'Ragtime' is Great Time at CSUN

It's one thing to attempt a musical as ambitious as Ragtime and it's another thing to pull it off. Much credit to the departments of theatre and music at CSUN for doing both. The show at the Campus Theatre, though staged by students, aspires to professional standards and, more often than not, achieves them.

Graced  with strong performance, lively choreography, fine vocals, smart set design and authentic costumes, CSUN's Ragtime effectively transports you back to a time of infinite hope and ugly reality, a period when even the most repressive social order could not smother dreams of glory.

The musical is based on the 1975 novel  by E.L. Doctorow. First staged on Broadway from 1998 to 2000, it received 13 Tony nominations. It was aced out for best musical by The Lion King.

Ragtime is about the intersection of three cultures in turn-of-the-20th-Century America: the comfortable existence of Mother and Father, upper class Protestants; the underclass  lives of African-American ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. and  his love, Sarah;  and the yearnings of newly-arrived immigrants, such as Tateh from Latvia, and his young daughter.

At the same time, the story is dotted with the appearances of some of that era's most well-known figures, including anarchist Emma Goldman, educator and orator Booker T. Washington, magician Harry Houdini and industrialists Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan.

Mother (Skye Privat) finds a black baby in her garden, the newborn child of Sarah (Nia Bernstine). She allows both to stay. Soon thereafter, Coalhouse (Robert Collins) comes by to reclaim the woman he loves and his new son. Meanwhile, Tateh (John Haukoos) barely supports himself and his daughter making silhouette cutouts until he stumbles onto a rudimentary form of motion pictures.

The action takes a dark turn when a trio of racist firemen, failing to extort a phony toll from Coalhouse, vandalize his new auto and dump it in the lake. With no place to turn, Coalhouse embarks on a course of vigilante justice, but at considerable cost.

Other cast members juggle up to four different roles, a tribute to their versatility.

Director Ken Sawyer invariably finds the truth in each scene, even as he gracefully switches from one location to the next. The choreography by Leslie Stevens incorporates marches, cakewalks, ragtime and gospel, all of them fascinating and more than a little challenging.

There isn't a weak performance in the show but there are several that qualify for special praise. Collins, who plays Coalhouse with star quality, has a commanding stage presence to go with a great set of pipes. His duets with Bernstine (Wheels of a Dream and Sarah Brown Eyes) are nothing short of magical.

Privat is particularly convincing. More than any other character, Mother is transformed by her experiences and observations, laying the groundwork for feminists more than a half century later. Privat's depiction of the transformation as well as her command of more than a half dozen musical numbers, is something to behold.

Haukoo's Tateh evolves, as well, and his voice is well-suited to his optimistic and driven character.

Among the actors playing famous figure of the era, there are particularly strong turns by Savanna Chute as Emma Goldman, Shelby Wane as vaudeville starlet Evelyn Nesbit and Joshua Wolf Coleman as Booker T. Washington.

In fact, the most serious flaw in Wednesday night's performance was occasional static noise from headset mikes. That's a minor annoyance that probably should have been corrected after last weekend's opening performances.

(Additional performances are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, as well as a 2 p.m. matinee on Saturday.)