The musical is directed by Ron Jewett and Andrew Barrus. The production is double-cast and stars Hale Centre newcomers Trevor Jerome and Carleton Bluford as Coalhouse, Clotile Bonner and Josephine Scere as Sarah, Meghan Parrish and Kathryn Little as Mother, Scott D. Morgan and David Weekes as Father, and Kelly DeHaan and Thomas Every as Tateh.

Music director is Kelly DeHaan, assisted by Anne Puzey; choreographer is Marilyn May Montgomery; costume designer is Suzanne Carling; set designer is Barrus; lighting designer is Spencer Brown; and the sound designer is Mike Williams.

Hale Center Theatre showcases the feeling of the fast-paced musical, not technical gimmicks

"Ragtime" is a square peg -- a big, sprawling musical conceived with a rectangular proscenium stage in mind. Hale Center Theatre is a round hole -- a theater-in-the-round where the audience encircles the action. Hale's set designer, Andrew Barrus, makes his living squashing square pegs into that round hole. Now the man who put the sand in "South Pacific" and the splash in "Big River" is running "Ragtime" in-the-round. But this time, says Barrus, the show won't be built around a technical concept. Though Hale's "Ragtime" production will have plenty of whiz-bang, the tricks will be in service of the story, and not the other way around. "Ragtime's" story of New York society, circa 1910, won't include any new gimmicks. An early plan to accomplish "Ragtime's" many scene changes via conveyor belts was discarded, and Barrus is glad.

"It would have been interesting, but too much," Barrus said. "It would have taken away from looking at the story and listening to the music to focus in on something like that. I didn't want that at all."

Projections of historic photographs from the early 20th century are being used to identify scenes instantly. Costumes for the show's social groups -- wealthy New York suburbanites, Harlem's black community and European immigrants to Manhattan's Lower East Side -- do the rest.

"There are so many locales in the show," said Barrus. "But this is an era that we identify with photography. I'm not the biggest fan of projection in a show, but I think it works here. The images are established in the patron's mind, so we can get in and out of scenes quickly."

"Ragtime," based on the novel by E.L. Doctorow, is set in New York during a time of turbulent change. Wealthy white capitalists of the era resented an influx of blacks from the South seeking equality and European immigrants looking for economic security. It was a time of innovation, when labor unions, cars, movies and ragtime music were new and unfamiliar -- and considered dangerous.

In the story, fictional characters mingle with historic figures such as J.P. Morgan, Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit, Booker T. Washington and Henry Ford.

"Ragtime" is regarded by many as one of the finest American musicals of the late 20th century, but it is difficult to produce -- full of location changes that are hard to accomplish quickly on an arena stage. And therein lies temptation.

The capabilities of Hale Centre's movable stage, which goes up and down and revolves -- as a unit or in sections -- were hard to resist when it was installed in 1998.

"We overused the stage in the space, and not very cleverly," Barrus said. "It wasn't really a part of the shows -- it just did its own thing. We needed to get away from that."

Many experiments followed, Barrus said. Some shows used machinery to good advantage, and some were overwhelmed by mechanical complications. HCT's most recent show, "To Kill a Mockingbird," used almost no technical gimmickry and was one of the theater's best, according to media critics.

"Ragtime" hits what Barrus hopes will be a good balance. The mechanical flying system installed for "The Slipper and the Rose" will dangle escape artist Harry Houdini for one of his tricks, and vaudeville star Evelyn Nesbit uses it to glide through the air on a giant swing -- her trademark. The stage's movable center will deliver actors and props to the stage occasionally, and a bridge will descend from the rafters several times to move actors from an auxiliary stage.

Such "tricks" are employed only because they make the story move, said Barrus -- and it must. "Ragtime's" musical score includes near-constant underscoring that keeps the show's pace fast. Actors and technicians are scrambling to keep up.

Musical director Kelly DeHaan said "Ragtime" has "twice the music" of any show he has worked on. DeHaan created the taped orchestral score used in the performance, hiring top local musicians for the job. DeHaan said he admires "Ragtime's" composer, Stephen Flaherty, for his deft use of American popular music styles.

"The thing that really moves me is that Stephen Flaherty has taken the ragtime music from the turn of the century and contemporary orchestrations and melodies, and combined them into an American art form," said DeHaan. "Every character has a theme, and every emotion of the story is portrayed in the music. If an audience loves music, they will love this show, because it really is carried on melody."

DeHaan's favorite moment of the show comes during the song "New Music," which sums up cataclysmic social change while it unites a pair of lovers. DeHaan remembers a moment in rehearsal last week when his cast finally captured the scene's emotional essence. As the black musician Coalhouse Walker reached for the mother of his child -- and his piece of the American Dream -- the actors in the chorus finally made their music soar as it should. DeHaan gets a lump in his throat when he talks about it.

"Those actors put as much heart into that moment as I spent building it [on the orchestration tape]," DeHaan said. "That is our true art -- when everyone comes together for one moment and it works. It's just magical."

For this show, if Barrus has his way, audience members won't go home thinking about the technical wizardry they witnessed. Instead, like DeHaan, they will remember the way "Ragtime's" story and music made them feel.

Journey in

* "Ragtime" opens Monday and plays Mondays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. through July 23 (except July 4) at 3333 S. Decker Lake Drive, West Valley City. Matinees are 12:30 and 4 p.m. each Saturday of the run.

* Tickets are $19 to $21; $14 to $15 for children; call 801-984-9000. For more information, visit http://www. halecentretheatre.org.