicole Powell, Arbender J. Robinson, Benjamin Schrader, Wallace Smith, Josh Walden, Catherine Walker, Christopher Williams, Carey Brown, Benjamin Cook, Lisa Karlin, James Moye, Kaylie Rubinaccio, Jim Weaver
Running time: approximately two and a half hours.
Ticket prices: $20 to $125.
Two hours prior to each performance of RAGTIME, patrons will be invited to enter a lottery drawing at the Neil Simon Theater for a limited number of $26.50 lottery tickets to that day’s performance.

Photographs by Joan Marcus courtesy Boneau/Bryan-Brown