Rags: The Musical – Park Theatre

Martha Kirby, Dave Willetts, Jude Muir and Carolyn Maitland in Rags: The Musical at the Park Theatre, London. Picture: Pamela Raith

Rags: The Musical continues at the Park Theatre, London until 8 February 2020.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

In an early scene of this musical about the New York Jewish immigrant experience in the early 20th century, Carolyn Maitland’s expert seamstress Rebecca is berated by Jack (Jeremy Rose), the dressmaker for whom she is working in Jack’s family’s tiny East Side tenement home.

Her crime has been to look at the dresses Jack’s family have been making, and make small adjustments – to the sleeve, the collar, the hemline – that measurably improve the dress, but take it away from the cookie-cutter approach by which Jack’s family have been scratching out a living.

That one scene is a metaphor for the development of Rags: The Musical itself. The original 1986 Broadway production was received so indifferently that it closed after just four performances and 18 previews. Ever since, it has been taken apart and reassembled in an attempt to get the story right.

Does it succeed? The reception this production (once more reworked by a creative team including the musical’s lyricist, Stephen Schwartz) received upon its premiere in Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre would seem to suggest so. As that production transfers to Finsbury Park, it is perhaps best to think of this as an original musical – the latest attempt by the same writers to shape their story – than a revival.

And what writers. Schwartz, of course, is known for works from Godspell to Wicked. He is joined by composer Charles Strouse (Annie, Bye Bye Birdie), and the book credits go to original writer Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof) and revisionist David Thompson (Steel Pier).

Between them, they have distilled the tale of a whole immigrant community into one that revolves around one family, headed by Dave Willetts’ Avram, his sister Anna (Debbie Chazen) and her husband, Rose’s Jack.

Throughout, the optimism about the American dream that brought these Jewish families from all across Europe and the Middle East is played against the reality: living and working in the same tiny rooms, rarely able to afford to go out and having to supplement their incomes by hawking family heirlooms out of a suitcase on the street.

There are more hardships than financial ones, too. Strouse and Schwartz’s songs, which draw on sweeping orchestral sounds (replicated effectively by Nick Barstow’s orchestrations for a small band let by musical director Joe Bunker) are in sharp contrast to the camp vaudeville of Adam Crossley and Matthew Gent’s boater-clad troubadours, whose recurring number ‘Greenhorns’ starts off gently berating the immigrants their country needs to fill its factories. As it is reintroduced throughout Act I, the tensions increase, until it breaks out into full-scale anti-Semitism.

Director Bronagh Lagan and her designer, Gregor Donnelly, source several political cartoons from the era which portray immigrants as an invading swarm; images which, despite being over 100 years old, feel depressingly familiar to London today, their message being echoed in attacks upon Jews, Muslims and other ethnic minorities.

But while that theme of abuse towards the characters’ community is strongly delivered (and provides a stunning climax to Act I, with Maitland performing an emotional rendition of the musical’s title song ‘Rags’) such concerns fade into non-existence after the interval. Act II opens with the family enjoying a day out in Coney Island, mixing with other Americans.

Instead, the focus is (perhaps rightly, and certainly more successfully) on Maitland’s Rebecca, who finds herself achieving success under the mentorship of Jack’s employer, the ruthless Bronfman (Sam Attwater). In this relationship, the rejection of the immigrants’ culture is more subtle, and more insidious: Bronfman describes himself as a German rather than a Jew, and encourages Rebecca to change her surname from Hershkowitz to Harris so that she may garner more favour from the uptown clients who may buy her dresses.

Rebecca’s relationship with Bronfman is in sharp contrast to that she has with Alex Gibson-Giorgio’s Saul, an Italian immigré and industrial campaigner, whose calls for a strike threaten the central family’s livelihood.

And it this musical’s greatest success – at least, in this new form – that the family is the heart of the piece. Chazen’s maternal twinkle plays well against the truculence of Rose as her husband, while widower Willetts finds an effective foil in Rachel Izen’s Rachel.

Also in the family, Martha Kirby’s Bella gets the juvenile romantic lead as she is wooed by Oisin Nolan-Power’s Ben, a delivery boy with songwriting ambitions. It is through Ben that we see and hear hints of the musical changes of the era – especially the rise of Ragtime.

It is the mention of this musical genre that reinforces reminders of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s Ragtime, a musical set in the same era and touching on some of the same themes. But where that latter musical (an adaptation of EL Doctorow’s sweeping novel) successfully straddled multiple storylines and the sweeping changes happening to America, Rags feels as if it has got better the further away from the epic gestures it gets.

It could even be argued that there are yet more revisions to Rags that could further refine and improve it. But with this Hope Mill Theatre production, one can also be happy that Strouse, Schwartz, Stein and Thompson finally have the story they need to tell, and which audiences owe themselves to see.

Scott Matthewman