Ragtime at the Pasadena Playhouse

Caught the terrific revival of RAGTIME this afternoon at the Pasadena Playhouse. It's always been a favorite score of mine and this felt like a first-rate production for a regional house.

The cast was pretty uniformly excellent, but special shout-outs go to Marc Ginsburg as Tateh, Clifton Duncan as Coalhouse and Shannon Warne as Mother.

I know there was a Broadway Revival in 2009 (and not a commercially successful one at that), but after revisiting the show today, it definitely feels incredibly relevant as a piece in this era of continuing issues of race relations and a heated immigration debate. With the resurgent success of Ahrens and Flaherty shows (Anastasia commercially, and the Once on this Island revival critically) - perhaps it is time for another mounting of Ragtime on Broadway?

I also saw this production a couple days ago and thought it was excellent. Ragtime is a favorite of mine and it feels timely right now with issues of racism and immigration. I agree that the actors who played Tateh, Mother, and Coalhouse were standouts. It was a fairly small cast for Ragtime and there were times that numbers felt a little sparse (the “Gettin’ Ready Rag” comes to mind). But overall I really liked the set design (a warehouse) and lighting. It was a treat to
see such a high quality production of this just a few minutes from home.

I'm late to the party but finally saw this show last night, and I just have to proclaim to the rafters how amazing I thought the production was! You can read the rest of my review here, or you can immediately go to the Pasadena Playhouse site and grab whatever tickets are left for the rest of this week. (It closes this Sunday March 9.)

First the set: Tom Buderwitz has designed a creative amalgam of Eugene Lee's original and Derek McLane's revival Broadway designs; he's surrounded the playhouse's baroque proscenium with a factory structure filled with crates that at once gives you poverty and luxury and everything in between. A continuous parade of dazzling movie projections transforms those stacks of crates into projection surfaces that make each new location evocative and resonant. Yes, we have Coalhouse's full-size Model T. Yes, we have a working player piano. (Actually 2 pianos.) Plus stunning lighting to sculpt the space beautifully in scene after scene. Bravo to all involved!

Second the orchestra: Rarely do we LA theater goers get a homegrown musical production boasting a pit band with 17 musicians! Every single detail of the famous 2-CD cast recording was heard last night, played with power by an ensemble of utter virtuosos.

Then the cast: what an enormous undertaking it was to amass this huge company (20 listed in the playbill) and stage this mountain of a show without a cut or edit to such superb effect. Every dance move was nailed, every emotional arc was played with nuance, but oh, those voices! In solos, duets or choral masses, the vocal sound coming from that stage was goose-bump inducing. (Kudos to the sound designer for expertly balancing the onstage and offstage voices the equal of any Broadway design.) In a company of dazzling talents, I've got to single out Clifton Duncan's Coalhouse, Marc Ginsburg's Tateh, and Shannon Warne's Mother. It seems blasphemous to say they surpassed their Broadway antecedents (and there's a lovely tribute in the program to Marin Mazzie's original performance of Mother), but go see the show and see if you don't feel the same?

No more need be said. The greatest musical play of the 1990's is getting a once-in-a-generation production in Pasadena, and you'd be a fool to miss it.

Updated On: 3/4/19 at 12:07 PM

I thought the show was excellent based on the cast and the source material itself. There were many inspired moments in this staging but I also had many issues with it. The cast was too sparse for my liking. They could have added at least two more African-American performers to round out the ensemble. It makes sense to have the performers double as other characters but not when you don't change their appearance. I was wondering why Grandfather was at the ball game but not seated with his family.

The use of the boxes was interesting and I thought it was clever how certain things popped out of them. However, having them onstage for the whole show took up important real estate and made the show feel claustrophobic. They could have moved them around as needed. The projections were good for the most part except for when they used a full movie for most of Atlantic City. It zapped the excitement from the song completely.

Coalhouse, Mother and Tateh were excellent. Marc Ginsburg as Tateh was one of the best Tateh's I've seen. I wish the same could be said for those that played Sarah, Younger Brother, and Evelyn Nesbit. They were all fine, just not superb like the rest. Younger Brother in particular did not read as "younger" brother. There were cuts in the production but I believe that's based on which version of Ragtime they licensed. This did not open the second Act with Harry Houdini. Finally, I was disappointed that they made Coalhouse's death happen off stage. It took away from the impact of that moment. Overall, it's a good local production of Ragtime but I preferred the staging that 3D Theatricals created a few years back.