Jordan Santiago

There's no shortage of incredible young talent in the region and part of Spokane Valley Summer Theatre's mission is to showcase and nurture it. RISING STARS is a showcase production that's become an annual and anticipated tradition for SVST. This year, SVST has added a performance, so you'll now have two opportunities to see the production: August 12th and 13th.

Walking into the Music Hall at Fair Park Tuesday night, I was extremely eager to enjoy Ahrens and Flaherty's lavish, Tony Award-winning score in the tour of RAGTIME. Together with Terrence McNally's dynamic script, RAGTIME is celebrated as perhaps one of the greatest book musicals of the past two decades. Unfortunately, in spite of all of its inherent strengths, technical troubles plagued the tour's opening night performance. I left the theatre completely disappointed.

At the beginning of Act II of Ragtime, Terrence McNally's masterful musical adaptation of E. L. Doctorow's novel, journeyman pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr., decimated by the murder of his beloved Sarah, sings, 'Say goodbye to music / Say goodbye to light.' This sums up my feelings about Theater League's production of Ragtime, which arrived for a brief four-day stay at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza on Thursday night. The original 1998 Broadway production won a Tony Award for Best Score, but many patrons who packed the Fred Kavli Theatre on opening night were dismayed to discover that Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty's sumptuous, moving songs were being played from pre-recorded synthesized music tracks. Despite superb performances from the entire cast, Theater League's Ragtime suffers greatly from this omission, which was apparently a decision of Phoenix Entertainment, the independent theatrical producing and management enterprise in charge of producing the show.