Review: Rags | Lyric Stage | Carpenter Performance Hall - Irving

Irving — If the musical theater gods are into that whole "everything happens for a reason" bit, as many followers of various dieties like to believe, then we now know why Kevin Moriarty needed to revive/revise the Charles Strouse musical flop It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman at the Dallas Theater Center in 2010.

The reason: So that Strouse would come to Dallas to see it, and also catch a full-orchestra revival of his second-most popular musical Bye Bye Birdie at Lyric Stage playing at the same time. (His most popular show is the one about the orphan girl with the big red 'fro.) And then Strouse would be so impressed with Lyric's full-orchestra treatments, he'd ask Lyric founding producer Steven Jones to revisit another of his musicals that, like It's a Bird, had a short run on Broadway: 1986's Rags.

If the Man of Steel was bound to save anything, turns out, it was Rags, where the show is getting a revival with a 35-piece orchestra and a stellar cast. The musical still has problems, mainly with its book, which was written by Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof). He reworked the book before his death in 2010, and that's the version Lyric is staging, billing it as a world premiere.

Strouse's score fuses ragtime and klezmer into his typcally tuneful music, which is big where it needs to be and subtle in the right places. Under the music direction of Jay Dias, this production again proves that Lyric's full-orchestra revivals are a pursuit well worth the time, effort and cost. The order of the songs has been rearranged a bit (and some from the Broadway version have been omitted), and a few of them achieve what many often consider the sign of a promising musical: you leave humming them.

Stephen Schwartz wrote the lyrics. By 1986, he had several important shows behind him (Godspell and Pippin). And although he didn't have anything to do with the music for Rags, he admits in the program notes that it's his favorite from Strouse, you can hear its influence on Schwartz's biggest success as a composer: the mega-hit Wicked. If you know Wicked, some of the music in Rags, especially the horns and percussion in the title song, will sound vaguely familiar.

As for the story, well, the comparisons to Fiddler on the Roof and Ragtime aren't off the mark. Set in 1911 New York, it tells of a group of Jewish immigrants who have arrived on Ellis Island and set out to find their American dream.

Rebecca (Amanda Passanante) and her son David (Chet Monday) arrived after her husband Nathan (G. Shane Peterman, in a role that suits him well), who we'll later find out is assimilating a little too much. Upon arriving, Rebecca meets the independently minded Saul (Brian Hathaway), as well as Bella (Kristin Dausch) and her over-protective father Avram (Jackie L. Kemp). On the boat, Bella met Ben (Jonathan Bragg) and they form a bond of which Avram, in true Tevye-like fashion, won't approve. Meanwhile, fruit vendor Rachel (the fantastic Lois Sonnier Hart) takes a liking to the widowed Avram.

If it sounds like a set-up for two or three storylines (like the later Ragtime), that's the idea. But it still feels muddled, and in Lyric's production, directed by Cheryl Denson, it's hard to focus on them when there's the crowd of fellow immigrants always hanging around, largely doing nothing—but still distracting—on Mamie Trotter's oddly spare set, which is just a hexagonal, raked platform. It's as if they're all stuck on a ship the entire time. Drenda Lewis' costumes are fittingly drab, and nicely done.

Luckily, the performances and vocals are strong enough to overcome the stasis. Passanante and Dausch get the best numbers, and deliver on the big notes and the pathos, and Hathaway has a blast with his character. Bragg makes an especially promising Lyric debut.

There's some fun stuff with the immigrants fitting in, such as selling gramohones or attending a Yiddish Theatre production of Hamlet (Max Swarner is Hamlet, Amber Nicole Guest is Ophelia), which leads to the song "It's Hard To Be a Prince."

Hamlet's story was tragic, and so it goes for one major character, which is when the musical brings in the historical event of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, which led to labor unions firing up at Tammany Hall. And that's how it ends, as the new Americans realize that the streets here aren't paved with gold like they were led to believe.

But they're paved. Like many immigrant stories, there's hope to be found in the struggle.