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...