Nearly a decade after “Dear Evan Hansen” put him on the theatrical map, Ben Levi Ross is moving audiences to tears with a chilling performance in a musical that, as both he and director Lear deBessonet have put it, “holds the promise and the wound of America so closely with each other, next to each other.”
The Los Angeles-born actor and singer stars in the Broadway revival of “Ragtime,” now playing at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York. He plays a character identified by the show’s young storyteller, Little Boy (Nick Barrington), as Mother’s Younger Brother, a member of an upper-class white family that includes his sister, Mother (Caissie Levy), and brother-in-law, Father (Colin O’Donnell), in New York circa 1902.
Despite his life of privilege, Younger Brother feels confined by the monotony of his day-to-day routine, especially when his efforts to win the affections of vaudeville performer Evelyn Nesbit (Anna Grace Barlow) fail.
It’s after he is introduced to a Russian American activist, Emma Goldman (Shaina Taub), that he becomes politically engaged and determined to serve as an ally to the local Black community, including musician Coalhouse Walker Jr. (Joshua Henry) and his wife, Sarah (Nichelle Lewis).
