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.

Based on E. L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel, with a Tony-winning book by Terrence McNally and a Tony-winning score by Ahrens and Flaherty, Ragtime takes us back a century to an era of historic change in the United States, a time when the country found itself divided between The Haves (well-to-do early 20th-Century White Anglo-Saxon Protestants like Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan, both of whom are supporting characters in Ragtime) and The Have-Nots (working-class African-Americans and fresh-off-the-boat Eastern European immigrants).

The Haves may have wanted to believe that “there were no Negroes and there were no immigrants,” but Ragtime’s fictional Mother, Father, Younger Brother, and Little Boy were soon to find out otherwise.

 Mother (Shannon Warne) takes in an African-American baby found in her garden along with the child’s unwed mother Sarah (Bryce Charles).

 Younger brother (Dylan Saunders) becomes inflamed by anarchist Emma Goldman (Valerie Perri) to revolt against the status quo alongside Sarah’s lover, musician Coalhouse Walker, Jr. (Clifton Duncan).

 And Mother’s life becomes intertwined with those of immigrant Tateh (Marc Ginsburg) and his young daughter Little Girl (Iara Nemirovsky) in addition to those already present in her own: Father (Zachary Ford), Grandfather (Gregory North), and Little Boy (Luké Barbato Smith).

Ragtime manages to be both epic in its cast of major historical figures like illusionist Harry Houdini (Benjamin Schrader), chorus girl Evelyn Nesbitt (Katharine McDonogh), auto mogul Ford (Ryan Dietz), financier Morgan (Tom G. McMahon), and African-American educator Booker T. Washington (Dedrick Bonner)

 and personal in its focus on Coalhouse’s efforts to win Sarah back, on Tateh and his daughter’s first steps towards becoming Americans, and on Mother’s growing disillusionment with her marriage.

If all these plot threads seem daunting in synopsis, McNally’s compelling book makes each thread surprisingly easy to follow. More significant is the light Ragtime shines on a) where we were vis-à-vis class-and-race relations a century ago, b) how far we have come since then, and c) how far we as a country have yet to go.

The first of director Lee’s multiple strokes of genius is managing to trim Ragtime’s original Broadway cast of fifty down to a bare-minimum twenty without sacrificing big-cast impact by giving all but a handful of principals multiple roles to play and having virtually the entire ensemble double as just-arrived immigrants, or Atlantic City beachgoers, or striking factory workers with distinctive enough looks to pass for an entirely new set of performers.

 More immediately apparent is Lee’s strikingly original production design concept, a stage piled high with shipping crates of various sizes that serve throughout as a reminder that whether fresh off the boat or generations into American life, the United States is a nation of immigrants.

Still, it’s not until lighting designer master Jared A. Sayeg brings up the lights and musical director extraordinaire Darryl Archibald and his sixteen-piece orchestra launch into Ragtime’s full-company prologue that Tom Buderwitz’s ingenious scenic design, (enhanced every step of the way by Hana Sooyeon Kim’s spectacular projection design including some remarkable early 20th-century footage of Atlantic City beach-goers) begins to reveal its many wonders: secret compartments, trap doors with their own hidden treasures, scene-setting miniatures, and more.

 And speaking of said “Prologue,” when was the last time you saw a Ragtime that opened with a game of musical chairs whose outcome any race-aware historian could predict, just one of Lee’s strokes of directorial genius complemented by Mark Esposito’s inspired choreography, from the vaudeville show that is “The Crime Of The Century” to the factory-worker moves of “Success” to the infectious high-stepping footwork of “Getting’ Ready Rag,” and that’s just Act One.

 Finally, Lee’s contributions to a stageful of finely hewn, superbly executed performances cannot be underestimated,

 from magnificent star turns by Duncan’s appealing, electrifying Coalhouse, Warne’s passionate, self-discovering Mother, Charles’s heartwarming, heartbreaking Sarah, and Ginsburg’s fiery, touching Tateh, to dynamic featured work by the multitasking rest of cast, including Ford’s imperious Father, McDonough’s saucy Evelyn, Perri’s impassioned Emma, and most especially Saunders’ fresh new socially-challenged take on Younger Brother, with child performer snaps to Nemirovsky’s sweet-and-lovely Little Girl and Smith’s precociously perceptive Little Boy, and more still to the multitude of cameos good, evil, and somewhere in-between delivered by the equally outstanding Bonner, Deni, Dietz, Jones, McMahon, North, Stilliens, Thomas-Visgar, and Washington.

 Completing Ragtime’s Broadway-caliber production design are Kate Bergh’s meticulously detailed costumes, Carol Doran’s equally fine wig and hair designs, and Philip G. Allen’s clear-as-crystal sound design.

Jill Gold is stage manager and Julie Ann Renfro is assistant stage manager. Rhonda Kohl is assistant to the director and choreographer.

 Casting is by Telsey + Company and Ryan Tymensky, CSA. Joe Witt is general manager, Chris Cook is production manager, and Brad Enlow is technical director.

A July 2017 Los Angeles Times article asked the question, “Can Danny Feldman Save The Pasadena Playhouse?” as the Playhouse’s new producing artistic director.

If Our Town, King Charles III, Belleville, and Native Gardens, hadn’t already made the answer abundantly clear, Ragtime, quite possibly the best locally produced musical you will see all year, clinches the deal.

Pasadena Playhouse, 39 South El Molino Ave., Pasadena.
www.pasadenaplayhouse.org

–Steven Stanley
February 10, 2019
Photos: Nick Agro, Jenny Graham

Tags: Aherns & Flaherty, E.L. Doctorow, Los Angeles Theater Review, Pasadena Playhouse, Terrence McNally