It hasn't even been a decade since the first production of the show left town. Did Broadway need another Ragtime? Seems premature. But it's hard to argue with a revival as surefooted as Marcia Milgrom Dodge's strikingly staged and vividly performed redo.
It gets off to a spectacular start, the Kennedy Center revival of Ragtime that moved to Broadway with no big names and a director/ choreographer—Marcia Milgrom Dodge—who will not be unknown for long. But Ragtime dwindles, as it has always dwindled.
The musical Ragtime is based on E.L. Doctorow's sprawling historical novel, which offered food for thought by tracing the dawn of 20th-century American society through real and imagined characters. But those who plan to see the theatrical version, now in revival at the Neil Simon Theatre, are advised to put away their thinking caps and bring their hankies. As a work of social commentary, Ragtime, introduced on Broadway in 1998, is hokey and pedantic, much like that other, plodding musical adaptation of historical fiction, Les Misèrables.
Roy Furman is having a very busy year producing Broadway Bound, Brighton Beach Memoirs, The Addams Family, and now the transfer of the Kennedy Center production of Ragtime to Broadway.
Surely there are not many opening numbers better than the intoxicating first moments of Ragtime, the stage version of E.L. Doctorow's best-selling novel. The show's themes and characters are introduced lickety-split in a thrilling combination of song, story and movement that goes a long way toward explaining what musical theater is all about. It also sets the bar very high for what is to follow at Broadway's Neil Simon Theatre, where a respectful, recalibrated revival of the musical opened Sunday. If nothing else quite reaches that joyous proclamation of theatricality, so be it.
It is good to have Ragtime back on Broadway. The 1998 show, with book by Terrence McNally, music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, is a significant musical that narrowly misses being a great one. Even so, compared to what nowadays passes for a great musical (Wicked, for example), Ragtime is nothing short of a masterpiece.
