Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We are live in the Greene Space in Soho with a special episode of All Of It for you today. It's Broadway on the Radio. [cheers and applause]

Alison Stewart: For the next hour, we'll be talking about the story of American history, coming face to face with the American dream. We're being joined by the team behind the Broadway music musical Ragtime. We've got Director Lear deBessonet here. We've got Ben Levi Ross, Nichelle Lewis, Brandon Uranowitz, Shaina Taub, Caissie Levy and Joshua Henry.

[cheers and applause]

Alison Stewart: Let's hear it for the band behind us. If you're not here with us in person or listening to us, you can see this shindig. Go to wnyc.org where you can watch a free livestream of today's broadcast. Now, let's get things going and hear some music here with a performance of He Wanted to Say. Joshua Henry who plays Coalhouse Walker Jr. Shaina Taub who plays Emma Goldman, and Ben Levi Ross plays a young man making a choice singing a song about how why we aren't that different. Here's He Wanted to Say

[music]

What is it you want?

I wanted to-- I know that if I were--

He wanted to say

I am here because I have to be

He wanted to say

I am here for what is right

Every day I wake up knowing

What you've lost and what is owing

I would shed this skin if I could

To stand with you and fight

He wanted to say

I am not who I appear to be

He wanted to say

Do not blame me for my past

We have different lives and faces

But our hearts have common places

This was deep inside me

And you helped me find it at last

Two men meeting

For a moment in the darkness

One turning from--

One waking to--

America

Two men finding

For a moment in the darkness

They're the same

They're the same

He wanted to say

How I envy you your innocence

He wanted to say

By your side I could be brave

If there's such a thing as justice

Let me help you find your justice

This I do for you and for Sarah

Who lies in her grave

But all he said was

I know how to blow things up

Two men meeting

For a moment

In the darkness

For a moment

In the darkness

[cheers and applause]

Alison Stewart: Shaina Taub, Ben Levi Ross and Joshua Henry singing He Wanted to Say from Ragtime. We're live in the Greene Space for the stars and the creative team from our series, Broadway on the Radio. Joshua, he's going to rest his vocals a little bit. We expect a little more from you later on in the show. I'll talk to Shaina and Ben first. Shaina, you play Emma Goldman.

Shaina Taub: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How would you describe her?

Shaina Taub: Oh, a joyful anarchist. I think Emma, historically her vision of anarchy, I think from my understanding her writings was predicated on the idea that human beings, when left to our own devices, cooperate. I think that's a fundamentally positive-- Anarchy can get a bad rap for being negative. I think that's beautiful. To me, she is clear-headed about the dangers and the violence and all of the horrors facing the country at that time and our time as well, frankly. I think that she brought a spirit of joie de vivre and humanity to all of her protests.

Alison Stewart: In the show, your character sees Emma Goldman, she sees her at a speech. How does that change your character, seeing her speak?

Ben Levi Ross: To quote the great music of Ragtime, it's like a firework, unexploded, wanting life but never knowing how. That's what Mother’s Younger Brother is. He wants to dedicate himself to something. As you were talking, Shaina, I was thinking, "He's not as clear-headed. I think he's a little messy with it." He's like, "Let's just blow some stuff up. Let's just burn it to the ground." He's a little crazier. I think his heart is in the right place. Emma Goldman is that-- you say activist doula, right?

Shaina Taub: Yes.

Ben Levi Ross: That's how you described yourself for me.

Alison Stewart: You once said that Showtime is one of your favorite shows. How did it become your favorite show?

Shaina Taub: Me?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Shaina Taub: Sorry. I'm so excited. I love Ragtime. I was a little kid growing up in a small town in Vermont. My mom got me the two-disc set of the original cast album for Hanukkah, I think in 1998. It just opened my world. It was my portal into the past, into my own Jewish identity and history and opened me up to learn about experiences that weren't my own. It gave me a real, real context for American history that I wasn't finding anywhere else. That's what art can do. It can just reach through the stage or reach through your CD player. Sorry. Let's bring back CD players. It really--

Alison Stewart: We're trying. What's your history with Ragtime?

