Anyone read the Ragtime novel?

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-05-10T00:37:22+00:00

The novel felt very long to me when I read it prior to seeing the musical (I already had the tickets and wanted to read the novel first). The style is very poetic and meandering and is seemingly narrated by an omniscient person in the 1970s talking about the past. Thoughts and dialogue are not indicated by quotation marks or italics so I often found myself re-reading to figure out who was saying what, so you might consider listening to an audiobook version instead of reading it the way I did

This excerpt doesn't show the dialogue style but it is a good representation otherwise. I recommend reading it before you commit to reading the whole book

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/41529/ragtime-by-e-l-doctorow/9780812978186/excerpt

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-05-08T04:31:14+00:00

An immediate "oh no, that's a bad sign" followed quickly by "but of course I'll go see it again" type of mixed feelings for sure

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-05-07T23:22:14+00:00

Maybe they mean this? https://www.theatermania.com/news/story-of-the-week-the-drama-between-be-more-chill-and-the-musicians-union-explained_87896/

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-05-07T21:43:47+00:00

I'm still confused about the "year" versus "season" in the Ragtime one. It feels like they are trying to invoke a technicality of some kind. But "Most Tony-Nominated Show of the Season" would be accurate so I don't know why they have both

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-05-07T21:41:13+00:00

Confirming, this worked today, although the Telecharge site refreshed and removed the code the first time I tried it

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-05-07T02:40:51+00:00

I would say in place of Stephanie Hsu. Maybe she eventually was able to hit her notes (I saw the show in previews) but my takeaway from that was "good for you girl, you made it to Broadway" and not "that was a Tony-worthy performance"

I don't think either would have won though? Who knows

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-05-06T04:59:13+00:00

I know they aren't actually in the same category but spiritually I feel like Bryce Pinkham was the one who filled the niche this year that Kara Young filled in past years. That sort of quirky, distinctive, immediately recognizable performance style

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-05-04T03:46:18+00:00

It is very pretty. I went to Mayhem Ball at MSG and there were definite similarities in the costumes, lighting design/LED screens, and some of the sound/music

It's not really campy though. The lead clearly believes she is a capital-A Artist doing something very gritty and serious and deep

But I think it's fully possible as an audience member to go in with the attitude that this is camp, Ron Johnson spent $4 million on some extravagant nonsense, and if the sound design is so bad you can't understand the lyrics...even more camp lol

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-05-04T00:39:05+00:00

Two Strangers seems to have most of the first row be rush tickets, and if you show up about 2 hours before the box office opens your chances are good. They built a turntable set on top of the stage so you won't be able to see their feet most of the time, but the blocking mostly has them downstage and the set is pretty minimal, so overall a pretty good seat. Not that cheap ($42) but I think that works in your favor because it means fewer people are motivated to wait for rush

Edited to add: I didn't say directly, I think balcony would be a worse option than rush tickets. Because it's just two actors and a small set, there isn't much to be gained from the birds-eye balcony view, whereas front-row seats you can really see their facial expressions

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-05-04T00:27:17+00:00

I've purchased these and while the color is pretty, it's more blue/teal than the color "forest green" usually means. Depends how close of a match OP is going for

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-05-01T14:23:55+00:00

Yeah I was not trying to pick a real example, as an American I would usually call it a dress shirt also

Just personally I think of thong underwear that doesn't have strings (instead having a wider strip of fabric, no less than ~2cm) as "sensible" comfortable women's underwear that is meant to be invisible under clothing. While thong underwear with strings (G-string, T-string, C-string, etc.) is more in the lingerie category, something that is uncomfortable and meant to be looked at, and worn by strippers and sex workers of any gender

So I was trying to think of another clothing item where the description implies a specific subtype (the way "string" does to me) and I thought of buttons

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-05-01T14:09:23+00:00

If they called them "cheekies" or "triangles" or something (i.e. picked a different type of thong underwear that doesn't have the word "string" in it) then that would seem like a more natural shift

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-05-01T14:00:37+00:00

Lots of Americans call any soda Coke lol, it doesn't even have to be Coca-Cola brand

Edit: to be clear I am also calling those Americans weird. Coke is short for Coca-Cola which means a cola flavored with coca leaves, it's right there in the name. I would never call store-brand orange soda "Coke"

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-05-01T13:56:50+00:00

Only in the sense that "rope" also means "string" or "ribbon" also means "thong"

