Big and serious and rich and graceful and worthy. Apply any adjective to the new musical Ragtime and you won't be too far off. With a score by Ahrens and Flaherty (My Favorite Year, Once On This Island), and an adapted book by Terrence McNally, Ragtime wants to be both epic social history and powerful personal drama. The show can't always have it both ways, but at least it makes more of an effort in the first direction than the myopic Side Show and more in the second than the estimable but cold Titanic. Understand that I am a longtime fan of Milos Forman's film adaptation of the E.L. Doctorow novel and so have reservations over the musical's Broadway-izing of certain characters.
Tateh, the Jewish immigrant who rises from selling silhouettes on the street to becoming a big-shot movie director, is a much fuller character in the musical (possibly even the most engaging), yet here the details of his wife's "death" have been fudged and obscured. The proper New England housewife who willingly turns her life upside down to help a new, black mother and her musician boyfriend, still becomes estranged from her husband. In the film, she makes a conscious decision to leave and take up with Tateh; in the musical, we're told at the coda that Father dies abroad, she mourns for a year, and then marries Tateh. Equally believable but something of a cheat.
And yet, I'm picking on details when the scope of Ragtime deserves plaudits. So many personages are introduced in the opening minutes, we wonder how one musical can cram in Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit, Booker T. Washington, Houdini and a fictional ragtime pianist who threatens to blow up the Morgan Library. It takes three hours, and sometimes the wedging strains, as when Henry Ford comes in to do a tune about self-made America, or Goldman serves as a conscience for younger brother's decision to join Coalhouse's gang. Both songs are potent and add to the musical's depth, but they're also the reason act one feels longish and a bit ill-shaped. For example, the catchy Coalhouse and Sarah number, "Wheels of a Dream," directly follows "New Music," wherein the couple have already been reunited. This makes "Wheels" feels like a reiteration rather than an emotional advancement.
Due to the Ford Center's cavernous size, and the bevy of characters jockeying for stage time, there's a remoteness to Ragtime -- like listening to a perfectly tuned, beautifully calibrated player piano. We respond to the musical's craft with awe and interest, even as we wish for a greater sense of immediacy and more depth to the interpersonal relationships. A major achievement, Ragtime has grandeur but just misses greatness. That may sound like damning with faint praise, but would to God more new musicals merited such a description!
