Each year the Dolphin Show bills itself as the country’s biggest undergraduate-produced musical. But everything’s bigger in “Ragtime.”
About 60 student musicians and cast members will present the musical’s final performances this weekend. Putting the show together meant facing particular challenges, including casting a diverse set of roles, portraying a wide range of locations, timing the action to a constant underscore and finding “a Model T that drives on the stage four times and then gets destroyed,” said producer Lucas McMahon, a Communication junior.
The producers found the prop car in California, but finding enough cast members to fill each role was another matter, producer Julie Boor said.
“We wanted to do a show that was hard in every way,” the Communication senior said.
The musical takes place at the turn of the century and requires a large and ethnically diverse cast. This meant finding a larger pool of actors to audition. The producers said they canvassed the dining halls to get more students to try out. Several of the actors with prominent roles have never been in a production at Northwestern before.
The musical takes place in about 25 different settings, set designer Tina Frank said. She decided on four main elements that would shift to portray the ocean, a courthouse, a theater, a garden and Ellis Island, among many other locations.
“Obviously realistic wasn’t going to happen,” the Weinberg senior said.
She instead chose pieces that could read symbolically in different ways, such as a fence that could be either ominous or domestic. This design lent cohesion to all the disparate settings, McMahon, said.
“Every picture we create is from a unified vocabulary,” he said.
Director Michael Holtzman said the specific challenges were particularly rewarding to tackle in a student-run musical.
“There were definitely times during the rehearsal process when I thought, ‘Where’s the grown-up who tells me how to deal with this?'” the Communication senior said. “But being a grown-up just means you have to talk to other grown-ups. I’m a senior. I am a grown-up.”
