Nominated for 13 Tony awards and winning the awards for Best Musical Score and Best Book of a Musical, this blockbuster was adapted from E.L. Doctorow’ s great novel Ragtime (a selection in Modern Library’s list of “100 Best Novels”).

Strikingly appropriate to our own difficult times, Ragtime uses three disparate families to evoke the dangerously dynamic forces transforming America just before World War I. The play’s ragtime, jazz, gospel, and ballad songs—30 of them in all—trace the once unimaginable sundering and merging of 3 families; one comfortably, traditionally, and conventionally white; the second, a black family pulled asunder by competing survival needs; and third an impoverished and nearly starving Jewish immigrant father and daughter. The musical’s explorations of how clashing racial, religious, social, and musical forces destroy some and transform others, eventually producing a hopeful American future, has moved and delighted a quarter century of audiences. Be sure to join them. This is a truly memorable show which cannot be missed.

At the Athens Theatre