Review: RAGTIME, Charing Cross Theatre

In 2016, is anyone doing musicals like Thom Southerland does musicals? After Allegro and Titanic in the summer, he sticks to the one-word title formula with Ragtime - it's (and here's one for the playbills) bigger than Titanic!

What an assault on the senses. The Big Apple at the beginning of the 20th century is a whirligig of new money and old money, new immigrants and old immigrants, new music and old music, but it's also seething, sensual and suffocating. Southerland uses 11 actor-musicians in his cast of two dozen, almost all of whom are on stage all the time, thronging Tom Rogers and Toots Butcher's set like New Yorkers thronged the streets of Harlem. On emerging from the theatre, wrung out with the emotional impact of it all, central London seems almost sleepy in comparison.

Despite the comforts of money and a residence in suburban New Rochelle, Mother is trapped in a dull marriage, so when Father joins an expedition to the North Pole, she feels a sense of liberation. Soon her life changes forever when she finds a black baby, still breathing, in a shallow grave and, almost on impulse, takes in the forlorn mother and child. Soon, the baby's father, Harlem pianist Coalhouse Walker Jnr, turns up in his shiny Model T Ford, and ignites the racism of Fire Chief Willie Conklin - and, subsequently, Coalhouse's radicalism too. Meanwhile, Tateh, a destitute Latvian Jew, arrives in New York with just his silhouettes to sell to keep his beloved daughter from starving. But when he makes the pictures move in a flickbook, he gets an idea and he and Mother meet a few years later in very different circumstances.

"Based on EL Doctorow's epic novel, this revival of the award-winning Broadway show follows the intersecting lives of three families: one wealthy, world-weary and WASPish; another immigrant, impoverished and industrious; another African-American, angry and anarchic. These three breaking and broken clans are uncomfortably stereotyped (the white patriarch is casually racist in the manner of an antebellum South 'gentleman'; the Jewish immigrant is technocratic and brims with business potential even in his darkest days; the African-American is a womanising musician who has seen the error of his ways) but one has to leave such political correctness at the door, put it down to its 1975 source material and wallow in the melodrama."

I wrote those words about the musical's 2011 revival at the Landor Theatre, and that critique still holds true - but, five years on, the USA (and UK) are different societies, the fault lines between genders, ethnicities and classes more visible than then (they were always there - perhaps we were more complacent just half a decade ago). Issues we hoped had settled into an accommodation foreseen by Booker T Washington (who appears in the show as a man of conciliation to contrast with Coalhouse's urban terrorist) now seem horribly alive again, spewing from the mouths of would-be demagogues on television, punched out with clenched fists on social media platforms and emboldened, as never before in my lifetime, in thousands of personal contacts on the streets.

Back with the entertainment, there's not a weak link in the cast and too many standouts to list. Anita Louise Combe is fantastic as Mother, the moral centre of the story, delivering a tearjerking 11 o'clock number with "Back To Before". That's not even the best vocal performance of the evening, an acclamation nailed in Act One by Jennifer Saayeng's spine-tingling "Your Daddy's Son". Ako Mitchell charms and menaces throughout, a big man in a "George Melly" suit, compelling us to pay heed to Coalhouse's demolished dignity. A word too for newcomer Seyi Omooba, whose lead on the gospel-tinted "Till We Reach That Day" announces a new singing talent on the London stage.

Of course, the source material (book by Terrence McNally, music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens - Broadway titans all, bagging four Tonys for this show alone), with EL Doctorow's novel as the base, is wonderful, but this production squeezes every last drop from that showbiz gold and from the gifted actors and musicians. There might be a better night in the West End just now - but I doubt it.

Ragtime continues at the Charing Cross Theatre until 10 December.

Photo Scott Rylander.

Read our interview with Thom Southerland

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