America in the Major and Minor Keys: The Return of Jazz on Broadway

in Ragtime musicIt seems as if the sun is always rising or setting inside the Vivian Beaumont Theatre. It’s a large, spacious room – which could function, quite naturally, as a cave – and in taking its production of the American Ahrens-and-Flaherty musical epic from its bare bones in Encores! last year, Director Lear Debisonnet did not go to great lengths to fill the stage with scenery. David Korins’ design expanded some of the story’s key elements, introducing the Model T that represents the estate of black musician Coalhouse Walker Jr. and the carved Victorian home of the white family in New Rochelle who become his unlikely traveling companions. But this is a production that tends to let the eye wander toward the horizon line, covering its actors, in lighting design by Adam Honoré and Donald Holder, in shades of purple and orange as their voices echo across the stage. It’s a fitting dynamic for a show whose plot juxtaposes a series of turn-of-the-century coincidences, largely in New York City and along the Atlantic coast, while dreaming through his set of the expansion of the rest of the continent. When Coalhouse sings that he’s going to show his son America, on the rousing “Wheels of a Dream,” the power of Joshua Henry’s voice can transport you straight to California, regardless of the fact that his character would never get there himself. What matters is the fantasy of infinite space, a great illusory promise, as this production understands, that sustains the nation but does not come true. Even America has an end.

Ragtime musicwith its resounding sentimentality, is not really a great musical, but Debisonette has enough ingenuity to convince you that it might come close. It arrived in a flurry of late-’90s Broadway epics of Americana procession and Titaniclocal responses to huge musicals such as Why is he different? And so are the tastes of Toronto theater director Garth Drabinski, who loves pageantry and shenanigans. (before Ragtime musicproduced a brilliant revival of the American musical Show boatwhose influence you can feel here; after Ragtime musicHe went to Prison in Canada; Much later, he tried to come back Paradise Square.) Although dibesonite production eliminates many flags, Ragtime music It has a solid, clear core and an educational tone worthy of EPCOT. Three groups of Americans—blacks, whites, and immigrant Jews—converge on stage, and as the nation rages with early 20th-century energy, the characters mingle, like the braided, syncopated chord progression of the title. In the end, despite the great loss we have suffered, we are moving toward a more hopeful dawn. Terrence McNally’s book, like E.L. Doctorow’s novel, features real figures from the era among the fictional characters, including Houdini (Rod Cyrus, wearing some cool vintage swimsuits), Emma Goldman (Shayna Taub, who resonates well with It is enough) and the scandalous Evelyn Nesbitt (Anna Grace Barlow, who gave Addison Rae the role of “the girl on the swing”). A few of Doctorow’s ironies have been deleted—the fact that the white characters profit from a boom in patriotism by operating a fireworks factory is downplayed, even if those explosives are crucial to the plot—though the fanciful fringes of the novel’s oddities remain, as when a young boy has visions of the beginning of World War I and urges Houdini to “Warn the Duke!” (Yes, he means Franz Ferdinand).

When this version of Ragtime music It premiered over a short run at City Center last fall, and was programmed — opportunistically, I thought at the time — for maximum impact in the weeks surrounding the presidential election. There, Debissonnette gave a large, agnostic presentation of the show, adaptable to any result in the polls, making the undigested aspects of the material prominent. The emotional impression it left depended on the audience, who was either tense in anticipation of the outcome or sad about it later. Eleven months later, this Ragtime music It has grown into itself. The show’s fin-de-siècle left-of-center values, its love of immigrants doing good through capitalism, and its hope for interracial solidarity by opening the heart of a sympathetic and discerning woman, seem even more radical now. But it’s also the case that Debisonnette and her collaborators wrestled more deeply with how they wanted to portray it Ragtime musicAmerican dreams on stage. Where the show once values ​​given, almost diorama labels, it is now presented as more fugitive and unstable, which is what its characters hope the world will be.

DeBessonet’s production begins schematically, with the different factions milling around each other. She’s just a competent director of a big band, and Elinor Scott’s choreography, especially in a later scene in a Henry Ford factory where people’s arms act as machines, is over-the-top. but Ragtime music It settles into a richer, more interior mode quickly, due in large part to the standout performances of its leads and the idea they applied to Ahrens and Flaherty’s score. As Coalhouse, a character first introduced as a talented pianist who later goes on a quest for violent revenge, Henry is amazing; His voice is his own internal combustion engine, able to accelerate a phrase into a high-speed sentiment with remarkable ease, but it also carries within the character a deep sadness that tempers the character’s emotions. Although Henry’s style is impeccable, he achieves the feeling that Coalhouse always reaches for and never quite gets his way. Its fire lies in contrast to the melting glacier played by Casey Levy (she played Elsa, after all), a new mother to Rochelle, identified only as a mother, who goes on a proto-feminist journey of self-actualization after taking in Coalhouse’s mistress, Sarah (Nichelle Lewis, who has refined her character’s rage but still gives herself a loud voice). Levy’s timbre is more contemporary than that of Marine Mazzei, who took the mother on a journey from soprano to belter, in creating the part, setting her version of the character on a slightly different path. Her warmth as a performer is always there, so maternal agency is suppressed rather than unexplored. She was covered in Linda Cho’s intricate lace costumes in the first act, then slowly gave her more room to breathe until she was finally barefoot on the beach, letting loose and breaking your heart with her song “Back to Before.” There’s Brandon Uranovich, too, as the third slot Ragtime musicThe central trio, drawing on the impossible optimism of his Eastern European immigrant Tate in the first act and, after his transformation into a filmmaker in the second, maintain the charm and defensive armament of a man who has seen hard times fall. There’s also finely crafted work from Ben Levi Ross, as the mother’s zealous, misguided and revolutionary younger brother. In a meeting with Coalhouse in Act Two, where the younger brother commits to helping with the bombing – a scene narrated by Top’s Emma Goldman – Ragtime music At its combustible best, it fulfills a vision of two men who find that, in the darkness of disillusionment with their nation, “for a moment, they are the same.”

Important points like these, when those sounds combine with James Moore’s sumptuous orchestra and crystallize into a sound that is sensitive to everything, make this Ragtime music It is impossible to refuse, even if it is very easy to dodge with it. And I could go on quibbling: it’s unfortunate, for example, that the set design relies so much on a screen at the back of the stage, especially when a particular image of the Statue of Liberty makes you feel like you’re underwater in an aquarium. It’s too bad that when you could once expect an actual ship to pull ashore at Lincoln Center, here we only get stairs. Also, every use of the American flag in the set is obvious and disturbing. However, the production is sung with such power and deep feeling that it overwhelms. These characters may have pipe dreams, and the show’s idea of ​​hope may be impossibly naive, but they remain. The musical exposition is bordered by the introduction and repetition of the title number, which embodies “the sound of the beginning of something” and, by the end of the exposition, the end as well. There you are, in the transitional twilight of the nation. That’s the green flash that imprints the back of your eyes, just as the sun sets over the horizon Ragtime music.

Ragtime music Located at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center.