Gil Hates Everything

See also Ragtime: The Concept Album.

This show surely wins a Nobel Prize for Effort: it features thirty-eight tracks covering two hours of music, let alone the script time.

“Ragtime” is based on the novel by E.L.Doctorow, and has a book by Terrence McNally who has written tons of plays and musicals. The music and lyrics are tackled by Ahrens & Flaherty, who we’ve already seen in GHM as the songwriters for “Anastasia”, “Lucky Stiff”, and “Once On This Island”. They’re pretty reliable, but this is complicated territory; do they have the necessary oomph and the chameleonic powers required to musicalize this seemingly major work?

After several reviews where I’ve felt it necessary to either eviscerate or tolerate, I’m happy to say that this is a big success.

The show is about America in the early 1900s, the time of Henry Ford and Harry Houdini and ragtime and racism and strikes and the prelude to the first world war. But it’s grounded at the personal level by the central love story, of Coalhouse the ragtime pianist, Sarah his runaway-then-reunited wife, and their child… and by the story of the Jewish immigrant father and his daughter, struggling to find a way to survive in America.

I’m not going to spoil the plot, which is gripping and tragic, but I will take a while to talk about the songs. There are lots, as I mentioned, and the nice thing about F&A is that they can write lovely and moving and powerful songs. Admittedly, if you write thirty-eight songs, you’ve maybe got a higher chance of turning out five or six winners, but the first act alone has “Your Daddy’s Son”, “New Music”, “Wheels Of A Dream” (holy shit, this is a good song), and “Gliding”, and that’s not to say that the songs which carry forward the plot are bad; “Henry Ford” is a very funny illustration of the production line.

When the second act moves from love story to, basically, terrorism, there are still moments of lightness (“What A Game”, reminding us that baseball is war, featuring an extremely funny use of a harp) and beauty (“Sarah Brown Eyes”), plus one of the most shocking and effective tricks I’ve heard in a song in a long while (“He Wanted To Say”).

By the time the dust settles at the end, some are happy, some are dead, and all are changed. Often I’m iffy about a happy ending where people’s ghosts look down on the living and express their happiness (“dude, you’re dead, how is this happy”) – but the advantage of this story is that it ties into the genuine historical advances in tolerance and the standard of living in America, as opposed to manufacturing an entirely fictional context and hoping that you buy into it.

I’m intrigued to consider the relationship between this and “Parade”, which digs into some of the same issues from a different angle. The score here is slightly less musically explosive, and in all the changes of focus and scale, it loses out a little in comparison with “Parade”‘s laser-focused personal apocalypse, but don’t take that as a deal-breaking diss; I’m comparing the height of tidal waves here, and you’re still likely to get swept away. If you desperately wanted something else to grumble about, you could note that occasionally the big tunes are a little predictable, with the result that you can tire of the big endings (“Wheels Of A Dream” gets away with it, but then there’s “Back To Before” and “Make Them Hear You” close to each other in the second act).

A 2009 revival of this show seems to have cost a lot of money and not drummed up the necessary sales. A pity. This was a great show to listen to, and although the story does bear signs of having been written in the 70s in terms of its combination of the macro and the micro, it still works pretty damn well.

Random Panda awards “Ragtime” nine out of ten pieces of bamboo. Strongly recommended, loyal readers :)

Tomorrow, I have the concept album of this show. Tune in to see how that sounds.