RAGTIME, THE MUSICAL OPENS IN WAYNEDALE

You are invited to “Ragtime, The Musical” at Elmhurst High School.‑ The cast is chosen from area high schools including IPFW theatre majors and presents some of the finest voices on stage.‑ This show is the summer theatre musical. Show dates are June 25-26 at 7:30 PM.

THE STORY: Set at the dawn of the 1900’s, the show is like a hurrah for an old-style Broadway musical, (think Show Boat, Porgy and Bess, and Okalahoma!), the short story that provides a soundtrack for the gritty historical pulse of American life.

Concentrating on three American families in New Rochelle, just outside New York City, it ambitiously embraces everything, from confronting racial intolerance and the radicalization of workers’ rights to the birth of the movies and Houdini’s escape from chains in a vaudeville act. In other words, all American life is here.‑ There’s a WASP family – simply defined as Mother, Father, their son Little Boy and mother’s Younger Brother; there’s a Jewish immigrant Tateh, and his daughter, Little Girl; and there’s Sarah whose abandoned baby Mother finds in her garden and the baby’s father, Coalhouse Walker Jr. whose crusade for justice in a racially intolerant world – when he loses first his car and then Sarah – propels the story to a dramatic height.

Around them, there are also real-life characters like magician Harry Houdini; vaudeville star Evelyn Nesbit on a swing, and a worker’s rights revolutionary Emma Goldman. ‑It is a densely populated show of over 40 performers.

It is wonderful to see a musical that actually seeks to say something.‑ It is also thrilling to hear the kind of emotion-filled music that is just not written anymore in our Sondheim-styled theatre. The music is frequently gorgeous (think Scott Joplin) and fills the theatre, captivating the audience.