26. ragtime could be the musical of our times
just not how it is right now
And there was distant music, a strange insistent music, putting out heat, picking up steam. What was it? The rumors of another Ragtime revival. THE historical epic musical will never be far off from one. Although the original production was critically mixed and did not turn a profit, and although it lost Best Musical to The Lion King, its shadow looms large for my generation of theater fans. It got Audra one of her 6 Tonys, it gave one of the best Tony Awards performances of all time, and the truest metric- it provided the selection of this year’s Jimmy Awards winner.
I saw the New York City Center’s Encores production the Saturday after the Election, my first time seeing the show in full. While I have loved the songs since high school and Joshua Henry is my must-see actor in everything he does, a lot of it is…woof. I do commend this cast who put on this production over the two weeks surrounding Election Day, knowing half their performances were going to be for wildly different audiences based on those results. Predictably, the mood at the NYCC was weepy neoliberal (Ruthkandacoalhouse forever?). People handed out Kleenex, hugged each other in the aisles, and gave multiple mid-show standing ovations. The musical’s politics are simple and very 90s, where the most optimistic future possible is a post-racial one, where the symbol of hope in America is a Black child being adopted by a white woman and Jewish father after his two Black parents are both brutally murdered by the state.
I had expected the show’s sanitation to let me down, so I was surprised by how much interesting complexity and cynicism was there in its fabric. If you turn it inside out and show the loose threads, there’s a lot there to play with. The show's best moment is arguably its ten-minute opening number, in which all the characters introduce themselves and the major themes. It's one of my favorite pieces of stage choreography ever. The three groups whose stories intertwine throughout the show- rich Whites, Black Harlemites, and Jewish immigrants- come in separately, mix, pull back to their own factions and circle each other suspiciously, and then mix again, dancing slowly and with feeling to the strange new music. It’s evocative and crystal-clear of the show’s pretty simple ideas. Your experience of America will be based on the faction you belong to, but it is impossible for these factions to be actually, completely separate from each other. For every American ideal, you will find the widespread hypocrisy of it in practice. Although history will seem inevitable in hindsight, the present still feels full of possibility for change.
There's a popular observation of American history that for every period of social progress, there will ensue a period of conservative counterrevolution. You have Reconstruction followed by Jim Crow, the Civil Rights/anti-war movements followed by the Nixon/Reagan years, and the Obama presidency followed by what we’re living in now. Ragtime positions itself as one of these moments as the huge influx of immigrants, the industrial revolution, and the Great Migration of Black southerners created a moment of social upheaval that would end with World War I and the First Red Scare (to be clear, I’m not a historian but neither were the writers of this musical). I think the show could pull something potent from exploring how history seems to be a wheel of hope and despair, and how it feels living in the middle of the good possibility, even if it may not last, or even if we may not live to see what it sowed. Ragtime’s relentless capitalism, anti-immigrant cruelty, and racial divide will always resonate because that’s been the story for 400 years. Maybe if we turn the wheel enough times, we can break these patterns. But maybe not, or maybe we should ask what the good times are worth when bookended by so much violence, or are there really any good times for the underclass or simply times when the suffering is overall less notable for historians? It's this aspect that I think could (sigh) make this show feel more relevant than ever. Joshua Henry played “Wheels of a Dream” with a disbelieving giddiness his son might actually get to grow up in a world in which he is able to walk with his head held high, a basic dignity which for now only exists in Coalhouse’s dreams. This is no less potent a moment even though we know what the next century of Black history will look like, and it defeats the power of the show’s best song to not underscore how revolutionary this imagination is. I feel like the show has always judged Coalhouse for his radicalisation, and this production tried to resist that but then couldn’t reconcile that with the actual text, which disapproves of his violence and then cures his anger to turn him into a saintly sufferer type. Why should he not be angry after everything done to him? Furthermore, why is the show so comfortable with him and Sarah being brutally martyred by the state but finds it unconscionable for his group to kill the white supremacists who actively harm them and destroy a millionaire’s building for the cause of racial equality?
I think the show can get there though because it has woven into its lyrics so much deep cynicism about what being American really means. The chief critique I hear of Ragtime is that it's too long and the historical characters could be cut down, but I think the unruly sprawl works if there’s strong thematic throughlines. The point of pivots like “What a Game” and “Atlantic City” are that these shiny pieces of Americana have dark sides to them in reality. The same is there in the lyrics of “Henry Ford,” and I couldn’t believe this new production missed the incredibly low-hanging fruit of drawing comparisons between him and some other super-racist capitalists we know of. Harry Houdini’s subsequent appearances lose that compelling idea from the opening number that makes him a good supporter of Tateh’s arc- “making it” in America, especially as an immigrant, is a deception. There’s a hard reality behind that pretty silhouette. I think Emma Goldman’s presence could be cut a little, but that socialist point of view and moral conscience is necessary. Finally, there is a really interesting layer of how Booker T. Washington’s respectability politics cannot answer the extreme violence being unto Black Americans emotionally or practically, but this book is completely unable to do anything with that.
