GRAMOPHONE: Rags The Musical – Original London Cast Recording

I have always been unreasonably fond of Charles Strouse and Stephen Schwartz’ Rags and would have given my right arm to have seen the great Teresa Stratas as Rebecca at one of the handful of performances (it ran for only four) she gave on Broadway. She doesn’t even feature on the original cast album; Julia Migenes stepped in to replace her.

I some ways Joseph Stein’s original book was a natural sequel to his Fiddler on the Roof tracing the immigrant experience all the way to the New World and Manhattan’s cramped Lower East Side. But epics sometimes grow bigger and stronger for losing ballast and gaining intimacy and David Thompson’s revised book for Rags – in collaboration with Strouse and Schwartz – invades the privacy of one particular family better to understand their hopes and fears, their trials and tribulations.

I saw the show at London’s tiny Park Theatre after it transferred from the Hope Mill in Manchester and what worked especially well for me was the integration of Strouse’ score into the fabric of the drama using actor/musicians onstage as an extension of the core ensemble off. In that regard Music Director/Arranger Nick Barstow is the real hero of the hour doing a marvellous job of ‘Klezmerising’ the score so that a solo fiddle, a clarinet, a trumpet, an accordion project more sharply that homespun ‘tinta’ which gives the music its character and makes it so much more ‘immediate’. Like the characters themselves the score

is a melting pot of styles embracing folksy ethnicity alongside the burgeoning American trends of Jazz and Ragtime. ‘Blame It On The Summer Night’ moodily, seductively, sings the blues but the reach of its ‘release’, which I adore, conveys a yearning which goes far deeper. I love too the bitter twist on the American Dream projected through the edgy cynicism of title song and the duet ‘Wanting’ for Rebecca and Saul has that indescribable Strouse ‘ache’ omnipresent through all his scores.

This excellently produced cast album is in some ways a better experience than the show itself because it exposes fewer of its shortcomings and reveals more of its heart. I’m still not convinced that the big ballad ‘Children of the Wind’ needed moving from its auspicious position early in the show to the eleven o’clock number spot. The original verse remains where the whole song once sat but the rest of it – the chorus – is now far too close to the final reprise and for my money greatly diminishes its impact. Even so, Carolyn Maitland (Rebecca) gives a storming account of it. It is the show in microcosm.