Lear DeBessonet’s new revival of Ragtime, in a quasi-Encores! production at New York City Center, arrives on the eve of a pivotal U.S. election — and the timing underscores the show’s fundamental themes about the promise and pitfalls of chasing the American dream. Though it’s only been 15 years since Marcia Milgrom Dodge’s luminous Broadway revival, the adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s sweeping novel set in the early 20th century has a timelessness that still speaks to us. And the epic nature of the storytelling — with a cast of 32 and an orchestra of 28, under James Moore’s baton — also seems to dictate a more economical nonprofit production without elaborate sets (or even rehearsals of more than two weeks).

Ragtime remains an unwieldy beast of a show, with too much exposition and characters stepping forward to narrate each other’s lives rather than actually dramatizing events (the plot-heavy book is by the late Terrence McNally). Stephen Flaherty’s ambitious score, with lyrics by Lynn Ahrens that veer between poetic and portentous, is heavy on anthemic ballads that have an undeniable power but tend to grow a bit monotonous stacked back to back, like parade floats that each seek to outshine the one that came before. Still, there’s a nice mix of styles — from light operetta for the middle-class white characters to Eastern European folk music for the immigrants to, of course, ragtime for the Harlem-based Black characters.

There’s no denying that DeBessonet has assembled a remarkable cast. This is, hands down, one of the best sung productions New Yorkers will hear this year. Joshua Henry shakes the rafters with his powerful vocals as the tragic ragtime performer Coalhouse Walker Jr., while Caissie Levy shows admirable vocal restraint as a suburban mother who gradually begins to assert herself over the course of the evening. Other standouts include Brandon Uranowitz as an enterprising Jewish immigrant, Ben Levi Ross as a newly radicalized white man, and Stephanie Styles as the pixie-voiced tabloid and vaudeville sensation Evelyn Nesbit.

The Encores-style staging accentuates all the pageant-like qualities of the musical, with many performers holding their scores in binders in choral numbers and a scaled-back physical production where Adam Honoré’s impressive lighting design does a lot of heavy lifting for David Rockwell’s simple set pieces. Add in a compressed rehearsal period, and you get a production full of impressive individual elements that don’t always blend together into a coherent whole. Still, DeBessonet and her team demonstrate why Ragtime is still worth revisiting. At moments of national crisis, it’s good to remember that harmony can only happen when we bring disparate voices together, and that doing so is a public act worth cherishing. And preserving. Great music can grease the wheels of the American Dream.

RAGTIME
New York City Center, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes (1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through Nov. 10