America in Major and Minor Keys: Ragtime Returns

"In Ragtime, it looks as if the sun is always rising or setting inside the Vivian Beaumont Theater. It's a vast room, squat and wide-it can act, quite naturally, as a cavern-and in transferring her production of the Ahrens-and-Flaherty American musical epic from its bare-bones run at Encores! last year,the director Lear deBessonet hasn't gone to great lengths to fill the stage with scenery."

"But this is a production that tends to let the eye wander toward a horizon line, and which cloaks its actors, in Adam Honore9 and Donald Holder's lighting design, in shades of purple and orange as their voices echo across the stage. It's a fitting dynamic for a show whose plot knots together a series of turn-of-the-century coincidences, largely in New York City and along the Atlantic coast, while dreaming through its score of the expansiveness of the rest of the continent."

Ragtime fills the Vivian Beaumont Theater with a cavernous, horizon-focused staging that relies on light and a few enlarged set pieces rather than dense scenery. David Korins highlights key objects—the Model T and a carved Victorian house—to anchor the story. Adam Honore9 and Donald Holder use purple and orange lighting to cloak actors and let voices resonate across space. The score imagines continental expansiveness, and Joshua Henry's delivery in "Wheels of a Dream" embodies that yearning. The production treats the fantasy of boundless America as sustaining yet ultimately unfulfilled. Heavy sentimentality remains, but disciplined direction brings the show close to greatness.

Read at Vulture