Ben Levi Ross: My history with Ragtime is that when I was 11 years old, I remember being on a plane and my sister putting an earbud in my ear and playing for me Audra McDonald singing Daddy's Son. I was like, A, "I'm gay," and B, [chuckles] "That is the most beautiful voice and most intensely just absolutely all-encompassing emotional experience I've ever heard in a musical." Then I did not do Ragtime until Lear deBessonet approached me about City Center a year ago, and I fell in love with this character very deeply because I didn't really know about Mother's Younger Brother until this experience.

Alison Stewart: For people who don't know, Shaina wrote Suffs.

Ben Levi Ross: Yes. Give it up.

Alison Stewart: She won two Tonys for it. Was Ragtime an inspiration for Suffs?

Shaina Taub: There would be no Suffs without Ragtime. It was my central inspiration. It was my North Star, my guiding light. Everything about McNally, Aarons and Flaherty's masterpiece was just my holy book. It was my Torah. For this experience, absolutely. I just hoped I could inspire another young girl or any kid the same way that Ragtime inspired me.

Alison Stewart: I'm sure you have. I'm sure you have. You play Emma Goldman in this. You played Alice Paul. They were on the opposite sides of women's suffrage a little bit.

Shaina Taub: It's quite interesting. I wonder what they would have to say to each other. I don't think Alice Paul was radical enough for Emma. Alice, while a radical, was, I think, trying to work within a system where-- win a right to enfranchisement within a government system. Emma was, to Ben's point, burn it all to the ground. She thought, "Why fight for a right within a system that fundamentally won't support you?" I understand both perspectives.

Alison Stewart: Just went to my next question. Which side are you on?

Shaina Taub: Maybe somewhere in the middle.

Alison Stewart: All right. You played Nick Carraway-

Ben Levi Ross: Oh, yes, I did.

Alison Stewart: -in the Great Gatsby as well. You're playing this part, and you're thinking about Ragtime. I was wondering, what do you like about playing historical characters?

Ben Levi Ross: [chuckles] I guess they just find me. No, I don't know that it's something that I set out to do. I think that specifically with Nick Carraway, there is some-- what I'm noticing between the two of them, there is this narrator figure that both, obviously, Nick Carraway has, but that Younger Brother actually takes on in this show, which I always find interesting because you get to have a direct line with the audience a little bit. We do break the fourth wall in Ragtime. I direct address the audience multiple times in the show. I think that that's cool to me.

Alison Stewart: All right. When Suffs was running in 2024, you were in Suffs and Ragtime at the same time-

Ben Levi Ross: Election.

Alison Stewart: -and the election. What was that like for you?

Shaina Taub: day after the election 2024, I did Suffs in the afternoon, in the Wednesday matinee, and then Ragtime in the evening. I was so grateful to be in a theater. This is one of the places that we all get to come together and feel out loud in public. We're not sitting in our silo scrolling on our phone. Whether that's in a moment of big social celebration, social commiseration, an election that went our way, an election that didn't, the theater is here for us to not be alone in those feelings. To me, the great works of art, which I think Ragtime, one, is expansive enough to contain how you feel on either day.

For me, I felt so lucky to be with my theater community, to be with my New York community on that day, and process it together in one of our public spaces, where in America we're still allowed to tell these stories on stage. I think we need to exercise that right as much as we can.

Ben Levi Ross: Yes.

[applause]

Alison Stewart: Joining us now is Lear deBessonet, the director of Ragtime.

[applause]

Alison Stewart: Lear, you have a ton, a 28-piece orchestra, possibly the largest orchestra on Broadway. You have a huge cast. What was the challenge behind orchestrating such a huge group of people?

Lear deBessonet: Oh, I love making epic events. It's actually my favorite thing to do as a director. I think that, really, the epic nature of Ragtime is actually because of its subject matter. American history and the complexity, beauty, pain of the American dream, I think, there is a grandness baked into the questions of this piece, and it feels like the only way to tell the story.

Alison Stewart: Do you like performing with a huge orchestra?

Ben Levi Ross: It's like a dream come true. It's amazing.

Alison Stewart: What's interesting about it as a singer?

