Maria sets the stage alive

But do not expect that much of Ragtime, which has already flourished on Broadway. Admittedly it is one of those rare, challenging American musicals that declares itself more interested in politics than passion and the usual romantic routine where boy meets girl and bursts into song.

Yet the show is compressed in a style of glycerine, preachy winsomeness by Terrence McNally from EL Doctorow's beautiful 1975 novel. It wallows sentimentally in a turn-of-the 20 th century America when Ragtime was all the rage and New York was a bustling new world, rich with new pleasures and rife with poor i m m i g r a n t s .

Stephen Flaherty's music, in spite of a recurrent, catchy rag tune with syncopated rhythms, does not capture a dynamic sense of New York in the first excited flush of the new century.

The score for a vigorous 18 strong orchestra swirls elegantly around but rarely compels ear or heart. Wheels Of A Dream is one of the few songs that pulsates with heady emotion.

Doctorow's original novel is an i m a g i n a t i v e , capering extravaganza. But McNally, Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, writer of the corny lyrics, have failed to capture its strange, compelling qualities in their musical version.

Real-life historical figures like Harry Houdini, the escape artist, anarchist Emma Goldman and financier JP Morgan flit around imposingly on the fringes of the lives of Ragtime's fictional creations: a middle-class, Wasp family archly known as Mother, Father, Younger Brother and Little Boy; Tateh, an impoverished, Russian immigrant Jew with his young daughter, and Coalhouse Walker, a black pianist estranged from his lover Sarah.

Police violence and the vicious racism of New York fire-fighters, on whom the white authorities turn a blindish eye, work their destructive effect. Lovers' lives are wrecked.

Director Stafford Arima says he reconceived the musical as Little Boy's memory show. This irrelevant, cloying device sweetens what should be a tense, stringent atmosphere. Robert Jones's ultra cheap-looking design - a bare, darkened stage with an upper gallery - is merely functional . And the casting is similarly morose .

Younger Brother, an aspirant revolutionary, ought be a charismatic hunk not the apologetic wimp Matthew White offers. Samuel James's Harry Houdini exudes not a trace of athletic virtuosity. Dave Willett's Father is too much a dry old stick, and Rebecca Thornhill makes Evelyn , the mesmerising femme fatale, a vulgar chorus girl. Fortunately the two lead roles, that of Coalhouse Walker and Mother, who finally falls for Graham Bickley's Tateh, are played and sung with glorious ardour by Kevyn Morrow and Maria Friedman. Morrow's obsessed seeker after justice and lost love has all the wired calm of the fanatic.

And Miss Friedman, although sometimes conveying the frosty hauteur of a juvenile Lady Bracknell, sings with a rich, sinuous virtuosity. The two of them set the stage alive with a passion and urgency that is otherwise missing from a production by Arima which is gentle and soft where it should be fierce and hard.

Ragtime