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A Big, Agnostic Ragtime
City Center’s revival blows the speakers out but says comparatively little.
With its enfolding quilt of a score by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens of the kind that could be inscribed on a plaque, and book by Terrence McNally, all based on E.L. Doctorow’s landmark novel, Ragtime marks an apex for that form, the grandest Americana of all—if not necessarily the most “American,” considering the heavy hand of checkered Toronto theater impresario Garth Drabinsky in its making. Meanwhile Tateh and his daughter work their way through the tenements toward better lives, encountering the radical Emma Goldman (Shaina Taub, who’s come over from Suffs and reveals her own musical’s debt to Ragtime ’s genre in the process) and eventually intersecting with everyone else. That hangs a lot of weight on electoral politics, and as with that teenybopper Romeo & Juliet and the star-packed Our Town, puts this Ragtime in the frustrating position of deriving gravitas from this upcoming moment in American history while, in fact, saying very little about it.
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