Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✭✩
music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, book by Terence McNally, directed by Jackie Maxwell
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 26-October 14, 2012
“Back to Before”
Ragtime is the best musical you are likely to see in Ontario this summer. It has a sophisticated score, a fascinating story and a sensitive, imaginative staging that highlights the emotions of people placed in complex situations. It’s to bad that at the 1992 Tony Awards, when Ragtime came up against The Lion King in most categories, that the judges chose to honour spectacle over substance. It still won awards for Best Book and Best Score, but not Best Musical. That was 20 years ago now and the Shaw productions reveals Ragtime as one of the great musicals of the second half of the last century.
Like the 1975 novel of the same title by E.L. Doctorow on which it is based, the plot intertwines the stories of three very different American households – one upper class WASP, one black and one Jewish and newly immigrated from Latvia. Mixed in with the fictional characters are historical figures like Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit, Admiral Peary and Booker T. Washington whose presence expands the three fictional stories into a portrait of early 20th-century America.
As in the novel most of the narration of events is undertaken by the WASP family, who mistakenly think that by being safely ensconced in a white enclave like New Rochelle they are protected from the discord in the world around them. The family has entirely generic names – Mother, Father, Mother’s Younger Brother, Little Boy and Grandfather. Initially we think the story will focus primarily on them since their adventures begin the action. We are soon proved wrong. When Father (Benedict Campbell) sets off on a voyage with Admiral Peary to the North Pole, Father’s ship passes the boat carrying European immigrants to America including Tateh (Jay Turvey) and his daughter Little Girl (Morgan Hilliker). These are also generic names, “tateh” being a Yiddish equivalent to “daddy”. Not long after Mother (Patty Jamieson) and Little Boy (Jaden Carmichael) meet Tateh and Little Girl while waiting for a streetcar into the city.
In the musical as in the novel the principal story involves the two fictional characters who do not have generic names – the Harlem ragtime piano player Coalhouse Walker, Jr. (Thom Allison) and Sarah (Alana Hibbert) the woman he loves, leaves and tries to win back. Their lives take different courses. Walker’s life reaches the heights of fame in Harlem and enough fortune so that he can purchase a new Model T Ford. Sarah, in contrast, moves from despair, in abandoning her newborn baby, to hope when Walker returns to her, to tragedy when she is mistaken as an assassin at a presidential rally. In response to the destruction of his car by racists and then to Sarah’s death, Walker becomes radicalized in his search for justice.
At the same time two members of the WASP family move from the complacent happiness of their isolation to taking a stand to help those in need around them. When Mother discovers Sarah’s newborn baby in her garden she does not reject it but instead plans to raise it as her own until the mother comes to claim it. When Sarah arrives, Mother takes her in to wait for the baby’s father. Meanwhile, Younger Brother (Evan Alexander Smith) indulges in his fascination with the vaudeville singer Evelyn Nesbit (Julie Martell), who rose to fame when her millionaire husband murdered her lover in the rooftop theatre at Madison Square Garden. When Nesbit rebuffs Younger Brother’s advances, he happens to find shelter in a workers’ rally led by famed anarchist Emma Goldman (Kate Hennig). This encounter opens his eyes to the injustice of the world around him and he eventually joins Walker in his quest for justice.
Meanwhile, Tateh and Little Girl follow an entirely different course from hope to despair to success. The two had hope of a better life when they came to America only to find themselves in poverty. Only when a train conductor notices that tateh has drawn a flipbook of moving silhouettes (the pattern for the nickelodeon and later for movies), do Tateh’s fortunes rise in film to such an extent he later styles himself a “baron”. He is identified with the creator of the “Our Gang” comedies (1922-44), the first American films to put boys, girls, blacks and whites together as equals.
Director Jackie Maxwell has both kept the various strands of the story absolutely clear but has made them resonate with each other. Her clarity of vision has drawn superlative performances from the entire cast. Chief among these is Thom Allison as Coalhouse Walker. Allison has always been noted as a charismatic performer and here again he draws us into Coalhouse’s emotions from when he first steps on stage until the very end. Even in his Coalhouse’s turn to criminality, Allison makes us understand the outrage that has lead the formerly upright citizen to this pass. Allison uses his powerful singing voice to invest songs as different as the “Gettin‘ Ready Rag” and “Make Them Hear You” with an underlying passion.