Ben Levi Ross: Our stage at the Vivian Beaumont is a thrust stage. We feel encompassed by the audience. The orchestra is beneath us. I swear, sometimes, maybe it's just an energy thing, but I feel it rumbling up through me. To have 28 brilliant musicians at the top of their game underneath it, it feels like something that I'm standing on. It truly feels-

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Ben Levi Ross: -like I'm standing on the brilliance of this score and of this music. You hear it in its grandeur with that many instruments.

Lear deBessonet: Part of what has been so exciting for me about this moment is Ragtime is the first production in my new tenure Aa the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. Coming in, I felt like there is this tradition at Lincoln Center of being able to do musical revivals with an orchestra the size that it was written for. Being able to step into that tradition and really honor this music felt like such an important way to begin this next chapter.

Alison Stewart: Ragtime takes place in the earliest 20th century. The novel came out in the 1970s. The premiere of the original happened in the 1990s. What does the show have to say in 2026?

[laughter]

Lear deBessonet: The show invites the audience to hold space together in a uniquely live way. Where you're sitting there with over a thousand other people that are feeling and breathing at the same time as you. We're invited to think about essentially, the meaning of America in this moment, which is so completely complex and different for every person in the audience. I think the reason that I believe Ragtime is resonating, even beyond what we had hoped or beyond our wildest dream, honestly, of how we hoped it would resonate, is that, I think, people are hearing lines differently that actually have always been in the script.

Many people have said, "Did you update anything?" We say, "No. Every word is what it was originally." We are hearing it differently, because theater always is meeting us in the present moment. This story, looking at the early 20th century and the ways that different groups of people come together in pursuit of the American dream. Some encountering great elation and promise. Others really facing holding the wounds of this country. I think it just is meaning a lot right now. We're so grateful for it.

Alison Stewart: Shaina, the show just got extended until August, I believe it is.

Shaina Taub: Yes, August 2nd.

Alison Stewart: It will be running through the 250th anniversary of the United States on July 4th. How do you hope people will think about American identity, whether they're watching it now or they're watching the show? What do you think they're going to think about American identity through Ragtime?

Shaina Taub: There's a quote I love, by, I think, a theologian named Walter Brueggemann, that says amnesia produces despair in the same way memory produces hope. I love that. When we forget where we've been, and we forget our country's past, then we despair, and we fall into this seductive embrace of cynicism because we think we've never been here before. Memory and an active national memory, a national imagination where we're allowed to tell our stories on public broadcasts like WNYC, and at the Smithsonian, and on PBS, and all these places that they're attacking because they know how powerful storytelling is, frankly.

[applause]

Shaina Taub: They know. They know how powerful it is when people get in a room, and they reckon with the past, as Lear was saying. She always says, the promise and the wound of our past. I hope that the memory produces a hope that goes hand in hand with critical thinking. Not a simple, easy, everything's going to be okay hope, but a hope that demands that we look at our past and ask ourselves how we're being complicit in the present.

Alison Stewart: Ben, you recently performed in the New York City subway.

Ben Levi Ross: Yes, we did together.

Shaina Taub: We're buskers.

Alison Stewart: How do you think about New York differently after performing in the subway?

Ben Levi Ross: That there are nice acoustics. I do think my great-grandparents came through Ellis Island. When we were first rehearsing Ragtime at City Center, I took a long walk after rehearsal, one of the early days, and I swear I found myself on Orchard and Rivington, which is a street that Tateh sings about in Success. I could not stop crying for about 20 minutes. I called my dad and I was like, "I feel very connected to my ancestors right now." I think of New York through the lens of Ragtime every day that I'm performing the show.

Alison Stewart: You are listening to Broadway on the Radio from All Of It on WNYC. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We're in the Greene Space at WNYC with a special Broadway on the Radio event. You're listening on the radio. You can go to wnyc.org to catch the livestream. We're here with the team from Ragtime.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: With another performance from the show is Brandon Uranowitz as Tateh. He's a European Jewish immigrant to New York explaining to his daughter why it's important to imagine. You're going to sing Gliding. Hi, Brandon.

Brandon Uranowitz: Hi. Thank you.

[music]

See the silhouettes

It's a little book of silhouettes

When you flip the pages, they move

Look how nice

This is you on skates

Turning pretty figure-eights

On the smooth, cool ice

We are gliding

Gliding on a pond

Close your eyes

Close your eyes

We are gliding

Gliding far beyond

Close your eyes

Closе your eyes

Feel the wind as you pirouеtte

Are you happy yet?

