To say that a singer blows the roof off a theater, as Joshua Henry does in the revival of “Ragtime” that opened at New York City Center on Wednesday, is to understate what great musical performers do. It’s not a matter of so-called pyrotechnics, as if their vocal cords were dynamite sticks. Nor is it a matter of volume, so easily finessed these days. Also beside the point are ultrahigh notes and curlicue riffs, which are too often signs of not enough to sing.
As it happens, Henry offers all those things almost incidentally in this exhilarating gala presentation directed by Lear deBessonet. But what makes his performance as the tragic Coalhouse Walker Jr. so heart-filling and eye-opening, even if you know the musical and have some issues with it, as I do, is the density of emotion he packs into each phrase. Well beyond absorbing the aspirations and travails of the character created by E.L. Doctorow for the 1975 novel on which the show is based, he seems to have become the novel itself. He’s a condensed classic; he blows the roof off your head.
He is aided by songs that, though built from nuances of story, grow to the full scale of Broadway — not an easy act to pull off and not in fact pulled off consistently here. But especially in the first act, the music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, for whom “Ragtime” was a breakthrough hit in 1998, smartly express national themes in domestic contexts. Working with Terrence McNally, who shaped the unusually complex book from the highly eventful novel, they offer a boatload of songs in distinctive styles for the story’s three worlds, all intersecting in and around New York City during the first decade of the 20th century.
If that’s programmatic, it’s also a useful tool and metaphor. An upper-middle-class white family in New Rochelle sings in a classical vein derived from Western European operetta. Immigrants arriving in Lower Manhattan by the thousands — and particularly a Jewish artist called Tateh — bring the sounds of the shtetl with them. Coalhouse, a pianist and composer, represents the aspirations of a Harlem-based Black population with a beguiling, sorrowful, assertive “new music”: ragtime.
No wonder deBessonet begins the show with a spotlit piano: “Ragtime” is fundamentally about the shared dream of American harmony, even if reality delivers only discord. Fittingly then, this Encores!-adjacent production emphasizes the singing of the 33-person cast and 28-person orchestra, under the direction of James Moore, rather than the overblown hoopla of the 1998 production, which featured fireworks and a Model T Ford. The choral work — Flaherty wrote the vocal arrangements — is thrilling.
You hear all that and more in the succession of opening songs that swiftly introduces us to the similarities and differences among the characters. After the rousing title number, we drop in on the New Rochelle family: Mother (Caissie Levy) saying goodbye to Father (Colin Donnell) as he heads to sea for a year’s polar exploration with Admiral Peary. Next we encounter Tateh (Brandon Uranowitz) and his daughter as their “rag ship” of immigrants passes Father’s steamer going in the opposite direction. The families’ paths will cross again and again, in ways that seem both unlikely and inevitable.
Is it a problem in the show’s construction that by the time we fully meet Coalhouse, the story of the Black characters is already immersed in tragedy? Having given birth secretly to Coalhouse’s son, Sarah (Nichelle Lewis) runs off in despair and buries the baby in what turns out to be Mother’s dahlia garden. Without Father there to say no, Mother takes in Sarah and her resuscitated child. When Coalhouse soon comes to New Rochelle to find his lost love, the pieces are all in place for the joy and disaster that await them and the country.
To say that “Ragtime” remains more coherent much longer than most musicals adapted from plot-heavy novels is not to set a very high bar. Nevertheless, it’s impressive that while gradually expanding its scope to include industry barons (Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan), thought leaders (Emma Goldman, Booker T. Washington) and entertainment figures (Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit), along with their distinctive sounds, McNally’s book keeps the action granular and character-based. Domestic relations take priority over, or rather encompass, national ones.
But as the story broadens, it falls into some of the usual big-book traps: cherry-picked highlights, slogans instead of feelings, bare-bones exposition. (At one point, newsboys are reduced to shouting “Extra!” headlines.) More troublesome, the songs begin to sound alike, with powerful if generic ballads swamping the textural diversity we’d come to enjoy earlier. In the show’s last 40 minutes — it runs nearly three hours altogether — the behavioral changes among several of the major characters become difficult to parse, and because of that so do the politics. The story, too painful to find a place to land, circles and circles.
No matter. The material remains strong enough to support the richness of the performances. Uranowitz, somehow both heartbreakingly bitter and jaunty, is terrific throughout. As Goldman, Shaina Taub, on a working vacation from “Suffs,” makes an exceptionally witty firebrand. Levy (singing “Back to Before”) and Lewis (singing “Your Daddy’s Son”) each deliver what in another show might be the standout number.
But there can hardly be another standout in a production that features Henry’s endless supply of vocal drama. Perhaps this “Ragtime” is so moving precisely because its most tragic character can still convince you, at least in music, that there is hope for America, even now.
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