Most anyone who saw “Ragtime” in 2007 recognizes the milestone it made for the collaborating Boulder’s Dinner and Shadow Theater companies. The Arvada Center’s remarkable new staging is all that and more — bigger and more majestic in scope, scale, sound and resonance.
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But as America has changed in the past four years, so, too, has our response to seeing this sweeping look at a 1900s America in all its hopeful, hateful glory.
For all that was wrong with America as it was rapidly becoming an industrialized and urbanized melting pot; for all of the labor and racial injustice of the time; for all the political corruption and institutional abuses, it was also a time of hope and promise — not only for freed slaves and their children, but for immigrant dreamers streaming into the country at a rate of more than a million a year. All chasing a dream that came true for, well, one in a million.
“Ragtime” is a paean to what this flawed country was and yet could be — which makes it so discombobulating to see now, when economic pessimism hangs over the country like a cloud of dread. What has happened to us?
“Ragtime” is an American “Les Miserables.” It follows the changing fortunes of three intersecting New York families led by a black Harlem musician, a suburban WASP matriarch and a Jewish immigrant father. Into this mix, E.L. Doctorow’s source novel mingles real people like J.P. Morgan, Booker T. Washington, union activist Emma Goldman, and magician Harry Houdini, the poster child for rags-to- riches immigration.
The story turns on an act of vandalism done by Irish immigrant firefighters against the black piano player Coalhouse Walker. More specifically to his Ford Model T, the ultimate symbol of his arrival in the middle class. His precarious fortunes will soon be far exceeded by the widowed Jewish artist Tateh, a single father whose primitive drawings will, in effect, one day invent the moving- picture industry.
The never-named universal WASP “Mother” represents seismic domestic change as well. When her explorer husband leaves her to run their home for a year, she takes in a black child Coalhouse never knew he had — and discovers a strength she never knew she had.
Their lives all meld together in uncomfortable, violent and seductive ways.
This is really one of the best stories ever told in the context of musical theater, with a stirring, anthemic score (despite a signature refrain that’s clunkier than a Ford jingle: “We will ride on the wheels of a dream”).
And while this may be an epic class conflict, director Rod Lansberry’s ensemble has undeniable pedigree, with stellar performances and breathtaking choral moments from a cast of 35. Among them: Super sub Tyrone L. Robinson, who had all of one day to replace an ill actor and turn himself into Coalhouse; Christiana Acosta Robinson as his lady love, Sara; Wayne Kennedy (the only cast member carrying over from the 2007 Boulder production) as gentle Tateh; Daniel Langhoff as the WASP brother turned guerrilla rebel; former Shadow Theatre artistic director Keith L. Hatten as a dignified Booker T. Washington; and Sharon Kay White as fiery Emma Goldman.
But the heart of this show beats in Megan Van De Hey as the dignified mother who discovers, 70 years before Gloria Steinem, the power of the American matriarch. Van De Hey starts from a harder place than one might expect, which makes her journey toward independence and greater humanity much more interesting. When she sings “We can never go back to before,” she’s singing not for one woman, but for a nation of them.
Lansberry’s team of light, sound, music and dance designers work together in seamless tandem with scenic designer Brian Mallgrave.
And did we mention there’s a Model T?
It might seem audacious to suggest this production could be better — but it could be. The racism targeted at Coalhouse by the Irish thugs is so watered-down, it comes off as almost glib. If you blink, you’ll miss the murder that irrevocably turns the direction of the entire saga. And while Robinson sings Coalhouse to the rafters, he’ll need time to fully capture the man’s full leap into madness and revenge.
So there’s a more feral, ferocious place Lansberry could have taken us — but none of that lessens the fact that this might be his finest hour.
After “Ragtime” finishes in Arvada Oct. 2, it moves for two weeks into the new Lone Tree Arts Center.
