For Shaina Taub & Ben Levi Ross RAGTIME Isn't Just a Musical, It's a Movement

Something's beginning at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre. 

Almost a year after its triumphant return to the stage at New York City Center, Ragtime is returning to Broadway. This Lincoln Center production, directed by the institution's newly appointed Artistic Director, Lear deBessonet, marks the beloved musical's second revival since it premiered on Broadway in 1998.

Shaina Taub and Ben Levi Ross have been along for the ride, playing real life activist 'Emma Goldman', and fictional anarchist 'Younger Brother' respectively. The duo took a break from rehearsals to check in with BroadwayWorld and tell us all about the strange, insistent music that will give us all something to think about in 2025.

What have rehearsals been like so far?

ST: We now have the full thing staged, so it's like we have our arms around it. At City Center, this is where our process stopped. We just barely had time to finish staging it. So now we have a whole other step to the process to dig even deeper beyond just, "Where do I go and when?" 

BLR: It's been so amazing to like have the time to really deepen relationships with everyone. Mostly everyone in the cast is the same since City Center, so we have this original sort of understanding of the characters, and I don't want to say it was surface level, because I do feel like a lot of us got to the core of who they were, but to have the time to actually sit and discuss beat by beat moments is really crucial to making the production I think we all want to make. 

BLR: So many new things are arising for me just in general. Like right now, I just got out of rehearsal and we were going through the last quarter of the show, which is sort of like the final transformation for Younger Brother into this sort of anarchist figure. I'm really realizing that he is someone who is willing to die for this cause! The gravity of what that actually means at the time, turning away from his privilege, turning away from his family, giving it all up- it's a big deal in any time period, but especially in the early 1900s, that was unheard of. 

And so many of these characters go through such a journey throughout the course of this show. That has to be such a thrill getting to perform the scope of that character. 

BLR: Yeah, it's an epic. You can really go through all of the characters and the transformations are pretty drastic. Coalhouse, Tateh, Mother! These people really go through a metamorphosis. 

Your characters share such interesting moments together onstage... 

ST: I think of [Emma Goldman] as kind of like an activist doula- helping Younger Brother, who is sort of a stand for any young person wanting to find their place in the world and their voice in society and encouraging them to speak out. I have these lines like, "I've been waiting for you," and "Life has meaning. I'll show you how," and "You are with us. Come on." She's a real like pied piper of the social movement. 

BLR: It's just so cool how the show is structured with these historical figures and the fictionalized characters. With me and Emma Goldman, she really is sort of this spiritual presence for Younger Brother. What I'm realizing in this rehearsal process is that he really places his desires to be someone with a greater understanding of the world onto Emma Goldman. So Shaina really manages so beautifully the moments where she's really just being herself and then the moments where she switches into Younger Brother's interpretation of her. It's the best because a lot of the time I'm not even really looking to Shaina on stage, but she's like the voice of Younger Brother, so I can always feel her energetically.

What's it like collaborating with Lear?

ST: Lear really knows how to bring a community together through theater. We first worked together with Public Works, which is a program she founded at The Public, which of course is bringing together hundreds of New Yorkers to do these giant shows. That really feels like her superpower- just creating giant containers where a whole community of lots of different people, of different ages, different backgrounds can all collaborate on something that none of us could do by ourselves. Which is what I think theater at its best should be and what democracy at its best should be. So it's like those social resonances of theater are so alive in Lear's work.

And it's so cool that she gets to continue that legacy now at Lincoln Center. 

ST: Absolutely. It makes me so excited that someone like her is in charge of one of our major institutions. I think she really cares about this city and understands that storytelling and the arts are like a public service- that they really are part of the backbone of our society and it should be something that belongs to everyone.

Do you have a favorite moment musically? 

BLR: Oh, I know we both agree on this. It's "Sarah come down to me" in "New Music." It's so good. That's just like Josh [Henry] as a vocalist, being absolutely stupid insane. There are so many others though. I always get chills during "Journey On." The way that Caissie [Levy] sings some of that song I think is so beautiful because you're seeing the blossoming of Mother's yearning for wanting to be out of that patriarchal grip very early on in the show. I've just been loving that number. 

Ragtime is so important to so many people. It's a musical with an important message and maybe even more important now in 2025. What does doing it now mean to you and carrying that kind of responsibility?

BLR: I feel like I'm like exactly where I want to be right now. This is exactly the work that I want to be doing right now in 2025 and in 2026. For some people, their responsibility as theatre actors is to like take people out of the sort of present moment like escapism. That is so important in its own right. But at the same time, Ragtime is kind of the opposite of that. It's bringing people into the present moment by reflecting on what has changed and what hasn't changed in the past 100 years. 

ST: I think Ragtime deals with so many interwoven stories and characters that represent so many different issues that we're seeing today. It's rare that a piece can tackle one of those issues effectively, but Ragtime manages to find the common humanity in all of these seemingly disparate social issues. 

Just today we were rehearsing the epilogue and "Wheels of a Dream" comes back at the end of the epilogue. So we were really thinking about the lyrics: "When he's old enough, I will show him America, and he will ride on the wheels of a dream." What does that really mean? We're not saying he will ride on the wheels of a reality of how things are. It's like this dream of what the country could be as Tateh says at the end. There can still be hope in the face of all of these horrible things we're seeing- how we treat immigrants in this country, the horrible ways we're treating each other. There's still a dream there! 

We're not ending the show by saying that we've resolved it or that things are okay. We're not ending it by saying that everything is doomed. The last word we sing as a whole company in unison is "dream." I just think that's the provocation to the audience right now. It's our perpetual task as citizens, I think, to try and close the gap between the dream of what our democracy should be and the reality of what it is... which is not living up to what the ideals are.

How do you think this version of the show compares to what you did at City Center last year?

BLR: People are not even ready for this remount. It's truly visually so different. This is not the City Center production that people may remember. We are taking these four weeks of rehearsal and tech and using every second of it. It's definitely a full mounting of the production. And at the same time... something that Lear talked about, which we all agree with, was that the thing that was so beautiful about City Center was that the audience wasn't super distracted by tons of physical elements on stage. And so everyone in the audience heard every single word of text and every single word of the music. I think we wanted to keep that. We didn't want to muddy it up too much with spectacle. It really is still about the relationships and Terrence McNally's book and Ahrens and Flaherty's score. That's really what the show is. 

ST: You know, Ragtime gets so much deserved credit for its gravitas and its majesty and how epic and sweeping it is. And it is all those things in droves. But also, there's such a sense of humor in Ragtime. Terrence McNally's book, Lynn Ahrens' lyrics... I think that's what makes the tragedy pay off. They have an equal appreciation of the wit and irony of everyday life. The laughs are big. The reason you'll cry so much at Ragtime is because of how much you'll laugh first. 

Ragtime begins previews at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre on September 26 and opens on October 16, 2025.

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