An older Black woman dances at left, wearing a crown of flowers on her head. At right a young Black woman dances beside her. We see a drummer in green sitting rear left.

Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 1998 Tony Award-winning score for Ragtime (book by Terrence McNally) has many virtues—strong songs, strong characters, moments of great drama—but for my money, it cannot hold a candle to Ahrens and Flaherty’s earlier, less complicated, but no less ambitious musical, Once on this Island. First produced on Broadway in 1990, […]

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