Lear deBessonet believes in miracles. It is something of a job requirement for the artistic director of Encores! at New York City Center, the musical theater series that dusts off beloved, but often ignored, gems from the canon for short-run, no-frills stints. With just 10 days of rehearsal—a breakneck schedule that is both thrilling and punishing—deBessonet is in the thick of preparations for her latest endeavor, opening this week: the turn-of-the-century American epic Ragtime.
“Every single moment in rehearsal is full focus, full intensity,” she says, clear-eyed but forgivably preoccupied when we meet during a break last week at the 55th Street complex, a former Masonic temple. In its way, the crunch is liberating: “We don’t have time to doubt ourselves.”
Based on a 1975 novel by E.L. Doctorow, the musical, which premiered on Broadway in 1998, follows three families in 1902 New York: one, wealthy and white; the next, a Black couple with an unexpected baby; and the third, a Jewish father and his young daughter, newly arrived from Latvia. The three storylines—performed, in this production, by an ensemble cast including Joshua Henry, Nichelle Lewis, Brandon Uranowitz, Caissie Levy, and Ben Levi Ross—intersect in a gripping combustion of hope and terror that fires the melting pot of this country.
Photo: Jenny Anderson
“The show holds the promise and the wound of America right up next to each other so closely,” says deBessonet, 44. Themes of race, immigration, and celebrity worship in Terrence McNally’s script—real-life figures like Harry Houdini and showgirl Evelyn Nesbit appear as characters—uncannily mirror the news of 2024. One backslapping exchange feels like something from Fox News: “It’s men like you who have made this country great.“ “It’s men like you who will keep it great!”
That the presidential election on November 5 lands right in the middle of the show’s blink-and-you-miss-it two-week run is not for a moment lost on deBessonet and her cast. “The anxiety of the election is very present for people,” she explains. “Every single person in our rehearsal room has a different relationship to those feelings. People are going home from rehearsal, listening to candidates talk about what the country needs and the country’s history, and then coming to rehearsal and being in this work. It’s intense.”
Photo: Jenny Anderson
DeBessonet first saw the piece as a teenager, during its original Broadway run starring Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Marin Mazzie, and an 11-year-old Lea Michele. She fell in love with its combination of heart and history, listening to the cast recording—with music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens—“backwards and forwards.” To the director, it is ultimately about the American dream “that people from all over the world, of all different backgrounds, can come and have the freedom to build a life for themselves with dignity and freedom.” Its evidence is everywhere you look: “Every time I ride a subway car, it’s like, we are people from all over the world,” deBessonet says. “I’m from Louisiana, friend, where are you from?”
Photo: Jenny Anderson
A native of Baton Rouge, deBessonet first made a name for herself at the Public Theater, as the founder of its popular Public Works program, which combines local amateurs and professional actors in lively musical adaptations of classics like The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. In 2020, she joined Encores!, where she had hits with Into the Woods—earning her a nomination for best director at the Tonys after it transferred to Broadway—as well as Once Upon a Mattress, starring Sutton Foster. In between, she directed Annie Live! for NBC and, last summer, launched Arts for EveryBody, a nationwide project that funded theatrical events based on the theme of home across 18 cities.
In September, it was announced that deBessonet would be leaving Encores! to become the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, officially taking over next summer. The first woman to helm that nonprofit theater in its history, her intention there “will be to try to live into the promise of what theater can mean in people’s lives, which includes joy, silliness, and deep intellectual turmoil!” she says with a laugh. “It’s not all one thing.” Given LCT’s record of sprucing up revered classics like My Fair Lady and South Pacific, it feels like a perfect home for the director.
With Ragtime marking her City Center swan song, deBessonet will miss the ready-or-not gauntlet of mounting a show in a matter of days. “There is something great about the shortness of the process that keeps everyone in a constant state of…life is precious, time is fleeting.” And speaking of time, deBessonet must get back to her cast, whom she refers to as “Olympic athletes.”
Whatever happens in the real American story next week, deBessonet’s approach to the one she’s telling on 55th Street is apt in the face of uncertainty: “We are going to hold hands. We are going to jump.”
