It feels like I'm starting to make a habit of dashing into the city around the year-end holidays and seeing a show or two before the early-January closings (last year's expedition involved Spamalot and Hairspray). This year, I was actually on an emergency costume supply run and had plans for dinner with a friend, so I decided to see if I could catch the soon-to-close revival of Ragtime at the matinee. I hadn't seen the original back in 1998; I was just starting grad school and had no money for shows then. Nor have I read the E.L. Doctorow's novel. So all I really had to go on was the reasonably positive New York Times review, balanced by the fact that planning to close only six weeks after opening does not suggest a vote of confidence from audiences. I decided it didn't warrant spending too much money, so I gave the show's lottery a try, and after entering a complex three-person consortium got lucky with the very last of the $25 tickets, which put me in the very last seat of the front row, extreme stage right, right under a speaker. That wasn't exactly ideal, though it didn't stop me enjoying the show.
But I can certainly see why the revivial isn't finding much of an audience. I think it has more to do with the show itself than the production, which apparently is considerably scaled down from the very flashy and high-tech original run. While it has some lovely tunes, this is a very hard show to love. The episodic plot follows three different sets of characters: a white family living an upper-middle-class life in New Rochelle (referred to, in a way I found offputting, as simply "Mother," "Father," "Brother," etc.); the black musician Coalhouse Walker and his lover Sarah; and the hopeful Jewish immigrant Tateh, who is trying to support his young daughter.
Tonally, the show is heavyhanded, shifting clumsily from a rah-rah-America schtick to pointed illustrations of the darker side of the American Dream -- in this happy land of freedom and opportunity, Tateh (Robert Petkoff) and his daughter are perfectly free to starve in the streets. Meanwhile Mother (Christiane Noll) in her comfortable life must cope with Father's racism (though how exactly she escaped being a bigot herself is never explained) when she takes Sarah and her baby into her household. Coalhouse, artistically and financially successful and trying to revive his romance with Sarah, comes courting her there, only to experience the ugly bigotry of New Rochelle's Irish firemen and police. Meanwhile, Brother falls in with radicals. It's no fault of the actors, but these are less characters than examples out of a history textbook.
In the original production, Coalhouse and Sarah were played by future Broadway standouts Brian Stokes Mitchell and Audra McDonald; I suspect their star power carried the show. There's nothing wrong with this ensemble, and their voices are very good (though treated poorly by the usual B'way over-amplification), but the characters are so lacking in depth that it's often hard to care about them. Again, that's an issue of Terrance McNally's script rather than the production or acting. I found Tateh's story the most interesting, as he rose from street vendor to a creator of "moving pictures" and eventually to silent film director, but he got very little stage time relative to the other two plots and the show shifted away from him every time it started to get really interesting. Quentin Earl Darrington (Coalhouse) and Stephanie Umoh (Sarah) both have very solid voices, and their tragic ending packed a real punch, but their storyline was diluted by the switching back and forth to the not-very-interesting middle class white angst of Mother. And the "happily ever after" ending of the Tateh and Mother storylines struck me as painfully artificial. I don't know whether to blame that on Doctorow or McNally, but I suspect the novel was simply too sprawling to be effectively adapted to the stage.
Director and choreographer Marcia Milgram Dodge should perhaps have stuck solely to the former role. The "choreography" here consisted primarily of having the cast march around in story-segregated lines (white suburbanites, black musicians and dancers, poor immigrants), weaving repeatedly up and down and across the stage in a manner unpleasantly reminiscent of Grand Marches (at balls) that have gone on far too long. (You can see the end of the march-around bit in the photo above; click to enlarge.)
I did appreciate the period details: Coalhouse's offhand reference to 1910s black bandleader and composer James Reese Europe, whose music I dance to regularly and a biography of whom I greatly enjoyed, made me smile, and I adored the costumes, especially Mother's exquisite S-curve gowns, dripping with lace, and the simpler early-1910s styles she wears at the Jersey Shore. The little cameo appearances by everyone from showgirl Evelyn Nesbit to Houdini were lots of fun. And I didn't have a problem with the simple, scaffold-like, multi-level set or the lack of splashy effects. I was also pleasantly surprised to see a female chorus member who was notably zaftig.
Overall, I had a fairly good time, simply because I like the energy of live theater (and the cast was certainly enthusiastic, if young -- I've rarely seen such brief credits for so many cast members in a single Playbill) and because there were enough little things to enjoy about the production. But I came out thinking, sadly, that it just wasn't a very good show. I'm torn about whether to go ahead and read the novel.
I recently picked up the novel and drilled through it in a fairly short time. It's compelling, in my opinion. It's also every bit as impersonal as what you describe -- characters with no names, except for Coalhouse and Sarah, the fire chief, and the famous folks. It sounds as though they've changed Father some, from someone who was hampered by a ramrod up his ass but was nonetheless attempting to do the right thing.
Posted by: Kip W | April 28, 2010 at 11:22 PM