![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He dreams of a ‘gang of children – rich, poor, black, white – living together despite their differences.’” Not content to do a traditional re-telling of the musical, and limited in terms of the venue’s more intimate nature, Stangl devised a setting “that portrays both past and present ideas – an urban warehouse that represents both the beginning of the Industrial Age and a gentrified industrial chic, emphasizing the great income inequality we are currently living in.”Ĭharacters Stangl describes as “a diverse and divided community” coalesce within the warehouse to tell the story of “Ragtime” as a play-within-a-play – a concept she said was “inspired by Tateh’s line at the end. Stangl said she “chose to make the small space and limited resources at the Chance an opportunity rather than an obstacle.” Massive Re-envisioning – and Scaling Down Once we started putting our season together – and listening to the barrage of divisive news everyday – we all agreed that now was the time that we needed to try to tell this story, up close and personal.” Nguyen said “the timing wasn’t quite right, but we continued to discuss it, along with other potential projects, for months. Leading into the 2018 season, award-winning director of theater, opera, and film Casey Stangl reached out to Nguyen and company and made a passionate pitch about wanting to direct a stripped-down version of the show that would highlight the issues of race and immigration. It has amassed a lengthy, illustrious list that includes “Hair,” “Jerry Springer: The Opera,” “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” an inventive reimaging of “West Side Story” – and, more recently, “In the Heights” and “Parade.”īut from that roster, “Ragtime: The Musical,” one of the splashiest, largest-scale and most ambitious Broadway musicals of recent decades, has been conspicuous in its absence.įounding artistic director Oanh Nguyen said the show had been “on our short list of stories to tell for ages,” but until last year, the timing and a viable staging concept failed to emerge. Conspicuously AbsentĬhance Theater has staged a major musical each summer starting in 2001. Like This Free Civic News? Support Voice of OC Today. Doctorow’s 1975 novel) into a more compact, scaled-down staging poised to deliver the kind of intimacy for which the best Chance Theater stagings have long been heralded. Since the 99-seat Chance can’t hope to match that epic scale, it has reimagined “Ragtime” (scripted by Terrence McNally from E.L. staging, seen locally at the Shubert Theatre a year after the show’s 1996 world premiere in Toronto, sported elaborate trappings like a Model T that drove onto the stage. Just in time for Independence Day and the month of July comes a new staging, at Anaheim’s Chance Theater, of “Ragtime: The Musical,” that star-spangled paean to the promise, but also the social, racial and economic inequalities, of the Gilded Age as it crossed into a new century.īut this is no ordinary “Ragtime.” For decades, fans have come to new productions of the musical for the spectacle and glitz. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |