Skip to main content

Ragtime



Diane and I recently drove to Worcester to see a performance of RAGTIME, the musical based on the E.L. Doctorow novel of the same name.

The novel, published in 1975, became a movie in 1981 and a Broadway musical in 1998.

It was nominated for just about every Tony Award during its Broadway run, and it won four of those Tonys, including Best Book for a Musical, and Best Original Score.

It was revived on Broadway in 2009, and that revival won several more Tonys.

The play begins with a lot of exposition. Each of the central characters sings a brief song describing him/herself in the third person. This would normally seem flat-footed, but the story from Doctorow is a very complicated one, so this is arguably the line of least audience confusion. And the music is compelling enough to make this opening work.

That opening describes where the main characters are in their lives in 1904.

One odd feature of it is a bit of parapsychology.  Some of the main characters consist of a nuclear family, wealthy white folk, living in New Rochelle, New York. There's a grandfather, a father and mother, a young boy, and a bachelor uncle --- Mom's brother. Through happenstance, they meet the escape artist Houdini.

Houdini (as was explained to us in the expository scene) understood that his 'magic' was just illusion, and he wanted to encounter something genuinely mystical. The young boy, Edgar, blurts out to him "Warn the Duke." Houdini has no idea what this means. Years later, engaged in a stunt in Times Square, Houdini learns of the dramatic world-changing news from Sarajevo, and the boy's warning comes back to him.

Thus, he has his encounter with the genuinely mystical. Anyway, I think the Tony Awards were fairly won.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak