‘Ragtime’
City Center Encores!
Through November 10, 2024

In one of my favorite early episodes of “The Simpsons,” not long after Apu meets Manjula, the woman who is soon to become his wife, he asks her, “What is your favorite book, movie, and food?” She answers without hesitation, “The answer to all three is fried green tomatoes.” Leaving the tomatoes out, if you were to ask me about my favorite novel, Broadway show, and musical style, I would quickly answer “Ragtime.”

In a way, I wish that “Ragtime” — which is running in a splendid concert-style production at City Center for the next two weeks — had opened on Broadway two years later than it actually did in 1998, because then it would be easier to call it the greatest work of the American musical theater of the current century. 

Even allowing for the usual hyperbole — which is itself baked into the literature of Broadway — “Ragtime” is one of the greatest shows of our time.

Alas, not every great book becomes a great show — I haven’t seen the new “Great Gatsby” yet — but much of the success of “Ragtime” comes from its source material, E. L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel of the same title. Doctorow’s book is a thoroughly engrossing work, somewhat journalistic in tone, in which leading historical figures — illusionist Harry Houdini, political activist Emma Goldman, civil rights leader Booker T. Washington — interact with fictional characters.  

Often, the most moving disclosures, the deepest truths about America at the turn of the previous century, come from Doctorow’s characters rather than the “real” people.

Writers Terrence McNally (book), Lynn Ahrens (lyrics), and Stephen Flaherty (music) boiled down Doctorow’s sprawling saga into three main plotlines, all of which interact both with each other as well as the historical figures.  

The first of these is the upper middle class suburban family who open the story with the novel’s famous first lines, “In 1902, Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York, and it seemed for some years thereafter that all the family’s days would be warm and fair.”  

It’s worth noting that, as in Doctorow, Mr. McNally’s script does not give any names, first or last, to this family — their individual identities are totally subsumed by their familial roles: “Mother,” “Father,” “Younger Brother,” and “Little Boy.”  

The other groups who have their own stories, the Black characters who reside at Harlem (1906 was a little early for Upper Manhattan as a Black enclave, but okay) and the Eastern European immigrants who arrive on the Lower East Side, all have names. This is a clever reversal of a familiar racist trope of the period, implying that “all white folks look alike to me.”  

Much of the overall feel of Mr. Flaherty’s music derives from Marvin Hamlisch’s widely popular re-orchestration and recording of Scott Joplin’s 1902 piano rag, “The Entertainer.”  The Hamlisch-Joplin track was heard on the soundtrack of the 1973 film “The Sting” — which was set in 1936, long after the ragtime era — and Doctorow was surely familiar with both the movie and the track while he was writing his masterwork. 

Not coincidentally, the peak years of ragtime as a dominant musical style are also considered the first great years of Broadway as the nexus of American theater.  Many period songwriters incorporated elements of ragtime into their numbers — most famously Irving Berlin with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” — but the Flaherty-Ahrens team very aggressively and convincingly builds on the Joplin-Hamlisch sound.  

Take the opening number and title song, which builds to the line, “The people called it ragtime.”  A more traditional Broadway composer, say Jerry Herman, would have put a dramatic fermata  before the last word, to make it more theatrical, as in, “The people called it — pause — ragtime.”  But Mr. Flaherty syncopates that phrase more like Joplin would, without the pause, but adding a kind of open space at the end of the line. 

The score includes pastiche numbers evoking the 1900s: Evelyn Nesbitt, portrayed as a complete airhead by Stephanie Styles, gets a snappy vaudeville number called “Crime of the Century,” which recalls the vintage styles used by Fred Kander and John Ebb in “Chicago.” 

At the same time, the more plot-forwarding, dialogue-encompassing pieces, like “Journey On” are reminiscent of the anthemic, documentarian style of Maury Yeston in “Titanic.”  

There’s also “What a Game,” a brilliant tragi-comic number in which the board stiff, terminally uptight Father witnesses the changes in his beloved sport, baseball, and which has somehow become a locus for the lower classes, minorities, profanity, and grotesquely abundant expectoration.

Just as in 1975 and then 1998, we were able to get a better perspective on the historical events of the 1900s, “Ragtime” the novel and the musical seem greater than ever 50 and 25 years later. I can’t help but think if Doctorow were writing his novel today there would surely be an LGBT character, and there would be a less sympathetic depiction of Henry Ford, less as a trend-setting industrialist and more as the country’s leading antisemite and role model for Hitler.  

The original production had three breakout stars in Brian Stokes Mitchell (Coalhouse Walker, Jr.), Audra McDonald (Sara), and the late, much-missed Marin Mazzie (Mother), whose roles are marvelously essayed here by Joshua Henry — Billy Bigelow in the most recent Broadway “Carousel” — Nichelle Lewis, and Cassie Levy.  

To show how much time has passed, Brandon Uranowitz, who played “The Little Boy” in the first workshop production in Toronto in 1997, here plays the adult immigrant “Tateh.”

“Ragtime” is, among other things, a perfect work for the current political moment, showing what America really was — and still in many ways is — and what it could be. 

It ends with Doctorow’s memorable words, “The era of ragtime had run out, as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano.” As a work that very vividly depicts a specific time and place, “Ragtime” is a show for all time.