Back to Before

From the moment the curtain rises on the new Broadway revival of  "Ragtime,” it’s clear that things in turn-of-the-century America are bleak.  An enormous 40-person company lines the beautiful, but cold, set—three-tiered scaffolding which may or may not be on loan from last season’s “Next to Normal,”—and stares out into the darkness.  Each member is visible, relegated to a particular level according to which social class they are in: New Rochelle’s stifled elite, the fresh-to-America immigrants, or the rambunctious Harlem musicians.  Unfortunately this tableau is one of the clearest moments the audience gets in this uneven revival of a truly great show, which opened at the Neil Simon Theater tonight. 

Those lucky enough to have seen the original production (which made Broadway stars out of Brian Stokes Mitchell, Audra McDonald, and Marin Mazzie) will immediately note the absence of the scenic grandeur that inhabited the Ford Center for the Performing Arts ten years ago.  But, as a director like John Doyle proved with his revival of “Sweeney Todd,” it is often by stripping down the enormity of an original production that one finds subtleties in the emotional structure of a work.  Here, director and choreographer Marcia Milgrom Dodge tries to do this, but ultimately fails, unable to balance the energy and tone of her actors with the bareness of what surrounds them. 

The proceedings start off well-enough in the opening number, which immediately displays the brilliance of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s Tony Award-winning score, where directness is essential due to the fact that so much information must be conveyed in so little time.  Cast members address the audience in order to get bulky exposition out of the way before entering into a more traditional musical theater format, where they are allowed to sing songs with nary a hint of the self-referential gimmickry that has overtaken musical theater in the past decade. 

Dodge, like original director Frank Galati, wisely establishes a sense of propulsion to the staging where the classes weave around one another, overlapping in emotion if not in physical contact, much like the melting pot that was New York in the early 1900s.  While this is essential to conveying the tension of the times (special note goes to the subtle gestural differences in each class’s choreography), there is also a fine line between maintaining this energy and over-staging the show; a line that Dodge doesn’t walk confidently. 

Therefore, it is the show’s structure, where each character adds to the whole much like part of Henry Ford’s assembly line, that quickly steals the spotlight as the first act progresses.  But this structure also has a potentially frustrating flaw if not directed with finesse, in that the overwhelming amount of characters and plot development leave little time for us to connect to each storyline.  We jump from class to class with each new song, which, when viewed in succession, can make for a string of vignettes instead of an unfolding storyline. 

Central themes become apparent in each of these moments, as each class strives for both the chance to escape their confinement and to find security in the shifting world.  Characters begin coming together when Mother (Christianne Noll) and the immigrant Tateh (Robert Petkoff) convene on a train platform and the stark differences in appearance, one in rags with a child roped to his waist and the other holding a parasol and touching her child with pristine gloves, can’t stop them from forming a connection.  Mother also is responsible for finding a young African American child buried in her lawn, which we quickly discover belongs to Sarah (Stephanie Umoh), who has fled from Coalhouse (Quentin Earl Darrington), a piano man from Harlem who plays ragtime music while dreaming of a better world. 

The complexity of the interweaving storylines is matched, in the material at least, by emotional complexity, which is as absent from this revival as the use of scenery.  No performance is more frustrating than Stephanie Umoh’s stilted delivery of Sarah, a role for which Audra McDonald won a Tony during the original run. During “Your Daddy’s Son,” a tsunami of a song that should crash into the audience as such, Dodge directs her to run around the bare stage in an attempt to fill the space.  Instead Umoh—like Noll with “Back to Before” and Darrington with “Make Them Hear You”—is left to flail around before finally singing straight at the audience in a seeming attempt for something to play off of; with McDonald you saw the battle happening within, here it’s merely with the actress’s surroundings.  The problem again comes back to the disconnect between the performers and the design, the first amped up and the second scaled down from the original, to the point where even the sure-fire “Wheels of a Dream” falls flat.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to enjoy in the evening.  The first-rate score is reason enough to get to the theater, and, on a whole, it’s sung beautifully, just not as memorably as by the voices that originated the material.  Noll, here used as more of an occasional comedian than Mazzie in the original, has soaring moments vocally and manages to become the emotional core of the production despite every attempt on Darrington and Umoh’s part to do so.  But the material weighing in Mother’s favor lessens the impact of Sarah and Coalhouse, who have the evening’s most devastating turn of events.  

It should be noted that the audience around me responded enthusiastically to every element of the show.  Perhaps they weren’t able to see the original; or perhaps I need to accept that, as the lyric suggests, we can never go back to before, despite the intense desire to transport some of the original’s magic into this ultimately disappointing revival. 

Comments

[Zack]

yikes.

[Troy]

I disagree

[Janey]

big time disagree

[Christopher]

I look forward to seeing if I agree. I loved the original.

[Esther]

I loved the music but this production really didn't grab me emotionally. Part of it was that while I'd never seen Ragtime on stage, I had read the book and seen the movie, so I knew the story. There was no element of surprise. Plus, I felt like more time was spent with Mother's and Tateh's stories than with Sarah and Coalhouse. I felt like their characters weren't strong enough to really forge an emotional bond with the audience. Plus, a key scene in the musical was staged in a way that I can only describe as lame. I mean, I almost laughed. And this was a scene involving bigotry, something I never, ever find funny.

[ToscasKiss]

Opinions seem particularly spread all over the spectrum on this one. I was hoping to hear that this revival further strengthened RAGTIME's place in musical greats history, but sounds like maybe not. I'd be interested to hear your impression of Ron Bohmer as Father; I would expect him to be more affecting and sympathetic than the original (judging from the recordings) or either of the two actors I've seen in the role. Also, how were Tateh and Emma Goldman, vocally and otherwise? Oh--and re. Atlantic City ("Let's Run Away" and "Buffalo Nickel"), was there choreography similarly to the original, with a good sized group dancing with joyful, fun spirit? For me, that was a wonderful, necessary moment for the show. Can't help but love RAGTIME. Thanks for your impressions.

[Chimene]

This musical is coming in March 2010 to the Drury Lane Theater in Chicagoland. I haven't seen it performed in any form so I look forward to seeing it. My friend might be in the cast, too.