Rag Dolly

I recently watched Zach Barr (aka And Now They Sing)'s new video on The Pirates of Penzance, a slight re-make of their older video covering the 1980's production, now with extra commentary on the 2025 Pirates! A Panzance Musical. In both, but especially the newer one, their point is that it doesn't take a completely new script to reinvent the customs around the staging and design of any show. The 1980's Pirates made only minor book and music changes, the way they brought a fresh take on the piece was in the casting, vocal styling, and energetic physical performance, making Pirates the one Gilbert & Sullivan operetta to be considered a proper "musical" and performed by theaters that wouldn't think to do opera.

In the video, they also touch on what it means to democratize a show, to seperate it from a traditional sense of staging that is reinforced not by copyright law but by convention. They argue that the current (well, current starting in the 80's) push by producers to fund jaw-dropping megamusicals with something that you will only see on Broadway - be it effects or star-cast actors - starves regional and community theaters of contemporary shows that are acessible.

For example, take any of the Disney shows - Lion King or Aladin or Frozen - kids and families want to see these shows on Broadway because that's a recognizable character and story, and they're exited to see the special effects used to re-create the visuals in the movie. Of course, being popular movies and musicals, the producers are prepared to make a killing off the licensing rights. But what is Frozen without the Broadway visuals? Or Back to the Future? Or King Kong or Life of Pie or Death Becomes Her? These shows depend on budgets so big, once they move into licensing circles the theaters are left with two choices: struggle to re-produce the effects with a much lower budget, or pick a lesser-known work knowing that it will get less attention. That's why community theaters are still doing Grease and Footloose and the same classics, they are actually approachable from a company with a lower budget.

Now you might be saying, "Well those are IP musicals, they have to use stage tricks to match the animated visuals", and I say to you: "no they don't!!!" There are plenty of IP musicals that have reasonable scopes. You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown; Seussical; Addam's Family; and the most recent: Spongebob!

For those who haven't seen it, the Spongebob musical has really smart design! They approached the show with a lower budget (just like Seussical out-of-town) and made all the costumes and sets out of found-objects to give the sense of a bright and colorfull underwater city - possibly made from trash. Pool noodles, inflatable toys, sponges and mops and all sorts of junk make up the houses and plants. The costumes are clearly representative of the characters without trying too hard to match the literal animated designs - like official Disney-bounding!. Yes, the Broadway set is incredibly impressive and has a huge screen in the back, but despite all the money put into it, you can easily tell how it can be scaled down to a reasonable budget. You look at the set and think "I could do that". And even if no, your company's budget couldn't do that, you could do something really close!

I think of all this in regards to Rag Dolly, because the goal is to make a show that is approachable to license, not one that does well on Broadwway. These days, those are total opposites. Rag Dolly should be a show that inspires the company, director, and designer to think out of the box, to do what they can with a minimal budget, and give them the permission to do so. The conventions we create about how a show should be staged put enormous pressure on smaller companies to produce the show people expect - not just in text but in visuals and staging too - and deviating from that is very scary for a company with small margins. Shows like Spongebob and Seussical set a low barrier to entry, they are in conversation with low-budget productions instead of completely shutting them out to appeal to producers.

Like those shows, Rag Dolly is literally about imagination and wonder, as well as how impactful it can be to make a story out of nothing but rags, and that should inspire creative low-budget interpretations, not lock them out.

Additional note on Spongebob: it isn't perfect in this regard. There's a momment in the song BFF where Spongebob shows off "the incredible stretching sofa". It's a small gag in the Broadway, but this is a standout moment where the book demands a specific unique prop that is pretty tough to find/replicate, which ultimately could be replaced with any other similar silly gag. I've seen a couple school and community productions struggle with this bit! And it feels unecessary to require it in the licensed version. Stuff like this, going through with a fine-toothed comb, is what properly prepares a show for licensing.

I always get a kick out of pointing out where in the Rag Dolly fish scene you can see General D.'s giant hand rising out of the water. Camel kicks at it a couple times, but all it really does for the story is establish that A) General D. is more powerful than they know and B) he's the one ordering the fish to attack them.

But it's also really dumb.

This has stumped us since we first read the scripts. What? Why? There isn't any great metaphor, and many other lines in the scene serve the same purpose or could. Most importantly, why use so much of the budget in a production already pressed with a lot of special effects to make a giant hand seen for about a minute

But now. Four years later we discover: they didn't.

The hand. Is from. The 1983 Timothy Mason script for Raggedy Ann and Andy.

The Mason script does a lot of weird stuff with scale to get the idea across that the dolls are smaller than people. Some scenes use regular people and toy dolls, some use children playing the dolls, some are fully within in the doll world with giant props, and some scene have the human characters on stilts so they tower above the actors playing the dolls. It's a bit of a mess, visually. You can probably guess now why a giant hand prop was made for this production.

Near the end of Act 1, Raggedy Ann sings Rag Dolly as she misses Marcella and doubts Andy's choice to work with the mobster villains of the plot to make it big in showbiz. After the song, the mobster Frankie Malone shouts from offstage "She'll sing that in the show, get her!" and the ginat hand reached out from the wings to grab her, a la a vaudville cane hooking an actor off.

And people ask me why the 1983 production wasn't sucessful.

Now we don't have proof. But tell me. Seriously tell me if you think it's crazy to assume they already had the hand from the year before and wanted to get some use out of it. This is what's so frustrating with this show, you can literally trace the decisions that were made out of obligation to the production and not Gibson's intent for the story. That giant hand made it all the way to Broadway.

As soon as we discovered it, too, we went, "wait, if this wasn't really meant to be in here, why is it still here?" and talked about replacing it with the giant eye initially introduced at the beggining of Act 2. Sure, this meant moving it's introduction to a moment in General D.'s first scene, but a small price to pay for a coherent visual theme of his all-seeing-eye introduced early and established throughout the plot. From a design standpoint too, see above, it was a weird single moment that required a prop very difficult to source or make. Most Russian productions just put him and his henchmen following them in the ocean or on Fire Fins’ back. One production has General d water skiing with Wolf swimming ahead!

A point is often made, even by the actors themselves, that one of the driving nails in this show's coffin was the scale of the venues not matching the intimate staging the playwright had intended. As stages and audiences got bigger, the characters movements became more over-the-top and circus-like. To make that point, here is the size and seating for every theater venue that Rag Dolly played in in the 80's:

• The Egg - December 1984/5
  • Venue Name:
  • Stage Width: 39 feet
  • Seats: 982 (they actually just let you look at all the rental info including scale drawings on their website and I think that's pretty rad.)
• Moscow - January 1986
  • Venue Name: Natalia Sats Children's Theater (I'm assuming main stage)
  • Stage Width: Unavaliable
  • Seats: 1,100
• Kennedy Center - August/September 1986
  • Venue Name: Opera House
  • Stage Width: 100 feet
  • Seats: 2,347
• Broadway - October 1986
  • Venue Name: Nederlander Theatre
  • Stage Width: 86 feet
  • Seats: 1,235

Why, pardon me, the actual hell, would you do a show like this in a 2K seat theater. This show about how even the humblest beginnings can inspire hope and joy. About childlike imagination and whimsy. With a script that can be very introspective and often dry in its humor. Why. Dear Gods Why.

While working on the script, William Gibson wrote that he set Rag Dolly 50 years in the past. Which, in 1984, was 1934. Despite the playbill vaguely placing the setting as "Sometime Earlier This Century".

(At least the setting is not inacurate, we'll get to that)

But I believe that the show was very purposefuly set in 1984, the middle of the US's Great Depression (what I suspect will someday be called the "first one").

William Gibson was 20 in 1934. He graduated High School and was in an out of college during the Great Depression. He was politically active, joined Socialist and Communist youth groups, wrote extensively in his autobiography A Mass for the Dead about how political unrest alienated him from his comfortably conservative parents. "There was not a year thereafter in which I did not feel endangered by my country, I lived within its mouth like Jonah". The 1930's were not picked at random.

