Terrence McNally weaves these themes together in his adaptation of E.L Doctorow’s novel for the stage, musicalized so beautifully by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. Immigrants are still looked down upon, racism continues to rear its ugly head, and the benefits of white privilege are still guarded by those who fear change. It’s an intriguing idea to look backward from the lens of today only to realize how little we’ve actually accomplished in our progress as human beings. With the focus squarely on the characters, the melting pot of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century springs to life and, along with them, their hopes, heartaches and challenges. All that’s missing are the implied subtitles: Mother Finds Baby Buried in Flower Garden, Coalhouse Goes to New Rochelle, Immigrant Almost Loses Daughter in Riot. In this semi-Vaudevillian structure, the realism of the story’s vignettes unfold. (His transition marking Tateh’s arrival with his daughter is simple but stunning.)
PASADENA PLAYHOUSE RAGTIME CAST FULL
Tom Buderwitz ’s scenic design is full of smart visual shorthand that pops out of the shadows when Jared A. And, in between, a swing drops from the ceiling, a piano rolls on from the wings and a coffin sinks into the floor. Down below, a tiny model of the ship that Father and Admiral Byrd will set sail on for their adventure to the North Pole slips out. (Think Ben Stiller’s Night at the Museum franchise but serious.)Ī miniature replica of Father and Mother’s house on the hill in New Rochelle emerges from the top of a stack of crates. Using twenty actors who cover multiple roles on a more compact, compartmentalized set, he offers us a view of early American history from the storage boxes of a museum. Instead of going big, he goes smaller - not tiny, but everything is scaled down by half to fit the Playhouse. I still remember how the sheer volume of the choral numbers gave me chills.įor the revival at Pasadena Playhouse, director David Lee has a different spin. The stage was enormous and the production filled every inch of it. How do you scale down an epic musical like Ragtime for a smaller stage and a different time? When it opened at the Shubert Theatre in Century City in 1997, the cast numbered nearly fifty, the same as it would for its Broadway debut later that year.
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