The new revival of the 1998 Broadway musical “Ragtime” gives us a good idea of what the 1981 film adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s critically acclaimed 1975 bestseller would have been like if Steven Spielberg had directed it — and not Milos Forman.
At the time, many critics felt and wrote that the movie version of “Ragtime” should have been assigned to Robert Altman. Doctorow’s profile of a racially diverse America and its newest immigrants is not so much panoramic as it is kaleidoscopic. Doctorow created improbable but fascinating links between real people like illusionist Harry Houdini and activist Emma Goldman and fictional characters like ragtime composer Coalhouse Walker Jr., who has impregnated a desperate young Black woman, Sarah, who is essentially adopted, along with her baby, by a rich white woman called Mother.
Altman had handled these fluid multicolored, multilayered stories brilliantly in films like “Nashville” and “A Wedding,” but he had most recently directed the expensive flop “Popeye.” Forman, on the other hand, had directed two hits, “Hair” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Forman flattened and simplified the story, but retained much of Doctorow’s absurdist humor that fuels the narrative.
The “Ragtime” that opened Thursday at LTC’s Vivian Beaumont Theater is as if Spielberg’s “Lincoln” had been turned into a musical. It’s big, respectful, glowing with nostalgia, jingoistic in its patriotism, filled with stirring anthems and weighty enough to do battle with “Les Miserables,” the 1980 Euro-musical that had obviously inspired book writer Terrence McNally, composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens to write the musical version of “Ragtime.”
Doctorow gave his novel at least five major protagonists, each of whom flaunts a distinctly absurdist streak, giving the work its dazzling, irreverent humor. Against all conventions of the early 20th Century, Mother takes in Sarah and her baby, whom she finds in her flower garden. When Coalhouse shows up to court Sarah, she refuses to see him repeatedly, pushing to ridiculous limits Mother’s hospitality. When Coalhouse’s model-T car is destroyed by racist firemen, this ragtime composer acts like a white man and demands justice despite being thwarted at every turn. (In the novel and movie, his plight requires several scenes; in the musical, it is handled too efficiently in one song.) Tateh, a newly arrived Jewish immigrant, improbably launches a whole new art form (the movies) through his illustrations. And a character called Mother’s Younger Brother throws away his white privilege and fortune to become an anarchist. Each of these characters in the novel is a bit crazy at heart and, in their choices, defies any kind of ordinary logic. And so they fascinate us.
In the current “Ragtime” revival, there are only flashes of humor in Brandon Uranowitz’s Tateh and Ben Levi Ross’ Younger Brother. Ross, in fact, gets two of the show’s biggest laughs. They come when he tells the fugitive Coalhouse with all due calm, “I know how to blow things up,” and, at show’s ending, when he says he’s going off to fight with Emiliano Zapata in Mexico.
The Tateh character is so pathetic that he has to walk around New York City tied with a rope around himself and his daughter (Tabitha Lawing) so he doesn’t lose her. However, once he sells one of his “movie books,” with its series of printed illustrations, he sings the magical “Gliding” to let his starving daughter know that, against all probability, they will become wildly rich and famous in this new, often cruel country.
“Gliding” is one of the very few songs in “Ragtime” that William David Brohn’s original orchestrations don’t turn into a very major and very loud statement about Justice or Equality or Racism or Growing Petunias in the City. Time after time, a simple ballad begins quietly, promisingly only to turn gargantuan a few stanzas later. Besides “Gliding,” the other thing that keeps “Ragtime” from sinking under its own pomposity is Stephen Flaherty’s recycling of sparkling ragtime arias from Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha.”
McNally’s book turns many major characters into stick figures, and Lear DeBessonet’s direction works hard to sandblast away any remaining edges of interest. The Black characters are noble and sassy, the Jewish characters are noble and schmaltzy, and the white characters have a silver spatula stuck up their butt.
“Ragtime,” like “Les Miz,” gives anthems a very bad name. DeBessonet emphasizes their excessiveness by having her cast, especially Joshua Henry in the Coalhouse role, hold on to a note well passed its sell-by date. It’s difficult to tell if people are applauding mid-song because they’re impressed by Henry’s lung power or if they just want him to get off the note and finish the song. DeBessonet’s blunt direction only encourages us to applaud before the actors have finished singing.
It’s the numbing up of the Broadway musical, which is now held hostage by “American Idol.” It no longer matters if people applaud at inappropriate moments, because the amplification allows, even encourages it.
The “Ragtime” sound design by Kai Harada is particularly unfortunate since Lincoln Center Theater under the former artistic direction of Andre Bishop had used amplification only to support the music coming from the actors and the orchestra. Now, with this “Ragtime,” LTC has gone completely Broadway: the amplification completely supplants any live sound being generated on stage. Henry, along with Cassie Levy as Mother and Nichelle Lewis as Sarah, are vocally strong and deserve better. The female voices are especially ill-served since the sound design over stresses the treble notes, giving them a harsh glare that pushes them sharp.
When it opened on Broadway in 1998, “Ragtime” received mixed reviews and went on to lose the Tony for best musical to “The Lion King.” Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens’ overreliance on anthems has always been a problem, but more evident now is the weakness of Terrence McNally’s book. The story is not so much dramatized as it is told to us in a series of Wikipedia lectures. And the historic figures of Harry Houdini (Rodd Cyrus), Evelyn Nesbit (Anna Grace Barlow), Booker T. Washington (John Clay III) and Emma Goldman (Shaina Taub, recycling her “Suffs” performance minus the humor) appear to have wandered in from another far more intriguing show.
