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You’re looking at the story to find the reason for the storytelling mode.” Galati, the Tony Award-winning director who is now an associate artist at Asolo Rep, said he was inspired to hear Rothstein “describe a very creative and interrogating response to the show. The production was a hit with audiences in Minneapolis and again last year when Rothstein staged a different production at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in Seattle.Įven with the confidence of two successful runs, Rothstein still seemed a little anxious talking about his approach when he had a chance to meet the musical’s original director, Frank Galati, during a joint interview after a recent rehearsal.

‘Ragtime’ asks us to pause and consider why we are so fearful of the future as we are losing confidence in our past.”

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America the beautiful, fragile, ugly bully needs to peer into the reflection that is ‘Ragtime’ and contemplate how it is that a nation so full of hope and good heart has become so mean and angry. Minneapolis Star-Tribune critic Graydon Royce wrote that “America needs to see this musical. “We’re just really beginning to uncover the depth of our unconscious bias in our police force.” The incident impacted how audiences responded to the show, he said. Rothstein’s production opened in Minneapolis just months after police in a nearby town shot and killed Philando Castile in a widely circulated incident captured by his girlfriend in a live video stream. Coalhouse turns to protest and violence after police kill his girlfriend, Sarah, the mother of their young son. Mother lives a traditional life in New Rochelle, but she becomes an agent of change and a representation of the dawning of feminism as she comes to know both Tateh and the musician Coalhouse Walker Jr. “We’re still living in a quota system that was written in 1924.” “He’s a fictitious character, but we’re a nation of immigrants and we wouldn’t have the culture we do if not for the immigrants who found a way to navigate our broken immigration system,” Rothstein said. “There’s an immigrant at the center of it who invents film,” Rothstein said about a character named Tateh, who supports his young daughter by creating silhouette cutouts that evolve into moving picture books and then into motion pictures. Doctorow novel on which it was based, seemed even more timely than when it was first presented. He said the issues raised in the musical and the 1975 E.L. Rothstein first produced the show at Theatre Latte Da, the Minneapolis playhouse that he founded about 20 years ago, as the 2016 presidential election approached.

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“There is audacity in how you can take something as epic and truly glorious as ‘Ragtime’ and figure out how to do it small.” What’s beautiful about our art form by its nature is that it is reimagined and reimagined,” he said. “Theater has been reimagining itself for all time. When it opened on Broadway in 1998, the musical “Ragtime” featured a cast of nearly 60 performers and a large orchestra exploring how barriers of racism and immigration in this country began to break down at the dawn of the 20th century.ĭirector Peter Rothstein approaches the story’s epic sweep in a vastly different way in the production that opens Friday at Asolo Repertory Theatre, with a cast of 13 and an orchestra of nine musicians.