50 Favourite Musicals: 23: RAGTIME (1996) (Stephen Flaherty / Lynn Ahrens)

The 50 shows that have stood out down the years and, as we get up among the paint cards, the shows that have become the cast recording of my life:

First performed: 1996, Ford Centre, Toronto

First seen by me: 2003, Piccadilly Theatre, London

Productions seen: two

Score: Stephen Flaherty / Lynn Ahrens 
Book: Terrence McNally

Plot:  Three groups of people experience society's changes during the early 1900s in New York: the upper-class family of Father and Mother in leafy New Rochelle, the black musicians in Harlem including Coalhouse Walker Jr. embracing the new jazz of Ragtime, while the ships bringing East European migrants including Tateh from Latvia keep arriving at Ellis Island.  Linking all the groups are those in the newspapers, the ones who have made it: businessmen like Henry Ford and JP Morgan, activists like Emma Goldman and Booker T Washington, and celebrities like illusionist Harry Houdini and notorious beauty Evelyn Nesbit.

Five memorable numbers: BACK TO BEFORE, PROLOGUE - RAGTIME, THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY, TILL WE REACH THAT DAY, MAKE THEM HEAR YOU

Back in the mid-90s, there were two Broadway musical scores that I adored from the minute I heard the cast recordings, one was Maury Yeston's TITANIC and the other was Flaherty and Ahren's RAGTIME.  Both shows had striking similarities: both 'epic' shows which also honed in on the lives of individuals with both scores featuring memorable soaring ensemble numbers alongside character solos and duets, both integrated real-life and fictional characters and, most of all, both composers drew on early 20th Century musical styles so RAGTIME's score is awash with ragtime syncopation, Souza brass bands, Jewish klezmer music and vaudeville cakewalks as well as contemporary Broadway.  EL Doctorow's 1975 novel had already been filmed in 1981 by Milos Forman and it seemed an unlikely candidate for a musical but Terrence McNally's book is successful in keeping most of the intricate plot's plates spinning, with maybe Jewish immigrant Tateh's story being the least integrated as the other two strands - Coalhouse Walker's increasingly violent search for justice at the manslaughter of his lover Sarah and the wrecking of his beloved Model T Ford by racists, and the impact his actions have on the privileged family of Father and Mother.  But the score leads us from story and story and through the years, soaring above the book and giving specific character moments a universality.  Despite the original Broadway production running for almost two years it failed to make money - indeed it's Canadian production company Livent filed for bankruptcy ten months after it's closure.  This production received nine Tony Award nominations and won four including the Best Score and Best Book, but lost most of the others to the marauding LION KING. A 2009 Broadway revival was well received but only lasted 65 performances.  I had to wait until 2003 to see it in London in a production which was an expanded version of a Welsh concert production which attempted to make a virtue of it's minimalism but just looked exposed on the Piccadilly Theatre stage, it lasted three months.  However Thom Southerland's small-scale production at the Charing Cross Theatre was more successful artistically and showed the marvellous opportunities the musical holds for the performers playing the roles of Coalhouse, Sarah and Mother.  The Broadway cast recording is one of my most-played... and stand back when I belt out BACK TO BEFORE!  I still wonder what the Communist agitator Emma Goldman, who was exiled from America, would feel if she knew she featured in two Broadway musicals, RAGTIME and Sondheim's ASSASSINS?

Here the original Broadway cast - including the late Marin Mazzie as Mother, Mark Jacoby as Father, Audra McDonald as Sarah, Brian Stokes Mitchell as Coalhouse and Peter Friedman as Tateh - deliver that wonderful opening number at the Tony Awards: