ASCAP Interview

Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty:

Take A Journey Through The Past

With Broadway's Ragtime Team

By Jem Aswad

The songwriting team of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty has had such an incredible year that I find myself consoling them in advance for the let-down they'll feel next year. Their latest musical, Ragtime, is one of the hottest and most successful shows on Broadway, they were nominated for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards (for their songs and/or score for the 20th Century Fox animated feature Anastasia), and a Grammy (Best Musical Show Album) for Ragtime: The Musical - and the much-improved original cast recording wasn't even released at the time. To top it all off, Tara Lipinski skated to a medley of songs from Anastasia during her gold-medal Olympic performance.

This extremely dynamic duo reacts to their good luck with the same bubbly, modest enthusiasm with which they seem to react to everything.

They're very much partners, not just finishing each others' sentences but actually collaborating on them, embellishing the other's comments with the same keen editing that doubtless goes into every note of music and word to hit the page. For example, when asked if they both write both lyrics and music

"We do." (Lynn, primarily lyricist)

"We have." (Stephen, primary composer)

"We have, but not together. I can sit down and write a song, but I don't dare to write a theatre score because I'm not an educated composer.

"But she has great ears...

"I'm like an editor for him...

"And that's the fun of collaboration...

"Bouncing ideas off of each other..."

"I think it's very important in partnerships -- and relationships, actually -- to keep it fresh, and keep trying new things," Stephen continues. "I think every show we've done has been entirely different from the one before. The first, Bedazzled, was a fantasy, Lucky Stiff was a farce, My Favorite Year was a traditional musical comedy, Once On This Island is really an Afro-Caribbean dance piece, and Ragtime is a very dramatic musical. But at the same time, you have to be aware of when you're ready to try those things. Ragtime has over 50 actors, over 30 instrumentalists, and 35 songs -- it took awhile to work up to that."

It's all a long way from the songwriting workshop where they first met in 1983.

As far as "first big break" stories go, Manhattan-born/New Jersey-bred Lynn Ahrens' is pretty good: "My first job out of college was working at an ad agency, and I used to bring my guitar into work and sing during my lunch hour," she says. The advertising agency just happened to be the place where Schoolhouse Rock was born. "One day [Schoolhouse co-creator] George Newall came over and said, 'Hey honey, we hear ya write songs. Would ya like to try one for the show we're producing?' I did, and the first one I wrote -- which I think was the "Preamble To The Constitution" -- went immediately on the air, and suddenly I was a professional songwriter"

Lynn was well on her way to one of the "eleven or so careers" she had before her current one in theatre. In addition to writing and singing many Schoolhouse Rock hits -- including "Nouns," "No More Kings," "Interplanet Janet," and other songs that educated a generation -- she became a copywriter and creative supervisor at that same ad agency, leaving after several years to become "a full-time freelance songwriting person." She wrote music for Captain Kangaroo, which led to producing and creating four education-oriented television programs, including an Emmy-winner called H.E.L.P. She's also done "tons" of jingles and voice-overs over the years, and that's where Lynn was at on the fateful day in 1983 when she and Stephen met.

Flaherty brings an unusual and diverse background to the equation. He began playing piano at 7, and wrote his first musical at 14, which was about, "Uh, Siamese twins and faith-healing -- hey, I'm from Pittsburgh!" he laughs, as if that explains all. "It was just a silly show that some friends and I did in high school. But the fun thing was that each of the songs was in a different style, so there was a rock song, a country song, a gospel song, a show tune. I had done a lot of different listening when I was growing up, and I studied classical piano and composition and orchestration. But my first love was theatre, and I always knew that that's what I wanted to do. Now, getting there took many different side trips -- I worked in Nashville right out of college, I played for a ragtime band, I played in a couple of jazz clubs -- not well! -- and then I came to New York and played in a lot of pits for different Broadway and Off-Broadway shows.

He probably emerged from just such a pit to walk to the songwriting workshop on that fateful day in 1983.

"We had finished the first year of the workshop, and we were choosing who we wanted to write with for the last assignment," Lynn says of that day. "I had noticed Stephen and I thought his songs were great, but I'd never met him -- he wrote his own music and lyrics, so I assumed he wanted to work on his own. Well, I was standing outside, and he walked by, but he was so shy that he shouted from halfway down the block, 'You wanna work together?' (laughter) So we wrote one not very good song together, but it was really fun, and we decided to try to find a musical project to work on."

