‘Ragtime’ at Ford’s, a Stellar Historical Musical

For a brief time in the early years of the 20th Century, ragtime, an up-from-the-blues-and church, and vaudeville genre of music, swept across the burgeoning United States, as fad, rhythm and melody, often dancing backdrop to a rapidly changing world.
 
Ragtime, as a form of enduring popular music, did not last too long into the century, being perhaps too grand and mellow to sustain itself in wide, popular ways.  It made a brief return to popularity in 1973, when “The Sting,” a star-driven (Paul Newman and Robert Redford) movie about con men in the 1920s, featured an irresistible ragtime score that won an Oscar.

Two years later, in 1975,  the novel “Ragtime” by E.L. Doctorow appeared. It was about the lives of disparate characters, including an immigrant from Eastern Europe, a dynamic black musician named Coalhouse Walker, a well-to-do white family living in a suburb of New York and how their  lives and that of famous historic figures intersected.  A 1981 film version of the novel, directed by Carl Foreman, was epic and also long — and stuffed with stars fared moderately well.

In 1996, this most American of musicals, with a book by playwright Terrence McNally, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens and music by Stephen Flaherty, had its world premiere in Toronto. The American premiere came in Los Angeles in 1997 and opened a year later on Broadway in 1998.  Directed by Frank Galati and choreographed by the gifted Graciela Daniele, it ran for a successful two years, with 834 performances. It starred Brian Stokes Mitchell as Coalhouse and Audra McDonald in a large cast.

It was perhaps unfortunate for “Ragtime” that it had to compete on Broadway in the year of “The Lion King,” which is still running.

But for all that, it was the musical “Ragtime,” through which variations on ragtime music run like American tribal memories, anchoring and lifting its themes time and again, which has endured after all, touring, re-appearing, re-mounted — including an impressive, and stirring production mounted at the Kennedy Center in 2009.

Now, it has re-appeared in Washington, this time as a history play that seems remarkably alive in the present. Perhaps aptly, it’s at the historic Ford’s Theatre through May 20, in a remarkably powerful, emotionally challenging, and also intensely engaging production. Most of all, it seems remarkably light on its feet, for a project that — counting novel, film and productions of the musical — had not been around for 42 years.

If anything, “Ragtime” in a kind of reversal of intellectual diet has gained both weight and immediacy.

The music and songs seem fresh, but the themes echo almost every day and loudly through our daily  social, cultural, individual and — God knows — political lives.
 
As the story goes, in 1912,  a ship full of bedraggled, poor immigrants from Europe is arriving, bringing with them Tateh, an ambitious artist and single father of his small daughter to face pain and adversity but also opportunity.  The country is entranced by scandal and celebrity, sex and murder, Father, the head of a well-off family, is embarking with Admiral Peary to the North Pole as his troubled wife bids him farewell. Coalhouse Walker, a successful and charismatic piano player in Harlem, has purchased a brand new Motel T, the invention of industrialist Henry Ford. The volatile activist Emma Goldman is raging against big business. Another immigrant, the escape artist Houdini is trying to get noticed. This is America in 1912, and the world is moving beneath everyone’s feet, and ragtime is the nation’s musical rage.

Race, immigration, gender (a woman stepping cautiously out of her designated role), tectonic technological changes, international unrest, the politics of rich and poor, and the coming of mass travel and mass entertainment (Tateh discovers how to make pictures move) are all on stage, and will echo loudly in tomorrow’s news and on the internet, given the Trump times we live in.

The music in in “Ragtime” is every bit as expressive as dialogue in a play or arias in an opera.  The songs are not necessarily stand alone. They exist very much as the identifying qualities of character, but in the ragtime music, it has its overarching theme of change, at the beginning, coursing to the climax. “Getting Ready Rag,” “Nothing Like the City,” “Your Daddy’s Son,” “The Wheels of a Dream” and “Back to Before,” a kind of sad lament and acceptance of change by Mother, are all integral parts of the play.

The stage seems, even in its most intimate moments, always crowded, and that, at Ford’s includes the portrait of Lincoln in his box, which resonates differently with every play. The large cast, when it comes together at various times and occasions, is a powerfully emotive character by itself.

In a play marked by tragedy, and violence, racism and rage, there are, of necessity, standouts.  We have to single out Kevin McAllister as Coalhouse,  who—faced with the killing of his beloved and the destruction of his prized Model T by race-baiting members of a New York firehouse—channels his rage into violence that recognizes the consequences.  Tracy Lynn Olivera—who plays mother and wife in the upwardly mobile white family—brings an emotional but clear and ringing voice to constant acts of recognition.  McAllister and Olivera gave remarkable performances at a recent Ford’s revival of “110 in the Shade.”

All of the cast is stellar. Everyone, even the accordion player have something to add: The often giddy Justine “Icy” Moral, as the flighty but knowing Eveyln Nesbit, the rousing Rayanne Gonzales as Emma Goldman and, especially, Nova Y. Payton, who gives such phenomenally gifted voice to the soul of Sarah, the beloved of Coalhouse.

There’s another player here, though, and that’s the audience. On any given afternoon or evening, its members will be different in a way that is a Ford’s audience, which is to say, a visiting audience, as well as members of local and regional theater goers. We happened to meet a school principal named Jim Bowie  from Arkansas, watched as two young black men, one of them sitting almost without breathing during the tense confrontation between Coalhouse and the Irish firemen. I heard the young girl sitting next to me sobbing tearfully and watched as an old man, clapping, was the first to rise for the standing ovation.

This is the kind of thing, to be sure, that makes theater almost an affront to every new app, but the play, the performance, has to be better than good to make a permanent memory.  “Ragtime” is that good.