A Collision of Style and Substance
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage A COLLISION OF STYLE AND SUBSTANCE By Stefan Kanfer Setting foot in the new Ford Center for the Arts is like entering Oz. Long before the curtain rises, management has made sure...
...All this—and a good deal more—is told with smooth efficiency by the book writer Terrence McNally, an old Broadway hand (Master Class, Kiss of the Spider Woman), abetted by Ahrens' spare lyrics and Flaherty's derivative music...
...He was an artist in the Old Country...
...Long before the curtain rises, management has made sure the customers know they are not in Kansas anymore...
...The program reminds us that the Lyric was bom of a wildly successful musical, Reginald DeKoven's Robin Hood, which gave the world the wedding anthem "Oh, Promise Me...
...That was a moment of enormous agitation—Watergate was reverberating, black militancy and feminist demands were in ascendance, mighty foreign economics triggered new doubts about the country's future...
...When this fails, he journeys to a factory where the soul-destroying labor threatens to wear him away...
...Three separate strands are interwoven in Ragtime: WASP assurance, emerging black consciousness, and immigrant striving for a decent wage...
...Audra McDonald possesses a glorious soprano...
...Lately he has become a successful composer, and when he learns of Sarah's whereabouts he comes to call and to apologize...
...Why, then, does something vital seem to be missing from this display of talent and material...
...automobile manufacturers, and a depleted stock market seem far away indeed...
...Even the Crime of the Century is not ignored...
...The architectural firm of Beyer Blinder Belle has combined the best characteristics of these razed predecessors, using the Greek mythological themes of the Apollo and the Lyric's tier of balconies and brick and terra cotta facades...
...Meantime, there are the tribulations of Tateh and The Little Girl...
...DeKoven used the profits to put up the Lyric...
...As in the novel, these celebrities are supposed to lend the goings-on authenticity...
...When the span lowers, it practically crushes the commoners below...
...here he tries to make a living by cutting silhouettes of passersby...
...Corti is the image of Houdini, and Kaye not only resembles the broadbeamed Emma Goldman, she conveys the agitator's soapbox authority...
...Faced with this, the musical tries for a feeling of timelessness, symbolized by a large handless clock hovering over the stage...
...Whenever the narrative flags, there are always the notables to pick up the tempo and deliver a message or two: J. P. Morgan speaks from a metal drawbridge...
...The collision of style and substance reminds me of the long-running musical Les Misérables, where the audiences wept over the poor of 19th-century France, and then stepped over the homeless of New York...
...In 1938 the Apollo became a movie theater, then it went legit in the '70s and finished as a home for rock concerts and Parisianstyle cabaret...
...Not only are they African-American, they are permitted to have names: Coalhouse Walker Jr...
...The cast, stem to stern, is outstanding...
...The Latvian greenhorns in the third narrative revert to labels: Tateh (Peter Friedman) and his daughter, The Little Girl (Lea Michele...
...The characters in the second tale are different in every way...
...But the hypocrisy level is certain to be lower, and no one will advertise a car on the marquee...
...A Shtetl Iz Amerike," a song that cannot help but summon up images of Tevye in Fiddler On the Roof, and "Journey On," evoking the work of Stephen Sondheim...
...Up to a point this may be the case...
...Harry Houdini dramatically wriggles out of locks and chains, just as his fellow immigrants struggle to release themselves from the bonds of tyrannical bosses...
...Henry Ford is featured in Ragtime, the first production in the house that bears his surname...
...He is the child of Sarah, who is soon tracked down, and Walker, an itinerant musician who was not even aware that the great love of his life was pregnant...
...Her notoriety later makes her a vaudeville headliner, billed as "The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing...
...But as composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens indicate, merely because people sing the same song does not mean they think identical thoughts...
...Mitchell, a winning performer, sings and dances with enough energy to heat the 1,821 seat theater...
...All three groups step to the rhythms of a new music filling the American air: ragtime, born in the black ghetto and now influencing all of popular culture...
...The suburb brims with racists, and when Coalhouse drives his new Model ? around he becomes a target for louts in the volunteer fire department...
...Mazzie gives her character a vital intelligence and decency...
...The show is diverting and smoothly presented (and so it should be...
...Drabinsky is clearly in need of the successful, the wealthy, the accomplished...
...For tourists, out-of-towners on an expense account, and butterand-egg men, satisfaction is guaranteed...
...Twenty-three years later many things have changed and the days of long hot summers, cries of "Our Bodies, Ourselves," arrogant U.S...
...Still, if Ragtime has a backstage superstar, the award must go to set designer Eugene Lee, who manages to reconstruct the vanished Penn Station (by Stanford White) as well as the old Polo Grounds, the suburb of New Rochelle, a union hall, the Morgan library, a Harlem nightclub, the Atlantic City boardwalk, and, for lagniappe, the Atlantic Ocean...
...Brian Stokes Mitchell) and his inamorata Sarah (Audra McDonald...
...Doctorow was clearly on the side of the downtrodden, the impoverished, the disenfranchised...
...While the opening number grows increasingly dissonant, it becomes clear that the confident middle class, the oppressed blacks and the bewildered foreigners are on a collision course...
