Rosalie Craig in "Back to Before"
The first West End revival of Ragtime opened last week to mixed reviews. The creative team is Terrence McNally (book), Lynn Ahrens (lyrics), Stephen Flaherty (music), Timothy Sheader (direction), Javier de Frutos (choreography), Jon Bausor (sets), Laura Hopkins (costumes), James Farncombe (lights), and Nick Lidster and Ian Dickinson (sound). The cast includes Rosalie Craig (Mother), David Birrell (Father), Rolan Bell (Coalhouse), Claudia Kariuki (Sarah), John Marquez (Tateh), and Tamsin Carroll (Emma Goldman).
Michael Billington (Guardian): Revived by Timothy Sheader, it is staged with all the brilliance you’d expect of a man who has won the Olivier award for best musical revival three years running. My doubts concern the show itself. … Skilful as Terrence McNally’s adaptation is, the characters lack real individuality. Mother, as the heroine is called, becomes an emblem of the white liberal conscience, while Father is left to embody racial conservatism. Even Stephen Flaherty’s score and Lynn Ahrens’s lyrics seem duty-bound to give us an anthology of period styles. I have no reservations about the staging by Sheader and choreographer Javier de Frutos. … You can’t fault the way the piece is sung and staged – but, in attempting to provide a panorama of turn-of-the-century America, it inspires awe rather than affection.
Michael Coveney (What’s On Stage): The melting pot of America simmers down into coagulant goo. … Despite one or two flash points of action (the abuse of Coalhouse’s Model T Ford, for instance, or Emma Goldman rabble-rousing in Union Square) there’s a becalmed mood to the evening. In many ways, Sheader and his team have revolutionized how shows are presented at this venue, notably in revivals of Lord of the Flies and Into the Woods. But Ragtime does not fulfill its promise of Shakespearean complexity, and soon becomes a penance to sit through; and not being able to see the band (they are supervised by Nigel Lilley on a hidden platform way up in the trees) is another serious deprivation.
Mark Shenton (The Stage): Against a wrecked billboard featuring an election poster of Barack Obama with the slogan “Dare to Dream” still visible below its gashed centre, Ragtime’s focus turns from being a story about the transformation of a nation … to a show which we are invited to see through the prism of the crushed ruins of the hopes that America once represented. … If the production is all too full of distractions, at least the frequently glorious score has its own seriously captivating power, and is punchily rendered here under the superb musical direction of Nigel Lilley. There are some terrific vocal performances. … All, however, are fighting a losing battle against the dominating concept that forces them to comment on their characters rather than live them.