And if it still sometimes feels like an animated history lesson, delivered by a liberal but square teacher a shade too eager to make the past come alive, the show now neither drags nor sags under its big themes. Warmly acted and agreeably sung, this “Ragtime” travels light. (The Model T, which is central to the story, appears here, too, but as a 3-D outline of a car.) With a tiered, skeletal set that suggests a majestic phantom railroad station, this “Ragtime” puts the emphasis on people as makers of history as well as its pawns instead of what surrounds them. But with a top-drawer design team that includes Derek McLane (set), Santo Loquasto (costumes) and Donald Holder (lighting), she makes it clear that “Ragtime” never needed all that decorative baggage to tell its stories of three families of different ethnic and economic strata. So to present a bare-bones “Ragtime” courts the danger of revealing how bare them bones are. Characters who remain mysteries to themselves in the novel are here allowed moments of self-analysis and self-explanation that Dr. Terrence McNally’s script and Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens’s songs have a way of turning the shifting historical flux of Doctorow’s novel into carefully diagrammed flow charts.
The show is hardly one of Sondheimesque complexity. “Ragtime” benefits from this less-is-more approach, but only to a degree. Despite the vulgar shadow cast by the $50 million “Spider-Man” extravaganza in the making, scheduled to open next year, the trend on Broadway of late has been toward small productions of big musicals, particularly in revivals of Stephen Sondheim shows that put the emphasis on words and music as guides to human ambiguity. Such ostentation was perhaps appropriate for the late 20th century, but hardly fitting in the financially anxious days of the early 21st. It was lovely to look at and sometimes to listen to, but you felt as if a big, fat dirigible filled with overdressed partiers and a cargo of heavy messages had landed on your head. The Drabinsky “Ragtime” was as infatuated with its own mammoth scale and stagecraft as its early-20th-century characters were with the latest innovations in science. That show, created to open the spanking-new Ford Center by the Mike Todd-style producer Garth Drabinsky, was a paean to the latest in theater technology, a sort of World’s Fair for the stage, that featured planes, trains, a full-size Model T and fireworks (to accompany the expression of love). Still, Marcia Milgrom Dodge’s appealingly modest new interpretation, which originated at the Kennedy Center in Washington, often finds within this work’s panoramic sweep an affecting, uneasy human soul largely missing in the 1998 version. Doctorow’s book, “Ragtime: The Musical” is never going to be described as subtle. Flattening and straightening the kinked currents of history that eddied through Mr. Doctorow’s 1975 novel about the reshaping of America in the early 20th century, still suggest anthems from a hymns-for-the-converted Weavers concert, reorchestrated for Broadway belters. True, the songs in this musical, adapted from E. The judiciously pared-down production that opened Sunday night at the Neil Simon Theater is a sprinting sylph compared to the opulence-bloated show that went under the same name a decade ago.
“Ragtime” has lost weight since it was last on Broadway.
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