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Ragtime has all the stuff Broadway audiences should eat up: A plot that hinges on murder, vengeance and injustice; a story whose moral seriousness glows like polished veneer; a number of fantastic voices onstage; the requisite number of “My dreams have died” songs. It’s an ambitious sprawl of a story, adapted from E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 historical pastiche about the early, heady days of the twentieth century. And in this revival—the show first appeared in 1998—director and choreographer Marcia Milgrom Dodge and her 40-strong ensemble cast do their damnedest to keep things moving forward with the zeal and energy of a well-tuned engine.

So why does the whole shebang come off like the product of a too-efficient assembly line? Neither Terrence McNally’s mishmash of a book nor the sometimes-syrupy songs (by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens) do the show any favors. And then there are the inherent problems of Doctorow’s novel, a puffed-out chest of a book that uses its characters as flattened symbols of racism, intolerance, hypocrisy, and disillusionment. It groans under its own lesson plan, and the musical follows suit.

In the show, as in the novel, historical figures—among them Evelyn Nesbit (Savannah Wise), Emma Goldman (Donna Migliaccio), and Booker T. Washington (Eric Jordan Young)—rub shoulders with fictional mortals, often only tangentially. Their job is to anchor the story in its particular time and place. The real drama swirls around the members of a well-to-do New Rochelle family who, random white people that they are, don’t even get names: There’s Mother (Christiane Noll), Father (Ron Bohmer), and the Little Boy (Christopher Cox, who adroitly keeps his performance from being too cute). Mother also has a Younger Brother, played by Bobby Steggert, a lad who also just happens to be an explosives expert. The lives of the Family family become entwined with those of a struggling young black couple who are fortunate enough to at least have names: pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. and his wife-to-be, Sarah, played by Quentin Earl Darrington and Stephanie Umoh, just want to build a life together with their young son, although fate and injustice intervene. Meanwhile, Tateh (Robert Petkoff), a Jewish immigrant struggling to support himself, and his young daughter (Sarah Rosenthal) occasionally drift through to shiver visibly in their threadbare coats and bemoan the hardships of life in the New World.

No one in Ragtime is having many laughs, and it’s a small miracle that this production is as vibrant and as colorful as it is: The spare, utilitarian trusswork of the set is offset by Santo Loquasto’s costumes—bowlers, sweeping duster coats, ruffly pastel day dresses. And the performers at least try to make their characters three-dimensional, which in some cases means adding a dimension that wasn’t written in the first place: Darrington’s Coalhouse, in particular, makes a believable transition from gifted, hopeful citizen to beleaguered, embittered outsider.

But the story itself just has too many cogs, wheels, and levers for mere mortals to operate properly. None of the characters is onstage long enough for us to truly connect with their stories. The best the actors can do is to keep shoveling coal into the show’s hungry maw of an engine. Ragtime is an attempt to capture an out-of-control, early-twentieth-century America rattling toward an unforeseeable future. By the time that, deep into the second act, Noll’s Mother takes the stage to pour out her saga of prefeminist disillusionment in song—“We can never go back to before,” she laments, her nostrils flaring earnestly—the future can’t come soon enough. The story told in Ragtime starts in 1906 and ends sometime before 1914, yet by the time it ends, it seems a whole century has passed: It’s too late to go back to before, to the days when every song on Broadway didn’t have to be an empowerment ballad. — Stephanie Zacharek