A composed Ragtime Rhythm is gonna getcha at Seacoast Rep BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	Ragtime Music by Stephen Flaherty; lyrics by Lynn Ahrens; book by Terrence McNally. Based on the novel by E. L. Doctorow. Directed by Brett Mallard. Produced by Seacoast Repertory Theatre, in Portsmouth, through April 17. Call (603) 433-4472.
	Backstage As we saw last November with bear-baiting on the ballot, hunting is what you might call a loaded issue in these parts. USM professor Bill Steele’s new play, Shooting Dreams, takes it on, with a glimpse into a deer-shoot controversy on a Maine island. The Freeport Community Players give it a reading in the Freeport Public Library this Thursday, March 24, at 7 p.m. Call (207) 865-2220.

What we most readily recognize about ragtime music is what’s called its "syncopation" — its distinctive style of putting emphasis on the off-beats, instead of on the points where you’d instinctively, comfortably tap your foot. This was new and jarring music for Americans when it first emerged around the turn of the century. It was Western, but fused with the unfamiliar. "Broken rhythms," in the words of Oscar Hammerstein. But even more fractious and provocative than Joplin’s rags was the period of American history that they accompanied, which gave us, among other things, the race riot, the movies, mass immigration, and the Ford assembly line. Ragtime, the four-time Tony-winning musical on stage now at Seacoast Rep, is an earnest paean to both that music and the frenzy of its time.

Based on E. L. Doctorow’s best-selling 1975 novel of the same name, Ragtime follows the fraught period from about 1906 to 1915 through the intertwining lives of three very different families. First of all, there’s well-off WASP family — Mother (Barbara Lawler), Father (Rob Becker), their son the Little Boy (Dylan Schwartz-Wallach), and Mother’s grown Younger Brother (Patrick Dorow) — who live in civilized luxury in New Rochelle, New York, enjoying the patriotic windfall of Father’s fireworks industry.

Secondly, there’s the Latvian widower and immigrant Tateh (Joey Tomacchio), who arrives on Ellis Island with his young daughter the Little Girl (Cayla Reddington) and proceeds to sell silhouettes from a cart.

Finally, Harlem ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker (Michael Quezzaire-Belle) has loved, unknowingly impregnated, and left the lovely Sarah (Mariella Hill), who then finds shelter with the New Rochelle family. As Coalhouse tries to win her back by visiting the family every Sunday and playing their piano, the white folks’ home fills with those broken rhythms, just like society itself, in more ways than one.

Peppered in amongst these fictional protagonists are key historical figures of the day, who often act as catalysts for the main characters’ development. Coalhouse’s hero Booker T. Washington (Bruce Smith) holds forth on the state of the Negro; Hungarian-immigrant-turned-escape-artist Harry Houdini (Jeff Bowden) appears often to wield the "immigrant who made an art out of escape" trope, and Henry Ford (Brandon Mallard) comes and goes as a specter of industrial progress. The Younger Brother thinks he’s in love with the infamous vaudeville star Evelyn Nesbit (Bethany Leavey), but when he crosses paths with Emma Goldman (Donna Goldfarb) at a rally in Union Square, he’s vaulted into radicalism. What with all these American icons mingling amongst the main characters, the show has a bit of a playful comic-book feel.

In the show’s blocking and movement, Director Brett Mallard and Choreographer Brandon Mallard take advantage of the iconic qualities of their characters, and stylize boldly. The identifying movements of each group exaggerate the perceived differences between them: The New Rochelle family has wistfully stiff and elegant posture, the immigrants are alternately hesitant and explosive, and the Negroes sure can dance. These are intentional stereotypes, amplified to let us see how these diverse Americans have been led to view each other, and the best and most kinetic scenes put them all into intersection. In one great early sequence, the three main worlds of the play — the wealthy whites, the black folks, and the immigrants — form distinct groups on the stage, and to the tune of ragtime they inspect each other, circle, mill about pell-mell, and then warily regroup.

The cast charged with negotiating all these stirrings is as earnest and enthusiastic as the play itself. Quezzaire-Belle has a rich bellow and stylish pride as Coalhouse, and Tomacchio is a rugged but endearing firecracker as Tateh. Lawler is sensitive with Mother’s restrained yearnings for more than white-married safety, and as the Younger Brother, Dorow does well with an arc that takes his character from a Nesbit-crazy bumbler to a fervent radical. As Sarah, Hill projects an unaffected sweetness that’s a little anonymous but utterly winning. Voices are strong (although the theater’s sound system needs to be cranked down several notches to avoid washing them out) and when the whole multi-ethnic ensemble sings at once, the effect is genuinely rousing.

The play’s composer, Stephen Flaherty, has noted that ragtime was "composed, not improvised"; likewise does this musical at times feel a bit pat despite the discord that is its subject. Lyrics occasionally stray toward the maudlin, and the play’s treatment of the time’s various prejudices is a stock progressive sensibility, more earnest than exploratory. But this is musical theater, after all, not an American Studies text, and what Ragtime sets out to do — to invoke, to affirm, to render a sentimental epic of an era — it does with vigor, humor, and charm. Familiar as ragtime’s off-beats are to modern ears, Seacoast Rep succeeds in reanimating the newness and the challenges that Americans of a century ago heard in its rhythms.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com