Nichelle Lewis on Her Road to Ragtime and What Helps Her Tell Sarah's Story

Nichelle Lewis heard her grandmother’s voice on opening night. Standing onstage at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, playing Sarah in Ragtime, looking out at the audience during the opening number, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her grandmother was there. “I allowed it to happen because, as an actor, you have to be vulnerable and open to those things,” she said. “I just remember really allowing that.”

Earlier that night, the company manager told Lewis he had a ticket for her grandmother. Lewis thought that was strange; her grandmother was in the hospital, and she wouldn’t have gone by herself. After the show, Lewis learned her grandmother had died that night. “It’s crazy. I feel like on opening night she was there with me, and it was one of the most beautiful nights I’ve ever had,” she said. “It just felt so celebratory and filled with hope, which I think is all we need right now.”

That combination of hope and grief is inherent to this revival of Ragtime. “It feels super important to be doing Ragtime at this moment in time,” Lewis said. “I cannot imagine being anywhere else right now. This is the way we can give back to people, and it feels so amazing to be able to do it every single night.”

Reprising her role from the New York City Center production last fall, Lewis and the rest of the returning cast continue to approach each performance with intention. “It’s a moment filled with hope. It’s a moment filled with sadness. It’s a moment filled with dreaming and questioning," she said of the final reprise of “Wheels of a Dream" that closes out the show.

Lewis first encountered Ragtime in college, when a professor suggested that she sing “Your Daddy’s Son” for a vocal technique class. She had to research the song as part of her assignment, but once she started listening to Audra McDonald as Sarah on the original cast recording, she became obsessed with the show.

She sang that same song when she auditioned to play Sarah in Ragtime at New York City Center and left the room in tears. “I remember leaving the audition and telling my friend, ‘Even if I didn’t book it, I still feel like I went in and laid my heart out.’” Initially, Lewis didn’t book the job. Joy Woods did. After the cast announcement, Lewis ran into Woods at a restaurant and congratulated her. Woods, who couldn’t tell her about Gypsy at the time, dropped a hint that the role might actually open up again. Lewis auditioned again; Joaquina Kalukango was announced as the new Sarah. Later, a casting director approached Lewis at a benefit and gave her a heads up that they wanted to bring her in for Sarah again. Before she could figure out what was going on, she got an offer without having to audition again. “If it is for you, it will be for you,” Lewis said. “That story just reminds me of that.”

Now, at 26, Lewis gets to sing “Your Daddy’s Son” on Broadway. Since that college class, Lewis has dug deeper into Sarah, researching the near impossibility of being a Black single mother in the early 20th century, like Sarah would have been. She’s also helped raise a little sister. “The first time I held her in my hands, I said, ‘I will do anything to protect you and to watch over you and take care of you,’” she said. “That interaction with her is definitely what’s helping me tell this story now.”

Lewis doesn’t spend much time at the stage door these days. It takes a lot to be present for the performance she’s giving eight times a week. But when she did talk to audience members after the show, she saw people crying. She asked if she could hug them. She heard what Ragtime meant to them and cried herself. “It was such a beautiful experience to go out and talk to people and see how it affected them,” Lewis said. “Honestly, most of the time, just the same way it affected them, it affected me.”

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