![]() ![]() Washington's ideal of integration and is disillusioned and destroyed by racist white society. So McNally has Walker start out an idealist who believes in Booker T. This is not the sort of character you can give big musical numbers to. In the novel, Coalhouse is a mysterious, implacable man of few words his very silence implies a life he does not care to revisit by talking about it, and when he takes his violent stand you sense that this is the culmination of years of suffering. McNally tampers most with the character of Coalhouse Walker, and you can see why he had to. Why go for the complex man when you can have a cardboard figure to make your social points? The polar explorer Matthew Henson, one of the more fascinating African Americans in our history, is given only one line, and that is to remind us that slavery was a Bad Thing. Possibly for reasons of length, he reduces Doctorow's creepily fascinating capitalists to stick figures. In some cases, adapter Terrence McNally has made matters more thuddingly didactic. You can agree with the political attitudes these caricatures embody and still find them inadequate, old news, boring. Washington (Tommy Hollis) is stuffed with dignity, while the racist fire chief Willie Conklin (David Mucci) is a cringing thug. Morgan (Mike O'Carroll) must be selfish and haughty and Henry Ford (Larry Daggett) a little nutty. Emma Goldman (Judy Kaye) must be down-to-earth, nurturing and admirable, while J.P. Mother (Marin Mazzie, in superb voice) has to become a proto-feminist. (Brian Stokes Mitchell), must become a revolutionary, and Younger Brother (Steven Sutcliffe), the only WASP character with a social conscience, must join him. In keeping with '70s attitudes, the pianist, Coalhouse Walker Jr. Already we're in cliched territory, though the cliches must have looked fresher when the book was published in 1975 than they do now. ![]() The black family is the unmarried couple of a pianist and a washerwoman and their infant son. The Jewish family consists of a Lithuanian immigrant and the young daughter he fiercely protects. ![]() is placed at the center of the novel, and the musical, because they are the ones who have lessons to learn about how they're no longer the center of the country. The middle-class WASP family - called Father, Mother, Mother's Younger Brother, etc. With academic neatness, these include a WASP family, a Jewish family and an African American family. Washington - and Doctorow used most of them as background and counterpoint to the story of his fictional characters. The historical era that Doctorow wrote about is gluttonously rich in what now seem American archetypes - from immigrant anarchist Emma Goldman to escape artist Harry Houdini, from millionaire banker J.P. Doctorow novel upon which it's (quite faithfully) based, the show has breadth without depth. The first-rate cast is in first-rate form. Eugene Lee's sets, with their wide, freedom-promising vistas and their echoes of old photos and postcards, could hardly be more beautiful and appropriate. Director Frank Galati has composed one breathtaking stage picture after another. "Ragtime," the much-anticipated musical that opened last night at the new Ford Center for the Performing Arts, boasts a lot of ambition, a lot of beauty and a lot of hard work. ![]()
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