At a moment when the country feels fractured and uncertain, “Ragtime” returns to Broadway like a clear, defiant anthem—a reminder that America has been here before.

Twenty-five years after its original run, the musical roars back not with spectacle but with purpose, and in doing so, it may finally have found the moment it was meant for. This revival, now at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater and expanded from last year’s high-powered City Center concert staging, arrives not as nostalgia but as a galvanizing statement, both thrilling and newly vital.

Set in the early 1900s, “Ragtime” intertwines the stories of three families whose lives converge amid the upheaval of a changing America: a wealthy white household from New Rochelle; a Black pianist, Coalhouse Walker Jr., and his belove

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