Ragtime

When I saw Ragtime this past weekend, I was moved by both the elaborate and painstaking choreography and the emotional weight of the play. The play covered themes such as social class, immigration and nationality, racial prejudice, growing as a person, and doing the right thing. It centered around the lives of three seemingly different, but also very similar families all doing their best around the turn of the 20th century. One was a rich upper class white family, one a lower class black family, and and immigrant man and his daughter from Latvia. Each family's story becomes forever entwined, and I was moved by how tragic the play turned at times. I was quite choked up at times, and other times enraged. Although eventually the play had a happy ending, it was chock full of hardship and catastrophe.

However, I see the importance of this type of emotional experience for society in general. I recognized that one of this play's main purposes was to force people to feel through its exaggerated and theatrical nature. In this case what the playwrights probably wanted the audience to feel was a profound abhorrence for the injustice of racism. I felt as though this play, while being a quality source of entertainment, also served as a healthy societal reminder of the sheer amount of progress and change in America over just the last century, and also as a warning against injustice. Being reminded of history is especially important in a modern, forward-thinking college environment where students will lead their lives into the future.

I liked how through the medium of a musical each person's perspective and history could be shown. In one particular musical number, the audience could see both an American citizen about to leaving on a ship and an immigrant about to arrive in America. They sing songs about their thoughts as they see each other and wave from a very far distance, but only the audience gets to hear both of their perspectives. I thought this was a creative and interesting way to see things and something that would have been very difficult to pull off in a movie. Overall, I would say this play was very well done.