Ragtime ambitious but uneven
Ragtime Theatre: Two One-Way Tickets To Broadway Productions Directed by: Barbara Mah Where: La Cité francophone, 8627 91st St. Running: through Saturday Tickets: TIX on the Square (780420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca) or at the door Take a hint from their company name. Let no one argue that Two One-Way Tickets To Broadway Productions lacks ambition.
Ragtime, currently flying under the TWOTTBP flag, isn’t the only musical in the repertoire that sets about capturing the sweep of history onstage. 1776 the Musical, Marie Antoinette the Musical, Rodgers and Hart’s 1926 American Revolution musical Dearest Enemy — the list goes on, and includes Les Miz (this is your cue to start humming I Dreamed A Dream now).
But it’s hard to imagine a musical more panoptic in its vision than the one fashioned in 1996 by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens with playwright Terrence McNally, from E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 bestseller. Ragtime aims at nothing less than bringing to the stage a tapestry of the huge social, political and economic changes that forged 20th-century America from the ingredients of the 19th century. In this it uses the metaphor of the seductive new music of the title, with its simple joyful tunes, complex off-centre rhythms, and jaunty democratic spirit.
On the threshold of a new century, where dreams and nightmares intersect, we have three interwoven fictional families — one upper-crust and white; one immigrant, impoverished and Jewish; one black — colliding at the foreground of a canvas dotted with such vivid real-life figures as escape artist Houdini, anarchist Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford and vaudeville sex symbol Evelyn Nesbitt. Ragtime’s opening scene, the most impressive of the show, assembles all of the above onstage. It all starts with the privileged white gentry (Mother, Father, Younger Brother) who look back nostalgically at an era fading: “There were gazebos and no Negroes … .”
Barbara Mah’s production of Ragtime, onstage at La Cité francophone, has a cast of 33 and a 25-piece orchestra at its disposal to tell this complicated story. Gradually, in the revivals that followed the lavish $10-million Toronto-to-Broadway production brokered by LivEnt impresario Garth Drabinsky (currently serving a seven-year sentence for bookkeeping irregularities), audiences have seen scaled-down versions of Ragtime. Director Mah eschews all clutter, and sets her actors forth on a mostly bare stage, in pools of light.
Nothing wrong with that, especially since space is at a premium on the tiny playing surface. The focus is on intimate moments. But the music, which leans to the lush and anthemic, fares better than the drama, in truth. The effect is like a sketch of the piece, a series of highlight setpieces in a variety show rather than a seamless whole in perpetual motion. Partly it’s because the performances are variable, of course, in this semi-professional company; ditto the dimensionality of the characters.
As Tateh, a desperate Jewish immigrant who arrives in New York without a shekel, and only his little daughter (the adorably grave Lola Blake) and his skills as an artist between him and despair, Martin Galba has a particular lustre. Judy McFerran has a convincing ferocity as the radical Emma Goldman. Every principal has a lifechanging arc, propelled by unexpected self-discovery. Coalhouse Walker Jr., for example, played with expansive charm by Orville Charles Cameron, is the wayward ragtime keyboard player who finds in himself a passionate father/husband, and a social renegade. Geoff Ryzuk as Mother’s Younger Brother discovers in himself a true revolutionary. Galba’s Tateh discovers, at the heart of the American dream, the possibility of self-reinvention: the artist enters the spirit of the new century as a director of its newest art form, the moving picture.
Nicole English has a lovely musical theatre voice. But she substitutes sweetness and pleasant reserve for the more formidably prim white superiority of Mother, so that the show’s most radical transformation — triggered when Mother finds herself impulsively taking in a black woman and her baby — has less impact than it might.
There are moments of real force in a production that’s a vast challenge for this invaluable little company. The epic momentum that will carry the characters, and a country, from one century into the next is harder to find.