Author: Ian Louis Harris

Declaration of interest: I have known Lydia White, who plays the role of Bella in this production, since before she was born; she is my best mate John’s daughter. This production is Lydia’s professional debut.

Declaration of uninterest: this type of musical theatre is simply not the sort of stuff I would normally see. Yes, I wrote lyrics for Newsrevue in the 1990s, which is sort-of musical theatre and yes I wrote the lyrics for Casablanca the Musical at the turn of the century.

Yes, I am familiar with recordings of many of the great musicals of the 1930s through to the 1970s. But you can search Ogblog high and low for signs of straight musical theatre going in vain.

So, there I was; a chap normally predisposed to parodying musical theatre rather than appreciating it, trying to lap up Rags the Musical, a troubled piece from 1986 which closed on Broadway after just four nights, much revamped for this 2019 revival.

Rags is about a group of Jewish immigrants arriving in America early in the 20th Century. It has often been described as a sort-of sequel to Fiddler On the Roof, with several of those involved in writing the latter also involved in writing Rags. Here is a link to Hope Mill Theatre’s resource on this musical/production.

I thought the quality of this production was quite exceptional. I didn’t really know what to expect in a disused mill, relatively recently re-purposed as a small theatre with grand ideas to put on big shows like this.

Can they do it? Yes they can.

Coincidentally, I ended up sitting next to a pair of gentlemen who I had noticed sitting next to me in the Jūb Thai before the show. The chap immediately next to me turned out to be a local who has become very impressed by this new theatre on his manor. He told me that their home grown productions, of which Rags is one – have been consistently excellent.

The thing that impressed me the most was the universal quality of the performances. Not to detract at all from Lydia White’s superb performance, the praises of which clearly I am here to hail, in seriousness I thought the whole cast, every one of them, was truly excellent.

The quality of the musicianship was very high too. The music is a mish-mosh (if I might throw in bissel Yiddish) of ragtime, klezmer, jazz and show; that cannot be easy to contain and deliver to consistent quality, but the musicians and singers keep going to a very high quality level throughout.

The book was clearly problematic from the 1986 outset with this musical – I think the radical rewrite has partially but not totally solved the problem. I have some sympathy with the original author Joseph Stein. He originally set out to write a screenplay, settled on the libretto of a musical but kept the big picture story about the immigrant experience at the turn of the 20th Century. I have read a synopsis of the original version and it really does try to cover an enormous scope of subject matter for a musical.

And much like a troyer-shpil in the Yiddish Theatre tradition, which Rags The Musical parodies in many ways, it tries to throw in everything but the kitchen sink. So this is not one for the Royal Court.

The rewrite for this production is a smaller canvas but as a result some of the nuance is, I think, lost. So, for example…

…*spoiler alert*…

…Bella’s demise towards the end of the piece seems like happenstance rather than part of almost inevitable conflicts between ambition, desperation, industrial action and greed.

The writers have made some interesting choices, some of which work better than others. I loved the theatre trip towards the end of the first act where the protagonists see a Yiddish version of Hamlet which ends up with Klezmer music and Horah dancing despite Hamlet and Ophelia’s despair.

I was surprised by The Kaddish (mourner’s prayer) song, though, for which the writers chose simply to set the original mourner’s prayer to music. I imagined it would be something akin to the Fiddler On The Roof Sabbath Prayer song, which picks and chooses passages from the Hebrew prayer to make a very charming musical song in English.

The Mourner’s Kaddish is actually a tongue-twister of a prayer – part in Hebrew part in Aramaic – it must be really hard for people to learn it if they haven’t grown up with it and it must sound very strange to the uninitiated ear. Unfortunately I had reason to see and hear a mourner’s kaddish again, two days after seeing the show. I thought about it and really struggled to understand why the Rags lyricist hadn’t selected choice phrases in English to depict the meaning of that prayer with dignity and beauty. Perhaps superstition played its part – you just don’t mess with the prayer for the dead.

I was also surprised that the Children Of The Wind song doesn’t appear until right at the end of the show – reprised almost immediately in the finale. The musical would, to me, have seemed more holistic if that song had appeared early, e.g. when the immigrants arrive, as well as at the end of the show when their tale has been told.

But then what do I know to critique a musical? I don’t really do musicals.

At the small canvas level, the story very much resonated with me. I am, after all, a mostly third generation Jew, three of my four grandparents came to London from the Pale Of Settlement around the time this musical is set – plus or minus 20 years. My father’s family were indeed in the shmutter (rag) trade…they even changed their name to Harris; an idea which the Rebecca character considers but chooses to reject.

My mother’s family were musicians; quite quickly in England becoming far more high-falutin’ type musicians than the klezmer musicians in Rags, although I suspect my family arrived performing in much that style.

More importantly, much of the big picture story of Rags resonates very strongly today, I’d argue to a greater extent than it did in 1986. Anti-immigration is a large element of the Brexit saga and also the Trump experience in the USA. The issues around ghettoisation, cultural assimilation and the like are very much with us, albeit not so much in the Jewish community any more. Questions around whether migrants are desirable for sound economic reasons, wanted for reasons of commercial exploitation, accepted because allowing migration is the right thing to do or not wanted at all – these questions are high on the agenda in most nations.

Despite my reservations about the book and some of the songs, I think this is a really super production and a performance piece for our time; it has the potential to do extremely well.

Rags has had great reviews at Hope Mill for a start – click here to see them. This production could travel very well to other parts of the country, not least London, where there are so many communities which would, I’m sure, enjoy the resonance and relevance of this musical to their experience.

So what did I really think about Lydia White’s performance?

I can try to compare it to the many performances of Newsrevue casts I have seen. On that score, I can honestly say that her performance would be a standout in that environment. An environment where standout performers (e.g. from my era, Dorthy Atkinson and Rosie Cavaliero) have tended to go on to have very successful careers.

In Rags The Musical, the whole cast is very strong and/but Lydia more than holds her own in that company. For a professional debut I think it is an extremely assured and talent-packed start to her career.

It was also a great pleasure to chat with Lydia for a while after the show and learn/observe what a friendly, tight-knit group the company seems to be. Lydia won’t get that everywhere she goes in her show business career, but it’s good news that her first production is such a good one with such a together company.