...Those who demand a little substance along with style might go down the street and try some of the Off-Broadway theaters on 42nd Street west of Ninth Avenue...
...In lesser roles the rest of the cast is either comic, as in the case of McLaren, beautiful (Perry andMichele), moving (Sutcliffe, Friedman), or impressive (just about everyone else...
...When the three Bs were through, impresario Garth Drabinsky took over, bringing in a corporate contributor to help realize his dreams...
...How many new immigrants and black folks do you think have the price of a ticket to this show that purports to celebrate them...
...Finally, the musical suffers from gigantism, the assumption that if something is good, increasing its size must improve matters exponentially...
...She is answered by the billyclubs of two policemen, and their blows kill her...
...From that moment, Coalhouse begins the journey that will see him end as an urban terrorist...
...The main biographies and subplots take place in 1906, but the score reflects more recent epochs, with numbers like the Gershwinesque "Your Daddy's Son" and "Wheels of a Dream," reminiscent of so many Disney movie scores...
...Thus the $30 million Center for the Arts is not a salute to the historic Ford theater in Washington where Lincoln was assassinated...
...Still, if you want to foot the bill, you will enter a $30 million theater and watch a $ 10 million production, every cent of it visible onstage...
...the eccentric millionaire Thaw (played by Norman Mailer in the murky film adaptation) blows away the architect Stanford White over the love of Evelyn Nesbit...
...Eventually he will begin to make good by various inventions of his own devising...
...En route, the characters meet a laundry list of real-life movers and shakers circa 1906, among them Harry Houdini (Jim Corti), J. P. Morgan (Mike O'Carroll), Booker T. Washington (Tommy Hollis), Emma Goldman (Judy Kaye), Evelyn Nesbit (Lynnette Perry), Stanford White (Kevin Bogue), Harry K. Thaw (Colton Green), Admiral Peary (Rod Campbell) and, of course, Henry Ford (Larry Daggett...
...The musical is based on E. L. Doctorow's overpraised 1975 novel...
...That course winds its way slowly across the stage...
...The seats are nowhere near as comfortable, and the lobbies are likely to induce claustrophobia...
...The show actually begins in the lobby, a vast and opulently designed arena that runs clear through from 42nd to 43rd Street...
...Ten years later it was elegantly revamped and renamed, and started playing host to undistinguished shows until the breakthrough comedy Poppy (1923), starring W. C. Fields...
...Director Frank Galati moves some 40 performers around with the authority of a fieldmarshal, and GracielaDaniele's musical staging brims with energy...
...The lighting design by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer is, as usual, exquisite...
...Subsequently producer George White took over the theater, challenging Flo Ziegfeld's Follies with his Scandals variety shows, featuring such stars as Ethel Merman, Jimmy Durante and Ray Bolger...
...In a way the association is apposite...
...Slowly, gingerly, he gains entrance into the white folks' home, earns their respect and, finally, Sarah's love...
...Although the novel Ragtime purported to be about fin de siècle America, it was actually about the U.S...
...The Apollo actually started life in 1910 as the Bryant, a vaudeville-and-movie house...
...But as he rises, Coalhouse and Sarah descend...
...Ragtime has been on the road for over a year...
...One plot line concerns a family so generic that its members are billed only as The Little Boy (Alex Strange), Father (Marc Jacoby), Mother (Marin Mazzie), Mother's Younger Brother (Steven Sutcliffe) and Grandfather (Conrad McLaren...
...His Ragtime has a $125 top...
...They return to their comfortable home in New Rochelle where Mother cultivates her garden—and abruptly stumbles over an abandoned black infant...
...its title comes from the Ford Motor Company, which paid a lot of money to have its lighted logo over the theater...
...in the early '70s...
...But the girth of the production is at odds with its social conscience...
...But all is not well in New Rochelle...
...certainly the 20-member chorus resonates with far more power than a smaller group could summon...
...Why does one rise from his spacious seat with a sense that the evening is somehow incomplete...
...Before long they will be responsible for his undoing...
...Just as the slickly written bestseller posed as art, so this canny adaptation attempts to be a 1990s Showboat (a gargantuan revival that Drabinsky overproduced several years ago...
...Mother and The Little Boy bid goodbye to Father, who goes off with Admiral Peary to explore the North Pole...
...Santo Loquasto's costumes are evocative and, whennecessary, enormously inventive— particularly the long black coat that Tateh swirls to fine effect, and a series of graceful suits for Coalhouse andhis colleagues...
...When he seeks retribution he gets the runaround, dispensed by civil servants and lawyers...
...The Center occupies the sites of two vanished theaters and pays tribute to both of them: the Lyric, an Italian-influenced structure built in 1903, and the Adams-style Apollo opened in 1920...
...In part, I think, the problem comes from the original work...
...First, thugs destroy the musician's new car...
...President Taft comes to town and Sarah joins a cheering crowd, attempting to call the President's attention to her lover's plight...
...it then played host to such operettas as Oscar Straus' The Chocolate Soldier (based on Shaw's Amis and the Man) and a number of smash musicals, including Cole Porter's first big hit, Fifty Million Frenchmen...
Vol. 81 • January 1998 • No. 1