Are you happy yet?

Your Mameh would tell you

"Imagine you're fearless

Imagine you're fearless

And soon, you won't fear"

When I am afraid

I imagine your Mameh

She skates just ahead

Can you see her?

She's here

And we're gliding

Gliding far away

Pirouettes, figure-eights, silver skates

Just down the track

Glide with me, little one

Glide with your Tateh

We'll never look back

[cheers and applause]

Alison Stewart: That was Brandon Uranowitz as Tateh performing Gliding from Ragtime. This is Broadway on the Radio event from WNYC. We're live in the Greene Space. Let's give it up for the band one more time.

[cheers and applause]

Alison Stewart: We're going to invite Caissie Levy on stage who plays Mother. Oh, that's very sweet. Brandon, you play Tateh.

Brandon Uranowitz: I do.

Alison Stewart: Let's put people in the show. What's been going on in Tateh's life before he sings Gliding?

Brandon Uranowitz: A lot. A lot of discovery, I would say. He comes to America to pursue the American dream like so many of our ancestors did. I think as an artist, he hopes that he will find self actualization and freedom in a country that allows him the space to be himself. He learns pretty quickly that this may be not accessible to him and his daughter. He's really looking for a better life for his daughter, specifically. It's different in the novel by E. L. Doctorow than it is in the show. In the show, in Ragtime, Tateh's wife is no longer with us. I think he's trying to start a clean slate for him and his daughter.

He learns very quickly that that's not necessarily possible. The thing about Tateh that I find so moving and I hope that reaches across the fourth wall and into the audience and something that Shaina talks so beautifully about is despite the oppression, despite the roadblocks, despite all of the obstacles, despite everything in his way, he never gives up hope ever for one second. That's what this song is about, is teaching his daughter to how to hold on to hope. I think that's what is the launch pad for him in Act 2, when he finally succeeds and achieves the American dream, I think.

Alison Stewart: Your character is Mother, Caissie. She first encounters Tateh early on in the show. What is she dealing with when they first meet?

Caissie Levy: She's dealing with quite a lot. She's been living in her house on the hill in New Rochelle for quite some time, very comfortably with her husband and her son. Her husband goes away on a trip, and life begins to shift around her, and she is opened up to the world around her. She meets Sarah and Sarah's child, and Coalhouse comes into her life, and she meets Tateh. She is fundamentally changed by each of these interactions. We only know her as Mother. As she is mothering everyone else, she is very much mothering herself and parenting herself through the biggest shift in her life.

In this next song that we're going to sing, this is a beautiful moment where Tateh and Mother, who come from vastly different worlds, are finding common ground and watching their children innocently play and connect, unbothered by their differences that we as adults often get so tied up in and what we can learn from them. It's a really beautiful moment.

Alison Stewart: For people who don't know, people who aren't Ragtime-rs. This is not your first Ragtime rodeo.

Brandon Uranowitz: It's not.

Alison Stewart: It's not. Do you want to tell people about that?

Brandon Uranowitz: Sure, sure. I was introduced to Ragtime about 30 years ago when I played the little boy in the pre-Broadway tryout in Toronto with Brian Stokes Mitchell, Audra McDonald, Peter Friedman, the late, great Marin Mazzie. It was an extraordinary experience. I grew up just outside of New York City in New Jersey, and I had dreams of being on Broadway. Here I was part of this massive, beautiful, epic production that was going to Broadway. The thing is, is I was playing a character that did not necessarily align with my own identity.

Lea Michele was playing a little girl, and I looked like her twin brother. I think just in terms of meeting the themes of the show, it just was not a good fit. They didn't bring me to Broadway, and I was the only one who they didn't bring. Thank you. It was a deeply traumatizing experience for me.

[laughter]

?Alison Stewart: No big deal. I can move on. It's easy.

