On Thursday evening, all of Manhattan seemed to hum with a new music as Lincoln Center Theater’s splendid revival of Ragtime celebrated its opening night.
Filing into the grand Vivian Beaumont Theater for the show—directed by Lear deBessonet, LCT’s newly installed Kewsong Lee Artistic Director—were the likes of Audra McDonald and Brian Stokes Mitchell, who starred together in Ragtime’s original Broadway production in 1998; Rachel Zegler, fresh from her blockbuster run in Evita across the pond; Danielle Brooks; Phillipa Soo; Jasmine Cephas Jones; and Hillary Clinton.
Adapted by Terrence McNally, Stephen Flaherty, and Lynn Ahrens from E. L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel of the same name, Ragtime centers on a community in turn-of-the-20th-century New Rochelle, where a wealthy white family, a Black pianist, the woman he loves, and a Latvian widower all cross paths. DeBessonet couldn’t have found a more capable cast to tell its story of American dreamers to a new generation: the company includes Joshua Henry, Caissie Levy, Brandon Uranowitz, Nichelle Lewis, Colin Donnell, and Shaina Taub.
For deBessonet, the original production of Ragtime—which she saw as a freshman in college—“had this epic quality around movements of people and history, but it also followed these deeply personal stories with such emotional intimacy,” as she put it to Leslie Camhi in Vogue’s October issue. “And seeing what music does in the context of this show—how it makes the flesh-and-blood pain and dreams of history feel-able—was so revolutionary to me. I thought, That’s the kind of theater I want to make.” It would appear that with her own rousing Ragtime, deBessonet has done just that.
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