Ragtime - Shaw Festival Theatre

Directors’ Notes
JACKIE MAXWELL
talks about directing Ragtime
One of the signature songs of Ragtime is Wheels of a Dream, sung by Coalhouse
and Sarah as they hold their tiny baby and look into his glowing future.
As I have delved further and further into this beautiful, complex piece, the notion
of dreams...the need for them and their fulfillment, has revealed itself in
different ways.
There is the personal dream of doing Ragtime at the Shaw Festival with a cast
of ensemble members old and new, all wrestling with its joy, despair and
hope together. A dream of telling this potent story of the beginning of contemporary
America—with its mix of myth and cold, hard reality—here on
America’s doorstep. A dream that has resulted in a creative process more collaborative
than any I have previously experienced, as we untwine the deeply
intimate stories within and feed them through our vision of the kaleidoscopic
world they all inhabit.
But always, just as we do at the end of the play, we come back to Coalhouse
and Sarah’s dream—a bright, new future for their son. How wonderful then
that since this musical was written in 1996, that dream has been realized in a
way that neither character could have possibly imagined. Even the musical’s
creators would have been hard put to project that, in November 2008, Barack
Obama would become the first African-American President of the United
States. Wheels of a Dream indeed—a dream we salute and celebrate with this
production.
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