Brandon Uranowitz: No, no, no, it's okay. This is very healing for me. To me, this entire thing, it's so surreal coming full circle now. To me, it's just been a lesson in patience and meaning. Playing this character, Tateh, who is so the opposite of what I was feeling when I was playing the little boy, just so aligned with who I am. I feel him in my guts. This is a man, who is not just defined by his Jewish identity, but he's a character-- He lives at the intersection of rage and buffoonery. That is exactly where I exist, I think. It just feels like a cosmic realignment, and it's been an incredibly healing experience. Lear. Thank you. My God. That's my story.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for being so candid.

Brandon Uranowitz: Of course.

Alison Stewart: Appreciate that. This is your first time with this crew because they've all been together since this first appeared at New York City Center.

Brandon Uranowitz: She was.

Caissie Levy: I was there. You were there. You were there. I'm sorry.

Caissie Levy: No, it's okay.

Alison Stewart: When you came into the show, you said you wanted to concentrate on your relationship with Mother's Younger Brother. What did you find when you wanted to concentrate on that?

Caissie Levy: I just found doing the show at City Center was magic and so fast, and I had just come off of doing next to normal two weeks prior in London. I was doing a really hard gear shift, and we had 10 days of rehearsal. I felt like I was just scratching the surface of what my mother could be. I've just been such a fan of Ben Levi Ross for so long, and I just love the dynamic that exists between Mother and Younger Brother, but there's not a whole bunch on the page. What's there made me curious. It was one of the things I was looking forward to in coming to Broadway with the production is just the two of us getting to find those moments to connect and deepen this storytelling.

I think we've really done that, and it's enriched the way I see mother in such a deep way, because, without giving all the spoiler alerts, the loss I feel with my husband and the fracturing that happens there, I then also lose this person. I've always been so aligned with my brother, and I have to go on without both of them and figure out who I am as a woman and a mother without the two most important men in my life. I feel like we've gotten to flesh that out in a really beautiful way this time around.

Alison Stewart: I was thinking through the entire show how Mother is confined by her gender and even her status in many ways. How does she try to effect change?

Caissie Levy: I think the thing I find inspiring about this character is that she is just trying to do the right thing at all turns. She is not trying to make a choice for people to notice and applaud her. She is literally just faced with challenges and people and trying to be a good human. She doesn't really have an example to look to. We don't meet the women that might have influenced her in the story. I have to invent that.

I think her moral compass is very strong, and it gets stronger as the show goes on, as she is making decisions and trying to do right by Sarah and by Coalhouse and by her husband and by herself and doing the right thing for her son. I don't know if that answered your question. I find I'm learning things about her every single day because-

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Caissie Levy: -she's incapable of lying. She's just telling the truth at every turn, even when it's hard, especially when it's hard.

Alison Stewart: The next song we're going to hear is Our Children next. Do you want to set it up?

Brandon Uranowitz: Sure.

Caissie Levy: [crosstalk] did a little bit.

Brandon Uranowitz: Caissie did a little bit. This is our connecting over the common bond that our children share and, I think, reconnecting with our own innocence that has been lost in some ways over the course of the show and how seeing that in our children makes us see each other in a really special and unique way that ultimately. I don't want to spoil anything.

Alison Stewart: This is Our Children from Ragtime.

[applause]

[music]

How they play

Finding treasure in the sand

They're forever hand in hand

Our children

How they laugh

She has never laughed like this

Every waking moment bliss

Our children

See them running down the beach

Children run so fast

Toward the future

From the past

How they dance

Unembarrassed and alone

Hearing music of their own

Our children

One so fair

And the other light and dark

Solemn joy and the sudden spark

Our children

See them running down the beach

Children run so fast

Toward the future

From the past

There they stand

Making footprints in the sand

And forever hand in hand

Our children

Two small lives

Silhouetted by the gloom

One like me and one like

You

Our children

Our children

[cheers and applause]

Alison Stewart: That was Brandon Uranowitz and Caissie Levy singing Our Children from Ragtime. You're listening to a Broadway on the Radio event. We'll be back after a quick break.

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We are live in the Greene Space at WNYC with a special Broadway on the Radio event. I'm here with the team from Ragtime.

[cheers and applause]

Alison Stewart: We're joined on stage by Nichelle Lewis, who plays Sarah. We're going to hear the song, Your Daddy's Son. Take it away.

