Darnell Abraham and the ensemble in “Ragtime.”
PITTSFIELD — Few musicals are more crammed with events, ideas,
outsize personalities, and raw chapters of American history than
“Ragtime.’’
Then again, few musicals draw on more ambitious source
material, or are more faithful to the spirit of that material — in this
case, E.L. Doctorow’s brilliantly panoramic novel, which blended
fictional characters with such historical figures as Emma Goldman, Henry
Ford, Booker T. Washington, J.P. Morgan, and Harry Houdini to tell the
story of America in the first decade of the 20th century while
foreshadowing the convulsive years that lay ahead.
Those reverberating connections between present and past help to
shape our experience of Barrington Stage Company’s enthralling new
production of “Ragtime’’ right from the show’s opening moments. Director
Joe Calarco has devised a prologue that drives home the fact that
“then’’ and “now’’ are but different points on the same continuum.
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