(Quentin Earl Darrington), whose efforts to retrieve his love, Sarah (Stephanie Umoh), from Mother and Father’s home escalate into a shooting spree.ĭodge’s greatest strength as a director is keeping the actors moving, particularly in the glorious opening number, which hauls out practically every character in the proverbial melting pot: ”beggar and millionaire/everyone, everywhere/moving to the ragtime!” (In fact, her staging is so superior that one is inclined to forgive her insipid assembly-line choreography.) And she has corralled an almost uniformly first-rate ensemble: The barrel-chested Darrington is a booming, powerful Coalhouse who is physically and vocally different from his predecessor in the role, Brian Stokes Mitchell, but no less effective Umoh, however, is simply not up to his level (at the performance I saw, she missed one too many notes in her wrenching aria ”Your Daddy’s Son”). Doctorow in his 1975 historical novel, which Terrence McNally’s libretto has deftly distilled into three main story lines: the white New Rochelle, N.Y., elite, led by burgeoning liberal Mother (Christiane Noll), blatantly bigoted Father (Ron Bohmer), and Mother’s recalcitrant Younger Brother (Bobby Steggert) the just-off-the-”rag ship” immigrants like Latvian Jewish silhouette maker Tateh (Robert Petkoff) and his Little Girl (Sarah Rosenthal) and the men and women of Harlem, represented by ragtime musician-turned-militant rebel Coalhouse Walker Jr. A cast of 40 - huge by today’s Broadway standards - portrays the colorful panoply of characters created by E.L.
#RAGTIME BROADWAY FULL#
Stephen Flaherty’s music - appropriately entrenched in the titular jagged, syncopated rhythms made so famous by the likes of Scott Joplin - gets the full 28-piece orchestra treatment. But this is no penny-pinching, recession-era Ragtime.
Washington.More than a decade later, a leaner, less lavish, yet somehow even richer incarnation of the turn-of-the-20th-century-era musical has been neatly fitted into Broadway’s Neil Simon Theatre. and Eastern European immigrant Tateh, and historical figures like Emma Goldman and Booker T. It includes a mix of fictional characters such as the ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. Ragtime follows three families as their lives become entwined during the tumultuous social change of the early 1900s. and is both directed and choreographed by Marcia Milgrom Dodge. Nominated for 13 Tony Awards including Best Musical, and winning for Best Original Score and Best Book of a Musical, Ragtime is a powerful portrait. The Broadway revival production originated at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. To the consternation of its many fans, Ragtime lost the Tony Award for Best Musical to The Lion King, despite the fact that it had won both Best Book (for Terrence McNally) and Best Score (for Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty). Doctorow novel of the same name, opened on Broadway in 1998 at the then brand new Ford Center for the Performing Arts (now called the Hilton Theatre), and ran for about three years before closing. The musical Ragtime, a favorite among many lovers of the modern musical, is coming back to Broadway in October, when it will arrive at the Neil Simon Theatre.
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