[music]

Ooh, ooh

Ooh, ooh

Ooh

Ooh

Ooh

Daddy played piano

Played it very well

Music from those hands could

Catch you like a spell

He could make you love him

'Fore the tune was done

You have your daddy's hands

You are your daddy's son

Daddy never knew

That you were on your way

He had other ladies

And other tunes to play

When he up and left me

I just up and run

Only thing in my head

You were your daddy's son

Couldn't hear no music

Couldn't see no light

Mama, she was frightened

Crazy from the fright

Tears without no comfort

Screams without no sound

Only darkness and pain

The anger and pain

The blood and the pain

I buried my heart in the ground

In the ground

When I buried you in the ground

Daddy played piano

Bet he's playin' still

Mama can't forget him

Don't suppose I will

God wants no excuses

I have only one

You had your daddy's hands

Forgive me

You were your daddy's son

[cheers and applause]

Alison Stewart: It's so nice to meet you. I wish you could have seen your castmates watching you sing that song. They were on edge when you sing that song.

Caissie Levy: We love you.

Nichelle Lewis: You guys. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: That song is a show-stopping moment. You're on stage by yourself. What are you able to do in that moment on stage by yourself? What are you able to do creatively? What are you doing with your character?

Nichelle Lewis: So hard. I'm still tearing up from singing it. It feels surreal to be able to tell her story in such a beautiful way. This song is one of those moments where she's first really speaking out about what she did and how she was feeling and why she did it and why it was so painful to go through. Also, it's a moment of realization for her that she's going to be there for this baby. Regardless of the circumstances, she's there for that baby. It's a moment of visibility as well, because I feel so many women go through what she's going through. I just think it's so beautiful to tell that part of her story.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting because you really are tearing up.

Nichelle Lewis: Yes.

Alison Stewart: You relax. I'll talk to Joshua if you're ready.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Joshua, you were introduced to Ragtime by a professor in school. What did you learn that theater could do?

Joshua Henry: My first exposure to Ragtime was in the music library. Professor was like, "Go listen to this." I was like, "Sure." Didn't know anything. Didn't know much about musical theater. I remember hearing Brian Stokes Mitchell's voice and hearing him sing the iconic songs, the musical Wheels of a Dream. I just felt something open up inside my chest. I remember where I was sitting when I heard it. I didn't know one could make someone else feel that way with their voice. The power of storytelling and sound, to me, at that moment, I think I was 18 years old, something was born in me that was like, "That's what I want to do. I want to tell stories and move people in that way."

That was my first exposure to it. Actually, fast forward to three days ago, seeing him. We were doing this panel on stage at the Vivian Beaumont, just about his experience with the show. I'm sitting there with Nichelle, Audra, and Stokes, as we call him now. I was like, "One day I'm going to unload it on him." You know what I mean? "One day. Not today, not now, but one day."

Alison Stewart: That must have been an amazing moment for the two of you.

Nichelle Lewis: Yes.

Joshua Henry: Oh, gosh.

Alison Stewart: Tell us a little bit about that, Nichelle.

Nichelle Lewis: I was sitting right next to Audra. For me, I was just sitting there trying to keep my cool. I was like, "Yes."

[laughter]

Nichelle Lewis: It was incredible to be able to talk about the Black experience and Ragtime with people that we look up to so much.

Alison Stewart: Oh, my gosh. Joshua, I know you got nerd out about taking care of your voice. That's a very important thing.

Joshua Henry: This is true.

Alison Stewart: What is something that you've learned about the voice in doing this show you would like to share with the audience.

Joshua Henry: Everybody lean in. One of the most important things that I've learned about my voice is that each project is specific. I went into previews and Ragtime thinking, "I'm going to warm up like this every day. I'm going to do these trills. I'm going to do these scales." Then two months in, I was like, "No," because my voice was like, "Josh, we're not doing that." What I learned is your vocal load for eight shows, you've got to really experiment with it from week to week and take inventory on, "I don't have to warm up this part of my voice."

For instance, this part of new music, if y'all really want to nerd out with me for a second, where Coalhouse sings this high A. I don't know, feels like an hour into the show, before the show, I was warming up that part of my voice. Then when it came to performance, I was getting really tired, and I was like, "[sings] To me," I was like, "We can't do that." I've learned throughout the process to ebb and flow with my voice and also being on stage with these technicians and vocal masters has also been inspiring to learn from them. Listen and listen to your body and hear your voice and observe the incredible folks around you.

