The prologue that opens Ragtime loudly announces the musical’s epic ambitions as its nine fictional characters and six of its historical figures introduce themselves with third-person narration and shout-singing.
“It’s almost an opera,” says Vonda K. Bowling, music director of a new production by Dallas Theater Center and Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts.
Given the sweeping, presentational nature of the source material, E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel of the same name, it couldn’t have become such a success any other way. Now, DTC and Meadows are taking on the Brechtian masterpiece, setting the stage for the launch of a musical theater institute at SMU.
The plot lines first revealed in the nine-minute “Prologue: Ragtime” revolve around three families in turn-of-the-century New York from very different backgrounds: the upper-class Mother, Younger Brother, Father, Little Boy and Grandfather, who have just built a mansion in suburban New Rochelle with the proceeds of Father’s fireworks, flags and bunting business; Harlem jazz musician Coalhouse Walker Jr. and his estranged lover Sarah, the mother of their child, who moves in with Mother as Father leaves for an Arctic expedition; and Jewish artist Tateh and his Little Girl, fresh off the boat from Latvia and soon headed to Boston to try their luck there.
News Roundups
“The lyrics are totally in unison, three different factions all wanting the same thing and saying what they want in the exact same way but circling around each other, in each other’s way,” explains Bri Woods, who has just joined the DTC resident acting company. Woods received her master’s degree in acting from Meadows last year and is starring as Sarah alongside 10 current SMU theater students, making up almost half the cast.
“It’s one of most beautiful opening numbers because if you just got along, everybody would get exactly what they want,” she continues. “But they can’t. There are too many census boxes at play, too many economic, racial and religious differences, places of origin. We all, at our core, want to have a place to go to be ourselves and feel safe doing so, and none of them do.”
The meticulous process of turning Doctorow’s historical novel into a musical started with playwright Terrence McNally, who wrote a 60-page treatment in 1994. Then some of the most famous composers or composing teams in musical theater were asked to write four potential songs in just a few days. Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, at the time only known for Once on This Island, won the audition.
Before premiering in Toronto in 1996, then moving to Broadway two years later with talent like Audra McDonald as Sarah and Brian Stokes Mitchell as Coalhouse, Ragtime spent months in workshops as composer Flaherty and lyricist Ahrens completed the songs. McNally wrote the book.
“It’s the best history class,” says Joel Ferrell, who is heading up the Sexton Institute for Musical Theatre at SMU and directing the production. “It’s a reminder that Doctorow, Ahrens, Flaherty and McNally achieved the impossible. I’m not smart enough to argue about whether the show is perfect or great or whatever. But for a show that people could easily go, ‘It’s just too big, let’s never do it,’ they’re always trying to get back to it because it’s obviously an American musical-theater classic, like Fiddler on the Roof or West Side Story. It’s so utterly American.”
Alongside the big group numbers characterized by the prologue, Ragtime features intimate solos, duets and trios.
Tiffany Solano as Mother and Blake Hackler as Tateh star in the Dallas Theater Center and SMU Meadows School of the Arts co-production of “Ragtime.”
Andy Nguyen
The favorite of DTC company member Blake Hackler, who is theater chair and head of acting at Meadows and stars as Tateh, is the third number, “Journey On.” His character, arriving in New York harbor on a rag ship with his daughter, first crosses paths with Mother and Father, though they don’t actually meet until later.
“That is such a powerful, gorgeous, heartfelt melody, the excitement of these three people who are starting out on a journey, both a literal and a metaphorical one,” Hackler says of “Journey On,” citing Flaherty as the finest current writer of musical theater melodies. “It’s such a hopeful song and then almost immediately all hope is taken away.”
He’s talking about the storyline of Coalhouse and Sarah. Desperate and out of options, Sarah tries to bury their baby alive in the New Rochelle family’s backyard, only to be taken in by Mother. Coalhouse finds Sarah and en route to try to reconcile, he’s harassed by a white mob for driving his new Model T.
Bri Woods stars as Sarah in “Ragtime,” a co-production of the Dallas Theater Center and SMU Meadows School of the Arts.
Andy Nguyen
Neither character survives the show, Sarah dying during her attempt to defend him with the president of the United States, but not before their classic duet “Wheels of a Dream.” It’s one of Woods’ favorite Ragtime songs.
“It’s that moment when they come together, aligning for the first time,” she says. “They’re trying to figure out, ‘Where do we stand now? Are we moving forward? Can you dream this with me?’ They have such high hopes.”
But those hopes go unrealized. In the song “Till We Reach That Day” at Sarah’s funeral, Black mourners plead for justice while Mother, Father, Younger Brother, Tateh and the real-life political activist Emma Goldman weep.
“They’re just asking for one day of peace, one day where they don’t have to worry about their circumstances, where they can just breathe,” Woods says. “That’s all they want, like everybody. That’s the American dream, right?”
Goldman is among the historical figures that interact with the fictional characters, or help contextualize them. Other figures include Booker T. Washington, Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, Harry Kendall Thaw, Matthew Henson and Harry Houdini, who acts as a kind of double for Tateh.
Ragtime has been revived in New York a few times, mostly recently last year at Lincoln Center. Ferrell remembers the buzz that built around it as it first moved from Toronto to Los Angeles to Broadway. It was his and Hackler’s idea to approach DTC about a co-production.
“It’s instantly brilliant not only because it’s beautiful and I can hum everything, but you can’t tell exactly what decade it was written in,” Ferrell says. “I can’t tell whether it’s from 1940 or 2000.”
While the syncopated rhythms of ragtime are woven throughout the show, especially for the Harlem characters, Flaherty also includes brass-band marches and parlor songs for the New Rochelle family, Klezmer for the immigrants, along with jazz, gospel and musical theater-style ballads.
Music director Bowling, who doubles as pianist and conductor from the center of the stage, the eight other musicians and 20-plus actors arrayed around her, half-jokes how much her hands hurt from rehearsing the stride style that evolved from ragtime.
“The whole piece, but especially the prologue, where we’re introducing New Rochelle and Harlem and the immigrants, has these different styles, but the ragtime flavor is there throughout,” Bowling says. “It’s woven into so many different aspects of the show that it becomes its own language.”
Details
March 27-April 19 at Wyly Theatre, 2400 Flora St. $30-$160. dallastheatercenter.org.
Fort Worth play explores what it means to belong and be loved
Zoë Kim’s “Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?)” is a one-woman show about growing up Korean American.
Dallas native’s play written for ‘Will & Grace’ star comes to Addison
Doug Wright’s 2022 “Good Night, Oscar” is about a celebrity’s appearance on “Tonight Starring Jack Paar.”