Opinion: 'Ragtime'- No Soul

How many big guns does it take to make a great theatrical experience?

Consider the consortium of giants who created "Ragtime," the $10 million musical with the cast of 58 now playing on the cavernous stage of Broadway's colossal new Ford Center for the Performing Arts.

Garth Drabinsky, the zillionaire Canadian impresario and owner of Livent Inc., which brought us the recent "Showboat" revival, not only funded and produced the venture but also built the theater, an opulent melding of the old Lyric and Apollo theaters that runs between 42nd and 43rd Streets.

Local Titans

The director is Frank Galati, who wrote and directed the technically awesome, Tony Award-winning 1990 stage adaptation of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," a three-hour extravaganza with a cast of a mere 35, then the most costly and ambitious American play ever to hit the Great White Way.

A pair of local titans supplied the words. The novelist E.L. Doctorow of Sag Harbor, winner of all the major literary awards, wrote the 1975 world-wide bestseller the musical is based on.

The playwright Terrence McNally of Bridgehampton, of the Tony Award-winning "Love! Valour! Compassion!" and "Master Class," created the book. He also has written two hit musicals, "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and "The Rink."

The noted team of Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens collaborated on the music and lyrics, while the resident director of the Lincoln Center Theater, Graciela Daniele, designed the choreography.

First-rate creative genius was also brought to bear on the spectacular sets, by the award-winning Eugene Lee, and the gorgeous costumes, by the acclaimed Santo Loquasto.

Jonathan Deans created the brilliant, if rather overmiked, sound, while Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer collaborated on the truly smashing lighting design. Minor production values were clearly also handled by top people.

Families In Collision

Billing itself as "The Last Great Musical of the Century," "Ragtime" is set at the century's dawn in a turbulent New York City teeming with immigrants and black migrant workers from the South, and in a tranquil suburb.

The plot, and there is a lot of it, follows the fortunes of three families that symbolize the dream-seekers and the establishment types guarding the pot of gold, and dramatizes their collision courses.

We first meet a WASP family living in Victorian splendor in the whites-only enclave of New Rochelle. There's The Little Boy (Alan Strange), who serves as the evening's bug-eyed narrator, Mother (Marin Mazzie), a sheltered young matron, and Father (Mark Jacoby), a fireworks magnate off on an expedition to the North Pole with Admiral Peary (Rod Campbell) and his Arctic Club.

Sharing their mansion are Grandfather (Conrad McLaren) and Mother's Younger Brother (Steven Sutcliffe), a gentle soul who will become a fanatical civil rights activist.

With its parasols and tennis balls, this family seems invulnerable to change, oblivious to the "wretched refuse" swarming through Emma Lazarus's "golden door."

Little Coalhouse

This serenity is shattered by the discovery under a clump of hydrangeas of a black infant who has been abandoned by his washerwoman mother, Sarah (the magnificent Audra McDonald).

He turns out to be the illegitimate son of the great jazz pianist Coalhouse Walker (the charismatic Brian Stokes Mitchell).

Good Protestant Mother takes Sarah and Little Coalhouse under her wing, greatly enriching her life but infuriating her Irish-immigrant working-class neighbors.

Jewish Immigrants

When Coalhouse Sr. rolls up for a visit in his resplendent new Model T Ford, members of the local volunteer fire department trash the car and beat him up. Denied justice in the courts, the radicalized black musician and his supporters resort to violence.

Meanwhile, on the Lower East Side, the third strand of plot comes to life as Tateh (the delightful Peter Friedman), a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, struggles to support his daughter, The Little Girl (Lea Michele), by making cut-out silhouettes of passers-by.

A move to working backbreaking shifts in a Massachusetts textile mill involves him with the anarchist Emma Goldman (Judy Kaye) and the bloody labor strikes of her International Workers of the World. He and The Little Girl flee to California.

Historical Events

Once these narrative lines have been set in motion, we are swept into a maelstrom of historical events that engulfs the characters in clashing philosophies and political themes for which they seem to become the mere spokespersons.

A sort of heavy-duty, industrial-strength social conscience overtakes the action, and scenes clang into place freighted with moral significance.

In case we are slow to get the point, actual public figures besides Emma Goldman and Admiral Peary come forth to instruct us.

For example, the escape artist Harry Houdini (Jim Corti) appears as an inspiring metaphor for the poor in dead-end jobs, Henry Ford (Larry Daggett) as a ruthless union-buster, J. P. Morgan as an elitist robber baron, and Booker T. Washington (Tommy Hollis) as an advocate for racial equality.

Critic Unmoved

This is all excitingly acted, sung, choreographed, designed, lighted, and technically enhanced - but has the consortium of giants who labored on "Ragtime" brought forth a mouse or a masterpiece?

Well, actually, they've created something of a monster. Not a monster, exactly, but a three-and-a-half-hour musical with beautiful, perfectly formed moving parts that doesn't move us, that has no soul.

God knows "Ragtime" tries for the soul animating the novel, every fiber of it straining. But soul, perhaps, is not something a consortium of giants can will into being.

And "The Last Great Musical of the Century"? Let's hope it's still waiting in the wings.