Ben Levi Ross is having the kind of Broadway run that can make a young actor seem suddenly everywhere at once. The 28-year-old performer has been nominated for a Tony Award for his featured role in Ragtime, after winning Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards in recent weeks and helping push the revival to 11 Tony nominations overall.
Ross plays Mother’s Younger Brother, the wealthy young man who becomes radicalized as the musical unfolds. The production is still drawing sold-out audiences eight times a week, and the cast is now preparing to perform at this year’s Tonys ceremony.
For Ross, the recognition lands on a role and a show that he has already been living with for months. He also appeared in the off-Broadway Ragtime production at New York City Center in late 2024, extending a connection to the material that reached back to his teenage years, when he was obsessed with the original Broadway company’s Tonys performance of the show’s prologue.
“I just keep saying to myself, ‘Even though you’re tired, take everything in, take every second in, keep your eyes open, look around,’” he said. “Because this is rare, and this does not happen all the time.”
The reaction around Ragtime has been just as striking. The revival claimed five Drama League awards last Friday, and Ross said the run has created a sense of being part of something unusually visible for a musical that is also politically and emotionally direct. “It’s really rare that you get to be in a show with this many performances that are being recognized — not only by their fellow actors, but recognized by the community at large in this way,” he said.
That visibility matters because Ragtime is not a safe, escapist piece. The musical, which originally debuted on Broadway in 1998, is set in the early 1900s and deals with racism, classism, politics and the immigrant experience in America. The production opened last fall and has continued to fill seats, a sign that audiences are responding to a story that asks a lot from them and gives them little room to look away.
Ross sees that as the larger lesson of the revival’s success. “The success of this revival of ‘Ragtime’ should tell producers that you can have a successful show that is nuanced, that is deep, complex, that faces the ugly truths in our society — and that when all of those things come together correctly, it can be a commercial hit,” he said. “Those things don’t have to live on the fringes of the theater.”
The Tony nominations have also created a practical payoff for the ensemble. “Because we’ve had five performance nominations, you can be pretty certain that all five of us will be highlighted in some way with our performance,” Ross said. For a show that has already moved from late-2024 New York City Center staging to a fully mounted Broadway revival now heading for the awards stage, the next step is simple enough: show the audience and the industry why this production has stayed in the conversation.