Alana Hibbert, both as singer and actor, has a wonderfully warm presence. From the mingled love and regret of “Your Daddy’s Son” to the hopefulness in her duet with Coalhouse, “Wheels of a Dream”, she always reveals an inner strength beneath her shyness and sensitivity. Patty Jamieson is well cast as Mother, a woman whose natural empathy helps to understand life outside her cloistered world. In “What Kind of Woman”, she moves beyond condemnation to feeling the painful circumstances that would lead a woman to abandon her child. She expresses the fervent longing tempered by reality to get “Back to Before”.
Jay Turvey makes a very sympathetic and intense Tateh, more powerful when he expresses his hopes and frustrations than when he glories in his success. But his admission of his real nature to Mother at Atlantic City is touching and makes it credible how he could win her affections.
With a strong singing voice and impassioned acting, Evan Alexander Smith makes a stunning debut at the Shaw as Younger Brother, a role Steven Sutcliffe, also in the current Shaw season, originated in Toronto and on Broadway. Though initially he seems the opposite from his brash adventurer father, we see that he is, in fact, just as much a dreamer. He makes it all too believable how Younger Brother’s infatuation with Evelyn Nesbit could easily morph into an infatuation with the politics of Emma Goldman. He’s a man overshadowed in life by others looking for a cause or a purpose to give his life meaning.
In smaller roles Julie Martell is marvellous as “The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing” crying her mock-exhilarated “Whee!” as she glides to and fro. She may play an airhead on stage, but as Younger finds out she’s a hard calculating woman who is cashing in on her notoriety as long as she can. As her complete opposite, Kate Hennig is a dynamo as the fiery Emma Goldman, capable of working a crowd into a fervour through her oratory. Neil Barclay is exudes unadulterated hatred as the racist Willie Conklin. Kelly Wong is a vital presence as Harry Houdini, whose feats of escape seem to mirror the yearnings of the society around him. As Sarah’s Friend, Nicola Lawrence beautifully leads the powerful Act 1 finale “Till We Reach That Day”.
One of the many pleasures of the show is how composer Stephen Flaherty makes so many allusions in the score to the music of the period. There are, of course, the expected recreations of ragtime music, but there are also cakewalks and gospel, marches and faux-vaudeville show music and klezmer-influenced music for the scenes with Tateh and other new immigrants. Paul Sportelli guides the 17-member orchestra with precision, buoyancy and nuance. Choreographer Valerie Moore makes correspondent allusions to historical dance forms when the music asks for them.
Given the huge number of scenes in the show, designer Sue LePage has wisely created a set that is primarily a large steel frame with stairways, arches of railway tracks and an upper walkway, a structure that suggests the new industrial world, that can easily take on multiple identities through the projections of Beth Kates and Ben Chaisson. It is in her detailed costumes that she truly captures the period from the rags of the new immigrants to the summer linens of the wealthy to the feathers and frills of a vaudeville star like Nesbit.
The massive enterprise is safely under the control of Jackie Maxwell, who always keeps the personal stories in the forefront that could too easily get lost in spectacle. She makes it clear that the musical is about three families representative of three groups of Americans who experience the change of the new century in very different but congruent ways. The only detail she misses is in portraying Sarah’s baby as a swaddled infant throughout, when so much time passes in the show Coalhouse is right to ask if his son can walk yet or talk.
No other musical on offer in Ontario this summer has so high an ambition and succeeds so magnificently in achieving it. For those who were not in Toronto from 1996 to 1998 when Ragtime was playing at the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts, as it was then called, this will be your first chance to experience a great musical, more talked about than seen. Even if you saw it then, you will surely want to see the Shaw’s sleek, flawlessly cast production. And even then, one visit may not be enough.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Thom Allison as Coalhouse Walker. ©2012 David Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2012-08-28
Ragtime