In ‘Ragtime,’ the idea of a just, multiracial America is tragically incomplete

“When he is old enough, I will show him America,” sings Coalhouse Walker Jr. to Sarah, the mother of his baby son, at a key moment in the musical “Ragtime,” now in a triumphant Broadway revival at Lincoln Center Theater. Though sung with rapturous optimism, as this young Black couple in early 1900s New York imagines a bright future together, Coalhouse’s line is a bittersweet one, even a kind of time bomb. For the America that “Ragtime” ultimately shows us is tragically incomplete at best—a country where the freedom and opportunity that are supposed to be our nation’s birthrights are instead privileges, unevenly distributed, fiercely guarded and seized by struggle, if they’re won at all.

Sounds like a fun night at the theater, no? In fact, there are few musicals more stirring and satisfying when staged and sung as beautifully as “Ragtime” is here. (The show’s last Broadway revival, in 2009, was a tepid affair.) Its undeniable earnestness is situated within a teeming, sprawling vision of turn-of-the-20th-century America, adapted deftly from E. L. Doctorow’s kaleidoscopic novel by Terrence McNally, and it is buoyed by a sumptuous, irrepressible score by composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens. I would place it near the top of the class of American musicals on the subject of America itself, which would include everything from “Show Boat” to “West Side Story,” from “The Color Purple” to “Assassins.”

The multi-stranded story begins in 1902 with a departure, an arrival and an attempted reunion. A WASP patriarch simply called Father (Colin Donnell) goes on a North Pole expedition, leaving his wife (Caissie Levy) in charge of his family in comfortable New Rochelle, N.Y. A Jewish immigrant, Tateh (Brandon Uranowitz), brings his daughter to New York City, only to face overcrowded tenements and punishing working conditions. And a Harlem pianist, Coalhouse (Joshua Henry), sets out for New Rochelle in his new Model T to find his former lover Sarah (Nichelle Lewis).

The collision of Coalhouse and Sarah’s doomed romance with the guilty complacency of the white family in New Rochelle gives the story its tragic engine, and it chugs through “Ragtime” like a train. But it’s a local, not an express. One thing that struck me anew in this revival is how many diversions the three-hour show takes along the way: to vaudeville theaters, to a baseball game and to the beach at Atlantic City, where Tateh resurfaces in a lighter mood.

These frothier moments register less as relief than as willful distractions from the horror of the central story, in which Coalhouse has responded to cruel injustice with a violent uprising. They reminded me, I must admit, of the way many of us now try to continue our everyday lives and entertainments while troops march through American cities and masked men terrorize anyone who looks like an immigrant.

Still, the mantle of “relevance” is a heavy thing to lay on a Broadway musical. An earlier version of this same staging, also by director Lear deBessonet, ran at the Encores! series last November in the weeks before and after the U.S. presidential election, and depending on when audiences saw it, they felt either the show’s bursts of hope or its cries of despair with a fresh immediacy. Seen now, it plays less like a reflection of the breaking news outside the theater’s doors than like a dead-serious fable, speaking not so much to our precise present moment as to the perennial national questions this moment raises.

It made me think, oddly enough, of the current hit film “One Battle After Another.” Much as Doctorow’s 1975 novel took historical license, anachronistically placing an armed Black nationalist movement à la the Black Panthers in a Gilded Age setting, Paul Thomas Anderson’s contemporary film counterfactually imagines a Weather Underground-style leftist militant group that has been active at least since the Obama era. In both cases, political violence is a kind of clarifying shorthand to tell uniquely American stories of injustice and ongoing struggle, roughly analogous to the way Western and gangster films have mythologized violence in telling the American story. Come to think of it, it is also similar to the way “Hamilton” uses violence to frame its story of striving (though in that case the gunplay didn’t have to be invented).

Of course, the subject of political violence is hardly academic at the moment, with an administration conjuring a phantom “antifa” as justification for ever more repressive measures. But if little about our current moment seems to map directly onto the narratives of “Ragtime,” the feelings that course through it remain evergreen. One of the musical’s most powerful moments comes after Coalhouse has been visiting the New Rochelle house for months, hoping to woo a reluctant Sarah from the piano. When Father comes home unexpectedly from the North Pole, he is bewildered, singing about how this “strange new music” makes him feel out of place in his own home. Meanwhile, his wife and her brother sing about the “new music” with wonder and hope, as Coalhouse reunites joyously with Sarah. This breathtaking scene gives voice both to Father’s misgivings and to the inexorable power of change—and then harmonizes them.

That’s the kind of thing a musical, and it seems only a musical, can do. In combining disparate voices, it can dramatize nothing less than the weighty question of whether we can get along in this multiracial democracy by simply asking: Why can’t we sing it too?