When this musical first appeared on Broadway in 1986 — and then disappeared after only four performances — its creators could never have known how much the New York in their show would have in common with the New York of today.
It would, for instance, have been unimaginable to think that the hostility experienced by Jews in Rags who arrive in the city in 1910 would echo with the recent attacks on Jews in neighbouring New Jersey over a century later. Yet they do, even though it is this resonance that helps this show from being one of the also-rans of musical theatre.
The show’s story might best be described as the sequel to Fiddler on the Roof. For although the Jews in Rags have different names from the Jews in Fiddler, the story of single mother Rebecca (Carolyn Maitland) arriving on a boat in New York in 1910 with little more than her son and a sewing needle, feels very much like the continuation of the journey embarked on by some of Anatevka’s Jews after they are driven from their shtetl.
Perhaps this is no surprise given that both Fiddler and Rags share the same book writer in Joseph Stein. The later musical, whose lyricist is Wicked’s Stephen Schwartz and whose music is by Annie’s composer Charles Strouse, has been rewritten a number of times since it was first seen. Back then, the focus of the plot was the Tevye-like Avram (here, David Willetts) and his three children as they attempt to find their way in America.