While people around me were crying at the finale, at the chorus of people singing “America” in heavenly voices, my honest thought was “who is buying this?” It is both insane and undeniable that this show thinks it ends on an optimistic note. Coalhouse was just murdered. Why are we not sitting with that? The American dream is a lie, drop the curtain! That is the clear ending to the story you’ve been telling the entire time, not the fact that Tateh is going to…come up with The Little Rascals??? And again, the show misses the absolute lay-up of the fact that the country is about to go to war, and our narrator, young Edgar, will probably be drafted and maybe die, which is the thing he’s been psychically predicting the whole time! Why else have a psychic child in your show??? We are also supposed to be cheered by the fact that Little Coalhouse will be “shown America” when he is old enough, not horrified at what lies in store for this child to witness or what he’s already lost. If this were to be redone, I would look back to the Circle in the Square’s 2019 Oklahoma! Revival, and it's blood-soaked, “quivering feel-bad ending” that also felt incredibly honest. Without changing a word of the original text, they flipped the ending so that the defeat of the villain is really a murder in cold blood, followed by a sham trial to acquit the killer. They then sing the usually cheery finale song “Oklahoma” with a shell-shocked intensity, still covered in blood, representative of the violence that came with the settling of the West. That is the Ragtime I want to see- haunted by the burden of history and a dreaded prescience of what will come next- and I think the text even as it stands would be uniquely well-suited to such an interpretation if it can handle pissing off people who still wear Notorious RBG t-shirts.
More Changes I Was the Hypothetical Ragtime Revival Dramaturg
Move “Your Daddy’s Son” to after “Crime of the Century” so it's not a flashback. I think it makes more sense to meet Sarah at her lowest point and work backwards from there then get that perspective later. There’s also something haunting about making her story a circle of despair and hope and back to despair again. She will appear as a ghost later, but she’s really dead the whole time she’s onstage. Where it is right now is so disorienting that it's hard to connect with her anguish no matter how fantastic a performance is given. Then we also have this neat juxtaposition of Evelyn Nesbit and Sarah, two “fallen women” of wildly different circumstances.
On that note, Sarah needs some more substance. Maybe add a scene before “The Courtship” where she’s talking to Younger Brother about her past, her family, how she ended up all alone, anything? Even if he’s mostly talking at her, as her reluctance to open up to him makes sense, we’ve at least introduced some interiority to this character. Then we also have a scene that helps us buy the strong connection Brother feels toward Sarah and Coalhouse by the end of the show.
Obviously, they’re both really demanding roles, but I’d be really interested to see a production that casts a young Sarah and Coalhouse. I feel like it would make their passionate romance and especially Coalhouse’s optimism easier to buy. Their love also functions symbolically in the musical as the embodiment of pure hope, something fated that defies practicalities, and I think having them as this star-crossed Tony & Maria pair would be both swooning and devastating.
Why is Emma Goldman singing for Younger Brother in “He Wanted to Say?” Just let him sing. I get exactly why a director would do that and think it's clever, but I don’t like it. Ben Ross specifically killed this character and made it work for me like it hadn’t before, and I wanted to hear his voice. That song also needs to end with actual menace; the joke is the wrong note.
I can’t decide if I’d rather see this musical with 10,000 ensemble members or a really tight cast- like we’re watching a theater troupe put on a civics lesson vibe- where all the side characters are really thoughtfully double-cast to evoke parallels (cough, Hamilton, sorry). For instance, what about double-casting Emma Goldman/Evelyn Nesbit? Father/Henry Ford/JP Morgan? Who has the range?
Father needs to stay gone. He gets on that boat, and we never see him again. Who cares about him and Mother’s marriage? Not me. Her proto-feminism is slightly more interesting if she’s completely on her own. He can still sing in “New Music” but as a ghost or as Mother’s idea of him. Maybe she’s writing him letters the whole time, and trying to fill his shoes, making the decisions he makes in Act 2 but only because she thinks he would make them. Then before “Back to Before”, she learns he’s dead, realizes she’s been trying to follow the instructions of someone not even alive, and volunteers herself to go talk to Coalhouse. Now, wow, these two characters who actually have some sort of relationship are together for our big emotional climax.
The whole end needs a rewrite. I kind of think Coalhouse blowing up the library (maybe with himself and Younger Brother inside) makes more sense. I think that would kind of rule. Blow that shit up. He is choosing to die to create a better world for his son rather than being murdered because he thought the police were telling the truth? I think “the society we deserve doesn’t exist but it is worth dying for” is a more radical statement for your show to end with than having him be murdered by police, actually.
At my show, we’re selling t-shirts that say “Coalhouse Was Right” in the lobby.
The Epilogue is also so weird to just roll into and way too jaunty. Mother and Tateh’s big happy family is just so lazy and again, does not fit the tone of everything that came before it. We need some more thought into why Baby Coalhouse ends up still living with them and if that ending is still nice if you think about it for five more minutes. Like, you could at least be like “we couldn’t find any blood relatives” if you’re going to just dump story points straight to us. Scrap the Little Rascals. Keep the bummer endings- Evelyn Nesbit and Emma Goldman’s is perfect thematically. The conscience of this show gets deported. The little boy dies in World War I. Quiver and feel bad. That’s America!
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SEEN/READ HIGHLIGHTS
SEEN: Conclave and Anora, both fantastic
READ: A Jingle Bell Mingle, The Message, and the last Wicked book which I will be writing about along with the movie next week!!
WATCHED: Doctor Odyssey and the new season of Outer Banks which was ridiculous but gutted me regardless
and some personal updates because it's been a goshdarn month
I ran my second NYC Marathon and had tons of fun! It was bookended by two crushing losses (The Yankees, can’t remember the other one) so overall a very stressful week I feel I am still recovering from. Happy Thanksgiving. If you read this far, you’re clearly a good person so think about helping some hungry New Yorkers.