Posts Tagged ‘E.L. Doctorow’

RAGTIME

A nation where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and immigrants are told to get out and stay out. Ragtime may take place a century ago, but the epic 1998 Broadway musical has never been more relevant than it is today, and thanks to director David Lee and a glorious cast and design team, its 2019 Pasadena Playhouse revival blows the seven other Ragtimes this reviewer has seen out of the water, and then some.
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RAGTIME

Immigrants told to leave the U.S. and return to the “cesspools” from which they came. Blacks denied their basic civil rights. Wealthy whites still imagining an America in which neither of the aforementioned groups existed. If this sounds more like the stuff of today’s headlines than a twenty-year-old Broadway musical set over a hundred years in the past, all the more reason to celebrate the stirring big-stage revival of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s Ragtime now earning standing ovations at Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre.
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RAGTIME

The Ragtime revival currently touring the U.S. may not be the already trimmed-down Marcia Milgrom Dodge-version that scored the director-choreographer a 2010 Tony nomination. (The non-Equity cast is even smaller by 25%, the creative team behind its much scaled-down production design is new for the tour, and Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s songs are performed to prerecorded tracks.) Nonetheless, under Dodge’s inspired hand, this Ragtime turns out to be every bit as powerful as any of the half-dozen I’ve now seen.
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RAGTIME

Well-to-do early 20th-Century White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, their less fortunate African-American fellow New Yorkers, and a gaggle of fresh-off-the-boat Eastern European immigrants collide to life-altering (and occasionally life-shattering) effect in the 1998 Tony-winning musical Ragtime, now being revived by 3-D Theatricals in a production that would do any Broadway theater proud.
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