Alison Stewart: Nichelle, this is only your second Broadway show, right?

Nichelle Lewis: Yes.

Alison Stewart: This gentleman has done a few, Carousel. I guess we all know. What have you learned from working on this show?

Nichelle Lewis: Oh my gosh, I've learned so much. I think something I've really learned is honestly more about myself, what I can and cannot handle. I think I doubted myself a lot. It's really hard doing Broadway, eight shows a week. I think I just realized like, "I can do it. I can do this as long as I put my head to it, as long as I do my research." I've watched all of my castmates every single night, just getting up there and doing it and doing the work and putting their heads to it and also uplifting and supporting one another. It is amazing to be a part of such an ultra-talented cast, an ultra-talented group of musicians. It's wonderful. Our director, incredible. I've learned so much, and I continue to learn more every day.

Alison Stewart: Ragtime shows how people are subject to forces around them, especially true for Black people in the earliest 20th century. We see it in the show. Joshua,tThere's a moment when Coalhouse is asked to play a minstrel song on the piano, and he plays Ragtime instead. What does music mean to Coalhouse?

Joshua Henry: What does music mean to Coalhouse?

Nichelle Lewis: Yes.

Joshua Henry: One of the reasons I love Coalhouse so much is music is everything to him, and I say that about myself. For Coalhouse, his position in the community as an accomplished musician, there's a lot of esteem there. A lot of who he is is based around music. His community comes and watches him play. He goes and travels around with Jim Europe, an esteemed conductor at the time, to share the love and joy of music. It means a lot to him. The moment where this incredible woman comes into his life or the idea to go and find what is the highest representation of music for him means so much. It gives him a sense of purpose. I just really connect with that idea that music is, for me, a big part of my purpose, too.

Alison Stewart: Coalhouse and Sarah don't necessarily get a happy ending the way Mother and Tateh do. Nichelle, how do you find hope in Sarah and Coalhouse? His relationship?

Nichelle Lewis: In their relationship?

Alison Stewart: Just how do you find hope in them?

Nichelle Lewis: I Think they both carry a sense of hope throughout the entire show. That is the ultimate goal. We say the American dream. That is what, I think, we all hold in our hearts. I think they represent that so well throughout the show. Especially in Wheels of a Dream. It is the ultra moment of hope, of wishing, of grasping onto it and trying to hold onto it for as long as they can.

I think it inspires people, because even though they don't get their dream at the very end, it still inspires people to move forward in a way that makes change and hopefully make some positive change in the world. Even if we have to fight for it, even if we have to hold on and not let go, no matter what anybody says to us, I think that is who they are as a couple. They are that hope in the show.

Alison Stewart: That is the perfect segue, to hear Wheels of a Dream. Ladies and gentlemen, Joshua Henry and Nichelle Lewis.

[cheers and applause]

[music]

I see his face

I hear his heartbeat

I look in those eyes

How wise they seem

Well, when he is old enough

I will show him America

And he will ride

On the wheels of a dream

We'll go down south

Go down south

And see your people

See my folks

Won't they take to him

They take to him

Like cats to cream

Ooh

And we'll travel on from there

California or who knows where

And we will ride

On the wheels of a dream

Yes, the wheels are turning for us, girl

And the timеs are starting to roll

Any man can get wherе he wants to

If he's got some fire in his soul

We'll see justice, Sarah

And plenty of men

Who will stand up

And give us our due

Oh, Sarah, it's more than promises

Sarah, it must be true

A country that lets a man like me

Own a car, raise a child, build a life with you

With you

Ooh

Beyond that road

Beyond this lifetime

That car full of hope

Will always gleam

With the promise of happiness

And the freedom he'll live to know

He'll travel with head held high

Just as far as his heart can go

And he will ride

Our son will ride

On the wheels of a dream

[cheers and applause]

Alison Stewart: That's it for this Broadway on the Radio series. Ragtime, everyone. Thanks so much to team All Of It. We'll be right back after the [unintelligible 00:51:03].

[music]

 

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