Nor was the date picked for accuracy. Marcella Gruelle, whom the main story is based on, died in 1915. Raggedy Ann was patented earlier the same year, and the first book published in 1918. By the 1930's the Raggedy Ann franchise was in full swing and already had at least 16 books and even more stories published as newspaper serials. To those unfamiliar with the history (unthinkable) the idea of "Sometime Earlier This Century" seems accurate enough, but there's more dramaturgy to investigate here.

The playbill and script agree that the show takes place in New York, by the river. Specificaly the Hudson, with lines like "backwards night, moon's coming up over the Hudson" and an old staging note that The Palisades should be visible in the backdrop. However, Gibson also wrote in stage directions that Marcella and her father live in a "tipsy shack".

If this was in a more rural setting, a "tipsy shack" could be charming, romantic. But anyone who lives in a big city knows that you see plenty of "tipsy shacks" and people usually don't have kind words for them or the people who depend on them for survivial. I fully believe that Marcella and her father were intended live in a homeless community, called "Shanty Towns" or "Hoovervilles" in the time period. They were very common in large cities like New York (as today) and Central Park contained several.

Ok why does this matter? Is it weird to insist a character was written to be homeless?

Class struggle is a very constant theme in the script itself. Poppa is down to his "last nickel" and Mommy leaves them for a rich man with a nice car. General D. the opportunistic army recruiter offers a meaning for your death where your life has none. But Marcella faces more than immidiate struggle, she faces complete hopelessness. Poppa is unlikley to find work ever, he spends half his money on insufficient healthcare and the other half on booze, the biggest war in history is still in the public conciousness and rising facism creates whispers of another one, stop me when it sounds too famililar.

Gibson was aware of all of this right at the time when he was a politicaly active youth. He set his show in this time, he added these specific nods to shanty towns and the poverty the characters live in. And yet the 1984-6 productions paid little to no attention to it. The set is no "tipsy shack" it takes up the entire width of the stage and on Broadway was a full box-set with walls and shelves and furniture. An entire context was removed. And I'm sad about it, because I think that's exactly what makes it so relevant today. Marcella isn't just dealing with the short-term personal grief of her pets dying and her mother leaving long ago, she is already carrying the weight of this communal grief she has been born into, grief the people around her deem as too mature for her to understand. But she reads headlines, she hears adults talk, listens to the radio, she, like kids today, is not ignorant. Even if she doesn't fully understand, it is enough to sink her into a long depression.

We're never just dealing with one thing. I think that's why the show has come back now rather than any other time, the young people are more than aware of the hurt in the world and feel their grief is not taken seriously. Things are as bad or possibly worse now in the US than in the 1930's, understanding the context in which Rag Dolly was placed is the key to empathizing with the story and allowing the depth of the nuance to flourish.

Anytime you’re adapting a piece of existing media you have two options, tell a story in that world or tell a story about that word. Bare is has a hundred stories inside the world of Barbie, but there is only one Barbie movie. A movie about what it means to be Barbie, what it means to be a toy or a woman or a toy shaped like a woman. The Lego movie does less fourth wall breaking but it was never about what the animated characters are experiencing, it’s about a kid wanting to be creative and his dad who just wants to glue everything down. It’s what Boop wanted to be before vastly misjudging what people like about Betty Boop or the cartoons in the first place.

The Raggedy Ann musical isn’t a story in Raggedy Ann’s world, it’s about what Raggedy Ann’s world is for. About escapism and hope and how powerful it can be, but how specific and personal it is. About what it means to be created to bring joy and then thrust into a situation beyond your reach.

Who is Barbie if she isn’t a bimbo or a feminist icon? What are legos if you aren’t being creative with them? Who is Raggedy Ann if she isn’t smiling? Does joy and hope and laughter really have the power to cure everything? Rag Dolly says "no, but care and love and understanding do". Cheeriness vs compassion. Telling vs listening. This is what made me fall in love with this musical. I love media where the message is to encourage people, especially kids, to understand how to ask for what they need emotionally, especially when it's less about cheering up and more about listening. Marcella is going through a hell of a time, but she can't stand anyone to tells her she just needs to smile. She needs someone to hold her hand and give her just enough hope to face her demons (and her mother) herself.