Coalhouse Lives Again

Woo Hoo! Ragtime is on its way back!!! One of the greatest shows of the 20th century that didn't get it's full due the first time around now gets a second life. In hindsight, Ragtime really should have won Best Musical at the 1998 Tony Awards ceremony. For all it's visual glory, The Lion King just hasn't cut it. The new songs suck (hence Ragtime winning the Tony for Best Score), it is way too long (twice the length of the movie, mostly due to padding with the sucky new songs, which taxes kiddies' attention spans, as well as my own), and it just really doesn't have much to say. After seeing it once, I felt like I never really needed to see it again. Ragtime on the other hand has a glorious score, is completely relevant, and even though the first act is almost two hours, the show flies by. I caught the touring production in 1998 and then it was gone until Light Opera Works in Evanston did a fantastic production in 2003 that rivaled the Broadway production. I'm glad it's finally getting another chance. I am a little worried though that it's being done by an opera company. Opera performers generally do not have the style or understanding of musicals to be able to do a Broadway show. The Lyric Opera's production of Sweeney Todd in 2002 was a disasater. It plodded along, any necessary vocal subtlties were lost in the singers' operatic affectations, and there was no sense of drama. Many Rogers & Hammerstein shows have met similar fates, as has West Side Story. The fact that they need to have supertitles already indicates that they're looking for operatic singers rather than Broadway singers, which has me worried. A show like this really needs to right performers to pull it off. At least there's a silver lining no matter how the production team procedes: even if the production is lackluster, if it pulls in an audience it may convince other, more theatrically-oriented companies, to give this masterpiece a second look.