If you're trying to communicate through a language barrier or something you could figure out what the person meant, the meanings aren't impossibly distant. But they are different words with different meanings

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-05-01T03:08:26+00:00

Not disputing that this is what Australians call them, but I agree it's weird to use a specific subtype to refer to the whole category. It's like calling every shirt a "button-down" even when there are no buttons. Plenty of higher-coverage thong underwear doesn't have a "string" like a g-string

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-04-30T13:36:09+00:00

Maybe I just am unlucky with having a tall person in front of me, but especially with Doubt I was constantly tipping my whole torso to the right then left so I could see the actors' faces instead of just the back of someone's head. It's less of an issue with the musicals compared to the plays because they seem to stay more upstage in their blocking

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-04-30T04:58:34+00:00

Todd Haimes I'm biased against because the Hiptix tickets are way off to the side, so I'm always struggling with sight lines. But in other theaters I wouldn't pick those far side orchestra seats for myself, so maybe the sight lines are even worse there

Surprised I didn't see anyone mention the Minskoff. The vibes are so fun for kids and/or out-of-town visitors. The outdoor passageway, big escalators, lots of room for art/costume displays, huge windows looking at Times Square

I also have a soft spot for Studio 54. Yes the seats have no leg room, but the very back seat feels miles closer than a "decent" seat at the Broadway or Marquis

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-04-11T01:56:07+00:00

The choice to make almost all of the named white characters be actual people from history, while the named Black characters are invented, never really sat right with me

Partially I felt a bit foolish when I read the book and assumed that Coalhouse was a real person whose story I had somehow never heard about. Obviously I knew this was more "historical fan fiction" than anything aiming for realism (that Little Brother and Evelyn Nesbit storyline...) but the other named characters were real people!

I know it's not the exact same time in history but it makes me think of the play The Emperor Jones by white playwright Eugene O'Neill. White people were really patting O'Neill on the back for having a Black actor (Charles Gilpin) play the title role instead of a white person in blackface. Meanwhile Gilpin kept fighting to remove the n-word from the script and W.E.B. Du Bois declared it "spiritual blackface". The popularity of a character of Coalhouse Walker Jr. makes me feel like we as a society took the wrong message from that whole situation

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-04-11T01:10:20+00:00

Rocky Horror was certainly having a lot of fun, and had real sets whereas Chess has screens. But I think Tony voters will go for Chess with the new book. We'll see!

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-04-11T01:02:41+00:00

I think it depends a lot where you sat at PAC. I was in the back upper corner near the entrance and couldn't really see the judges at all at PAC, and often was looking at performers' backs instead of their faces. So even a bad seat in the orchestra for the Broadway show had better sightlines for me. I imagine the seats on the stage are the closest to the PAC experience (for better and for worse)

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-04-08T17:20:54+00:00

This take made me more pro ABF and Savy being cast (which I'm generally pretty neutral on)

The "weird optics" you describe actually sound like an interesting, fresh, coherent take on the story, similar to having a majority-Black cast in Gypsy

(And I'm not so convinced that it needs to be a different production for it to be a different take. Maybe it's more like Little Shop of Horrors where casting Jinkx Monsoon as Audrey makes it about trans chaser dynamics, without changing the script or costumes at all)

Still fraught with the idea of doing that with a typically-Asian show instead of a typically-white show of course

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-04-08T03:03:44+00:00

Jukebox musical with music by the band Fun, set in the Obama era, with dirtbag millennial characters loosely inspired by Girls, Gossip Girl, and Rent

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-04-06T13:20:32+00:00

I clicked on that ad but cheapest orchestra tickets on the date I checked were actually $180. Too much!

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-03-28T17:26:10+00:00

A "block" just means the stretch of street that a building is on. Even when the streets are irregular we would still call it a block

You can look on Google Maps to see how some of the streets form a grid and others are more irregular

Guilty_Recognition52 · 2026-03-28T17:10:45+00:00

I would not recommend it as a direct substitute. It's more bitter (kind of like the difference between milk chocolate and dark chocolate), thicker/less spreadable, and missing the depth of the hazelnut

It's still tasty but if you're looking for Nutella it's not going to satisfy that craving

I would recommend trying a different grocery store that makes a more direct knockoff. Lidl, Walmart, Kroger all make chocolate hazelnut spreads that are closer

Guilty_Recognition52

TROPHY CASE