Ragtime, in Your Time

Presidents’ Day seems like the perfect occasion to exhort you, implore you, and beg you to do yourself a favor and go see Ragtime at the Astoria Performing Arts Center this weekend. And please hurry – it closes on Sunday! In the age of Barack Obama, Ragtime has truly become a profound, riveting, immensely resonant experience.

CurtainUp review: Ragtime

Ragtime was the first Broadway show I ever saw (spring break '98), and the show is such an enduring masterpiece. In a way, I’m actually surprised we haven’t seen more of it around the city since then, but it took director Tom Wojtunik (newly anointed Artistic Director of APAC) to give the show a dazzling new treatment for our own historical era.

For one thing, this Ragtime is not designed to be a box-office blockbuster; it’s intimate, in-your-face, and visceral. You’ll likely make eye contact with a performer at least once, and you might get nervous at times that you might be whisked from your seat and into the show. (But not to fear: this isn't a physically interactive show, just an immensely emotionally and intellectually interactive one.)

And then there’s the cast—my highest praise and respect goes to D. William Hughes and Janine Ayn Romano, who tell the show’s central love story as Coalhouse Walker, Jr., and Sarah. The roles were played on Broadway by the inimitable Brian Stokes Mitchell and Audra McDonald. (And although the show ran only a few years, thanks to the power of cast recordings, their powerhouse duet “Wheels of a Dream” has been listened to/sung along with by theater geeks for more than a decade.) We know those songs. With those voices.

In fact, I actually got to hear them reprise their big duet in October, when Mitchell was the special guest star during Audra McDonald and Barbara Cook’s “Broadway Voices for Change” benefit concert. The left-leaning crowd was abuzz with the upcoming election, and McDonald actually brought a Barack Obama action figure on stage at one point. We all knew there would be a "special guest", and when Mitchell strolled on stage, McDonald quickly interjected: “Brian Stokes Mitchell, everyone!” She was sure that a few people in the back of the theater might mistake him for Obama, and Mitchell gamely pushed out his ears to further play up the resemblance. And then they broke into a glorious, unrehearsed (that’s what they told us, anyway) performance of “Wheels of a Dream,” a song which seemed magnificently appropriate for this moment in history.

But as you’ll see when you visit Ragtime (and maybe I’ll see you there again this weekend), Hughes and Romano inject their performances with a youth and vitality that feels fresh, true, and totally their own. And that’s just the beginning … For a mere $18, you’ll get a history lesson that will make you incredibly aware of the history you’re living. Right now.