Children of the Wind {Rags ~ Broadway, 1986} - Teresa Stratas

[@Nagennif1011]

It blows my mind that this exists.

[@michaeljj43]

i saw this. teresa stratus and judy kuhn were extraordinary!!!!!

[@marcelmaas6977]

I am happy to say I saw one of the previews of this show. It may not have been a perfect show, but what a glorious score!

[@lilchwis4423]

HOLY CRAP! THAT'S LIKE AN A QUALITY RECORDING... FROM 1986??? dang,,,

[@VeronicaGarland]

I wish it had the end, but this is priceless! THANK YOU!

[@RetiredRosie]

Thank you so much for posting this!

[@orion8835]

Ragtime is such a befuddled mess and seemingly a late 20th C . mystery that nobody seems to be able to rework to it’s deserving success it should have . Stratas is everything here. This isn’t just some cheesy ballad in her interpretation it’s an epic story and very human and perfectly controlled.

[@richardmayora1289]

I think you mean Rags. The show was done as a joint production of Paper Mill Playhouse and the Coconut Grove Playhouse. It was very good despite cheap production values.

[@oliverbrownlow5615]

Many years ago at the late, lamented Candlelight Dinner Theatre in Summit, IL, director William Pullinsi was reportedly given a free hand to clean up RAGS a little, and staged a very effective production. It was still pretty close to what's represented on the Original Broadway Cast recording, the major difference that I recall being the splitting up of "Children of the Wind" so that the first verse of it was sung on the pier upon Rachel's arrival in America, but the second, more agitated verse into the rest of the song ("I see us running through the forest and there's twenty miles to go ...") begins at a later moment in the play when she has requested help finding her husband from a Jewish welfare agency ("German-Jewish," as representative tells her), and become very upset at the suggestion that she is an abandoned wife, and should place her son David in an orphanage. RAGS really isn't so much a mess as a complex, under-appreciated masterpiece. Like the scores of Stephen Sondheim, it rewards repeated listening. Broadway audiences of the 1980's apparently had a hard time with its musical complexity, its panoramic structure, and its unromantic ending, but I suspect that if it were given a first-class revival by a major opera company, it might prove to be a very successful addition to the repertoire.

[@detectivefiction3701]

Fascinating, though I prefer the voice of Julia Migenes, who replaced Teresa Stratas on the RAGS cast album. I'm actually going to see a production of this show next month at George Mason University in Virginia.