Ragtime, Neil Simon Theatre, New York

The question begged by this Kennedy Center production of Ragtime is not whether it deserved its transfer to New York: the physical production is sumptuous, the musicality first-rate, and the cast – lacking in big names, a brave move on Broadway – is almost embarrassingly able. The question is whether the show itself is strong enough to warrant a revival less than a decade after the closing of its original Broadway staging.

The answer is a qualified “no”. This story of three families – Jewish immigrant, African-American and white-Protestant – in 1906 New York remains too much a hollow pageant whose political ambitions can feel almost as oppressive as the social structures against which some of its real-life characters (the anarchist Emma Goldman, the integrationist Booker T. Washington) struggle.

The masterworks of the socially conscious musical – West Side Story, South Pacific and Showboat – provide historical context chiefly through character and plot development. Ragtime, by contrast, with music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens and book by Terrence McNally (based on E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel), spends much of its first act introducing its characters and, in processional fashion, trotting out proto-celebrity icons, including Harry Houdini and J.P. Morgan.

It is only in Scene Nine, when the black ragtime musician Coalhouse Walker Jr and his beloved Sarah, whose abandoned child has been found by the white-Protestant Mother, sing the stirring “The Wheels of a Dream”, that we fully experience the story’s intimacy.

As Coalhouse, Quentin Earl Darrington, a thrilling singer with square-jawed stolidity, and, as Sarah, Stephanie Umoh, deserve the audience’s adoration.

Ahrens and Flaherty’s 2005 Dessa Rose expressed the theme of social integration with more concentrated deftness. Still, there is much to admire in Ragtime’s handiwork; the songs linger. Flaherty expertly mixes ragtime, cakewalk and gospel, with a soupçon of Sondheim. Christiane Noll, as Mother, and Robert Petkoff, as the immigrant Tateh, rise to the melodic demands eloquently.

In her final tableau, director Marcia Milgrom Dodge places Coalhouse and Sarah atop the multi-tiered, gunmetal-grey set. The implication is unmistakable: a century after the story’s events of ethnic strife, a black couple has arrived at America’s pinnacle, even as the country is engulfed in another wrenching moment of transition.

Tel +1 212 307 4100