There’s something very trenchant and a little foreboding about watching a revival of Ragtime at this particular moment in history. E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel (later filmed by Milos Forman; the stage musical is better) is effectively a portrait in miniature of the early 20th-century birth pangs of the modern American social compact: how diverse races, classes and economic groups agree to forgo some of their expectations or even rights in order to keep the fabric of the nation viable. At a time when that fabric is being casually, brutally shredded in the forlorn hope of a fleeting electoral edge, you realise how precious all that mutual compromise, sacrifice and forbearance is, and how much is at stake.

Doctorow allows this big picture to emerge from a trio of interweaving personal stories involving a prosperous, rather complacent WASP family, an African-American man wronged past endurance and a determined Latvian-Jewish immigrant. They move through a fluid onstage society which also includes historical figures such as Houdini, Henry Ford, Booker T. Washington and the anarchist Emma Goldman. The musical’s writers Stephen Flaherty, Lynn Ahrens and Terrence McNally keep matters dynamic and evenly balanced: the wide-angle perspective is always nearby, but it is the individual human tales that propel matters.

Thom Southerland, now artistic director of the small-to-medium-sized Charing Cross Theatre which serves principally as a home to musicals, directs adroitly. Setting the evening in an all-purpose timber hall with pivoting galleries, he arranges the action around a pair of upright pianos, which also take the burden of the score, although the cast augment matters on a variety of other instruments. (Christopher Dickins, for instance, accompanies himself as Houdini on accordion, whereas Simon Anthony shows just how redneck his fire chief is with the help of a banjo.)

The material is presented rather than enacted: once again the period musical register is pursued through a kind of sombre vaudeville performance style. I was reminded once or twice of the slightly venomous delivery of “The Ballad Of Sweeney Todd” by the ensemble in Sondheim’s musical. It all coheres nicely, and makes you hope that the second-act number is overly pessimistic when it declares that “We can never go back to before”.

Written for the Financial Times.