They began work on a musical adaptation of the hilarious 1966 Dudley Moore / Peter Cook film Bedazzled -- and even presented an early version in an ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop -- but "we couldn't get the rights, and we recently couldn't get the rights again." Instead, the pair began in 1986 with The Emperors' New Clothes (a children's show for Theaterworks USA) and followed with their first produced musical, Lucky Stiff, which debuted Off-Broadway in 1988 and won the Richard Rodgers Award (as well as a Helen Hayes Award for Best Musical after its run in Washington, DC). Once On This Island debuted in 1990, and moved from Playwrights Horizons to Broadway, winning two NAACP Theatre Awards, as well as the Olivier Award for Best Musical of 1995 after its London production. Their next outing, My Favorite Year, was an adaptation of the 1982 film in collaboration with book writer Joseph Doherty.

The pair began writing songs for Ragtime in the summer of 1994, but not before they had to audition -- via demo tape -- for the job. "They gave us six weeks but we only had 11 days," Ahrens says breathlessly, "and the days weren't even together -- one here, one there, Stephen was going to England and I was in production for another show, it was insane! But out of that desperation came a great demo."

"We were so excited about the project," Stephen says. "We really loved the novel, and we figured we had to go for it. And in those 11 days, we created four songs, three of which are still in the show: the title song, "Till We Reach That Day," and "Gliding." The creation was so quick that we had no time to second-guess ourselves -- all of that urgency and energy is in those songs."

Of course, that was just the beginning of a three-year process of turning a vast and vastly complex book into a coherent musical.

"Hey, I did American History in three minutes!" Ahrens laughs. "Of course, Terrence McNally was our librettist, and we all worked very hard together to condense or to simplify or just decide what to keep. (The pair gives big shout-outs to the rest of Ragtime's creative team, including Choreographer Graciela Daniele, Director Frank Galati, and of course Producer Garth H. Drabinsky). For the next six or eight months that's what we did. Then we had a first reading, worked on the next set of changes for the next few months. Then another reading, assessed, listened to the audience, got a sense of what we needed to do. Then a six-week workshop -- we had a very long development period, and little by little, the show emerged, and we went into production in the fall of '96.

Ragtime opened in Toronto in 1996, but the pair kept "rewriting and revisiting and revising" so that, when the show debuted in Los Angeles last summer, two significantly different productions of the show were playing simultaneously.

"Musical theatre is a live medium," Stephen says. "So it doesn't make sense for us to develop the music in a studio. Seeing how an audience reacts is much more preferable."

Lynn chimes in, "We were constantly taking songs out and writing new ones we liked better, and a lot of songs we kept refining or added a new chorus or a new bridge or changed the arrangement. Of course, there were times when I honestly could not remember which songs were in which show!" she laughs, "but we didn't lose a lot of complete songs.

"Stephen gives me this incredible present every time we have an opening night," she says. "It's a notebook with sheet music of all the songs that didn't make it into the show, and they're in order, like, 'This one didn't make it out of your living room,' 'This didn't make it past the first reading.' For the first show we ever did, the book was about two inches thick, and for this one it was much thinner."

E.L. Doctorow, the author of the Ragtime novel, didn't see or hear a note until the second reading. Was that reading perhaps one of the most nerve-wracking times of their entire combined careers?

"YES!" they reply in perfect unison and harmony. "He's one of the sweetest, funniest men you'll ever meet," Lynn says. "But he can be very dry. And for what felt like forever, he just sat there [makes stock-still posture]. But then I saw him laughing at the baseball song, and then another point I saw him smiling, and then at another point I thought I saw him crying, and I began to relax a little bit. He became more involved later on -- he would see a reading or read a version of the script, and he would gives us notes. We always listened to him, and we often didn't agree, but he had some great ideas. Writers are very solitary, and I think he was very taken with the idea of collaboration, and how we all fight and scream at each other to write a musical."

Hardly basking in their success, the pair just completed their work on the original Broadway cast recording album, and are now reading scripts and assessing what their next project will be. They recently completed some new songs for a direct-to-video sequel to Anastasia (interesting how animated features have also become a living art!), and they also continue to work apart: Ahrens still works on the odd commercial, and before Ragtime, she wrote the lyrics and book of Madison Square Garden's annual production of A Christmas Carol, with composer Alan Menken and co-librettist Mike Ockrent. Flaherty contributed incidental music for Neil Simon's most recent play, Proposals.

But what may be most fascinating about this duo is the way that their previous careers and lives have influenced the work they're doing now, from Stephen's experience in a ragtime band to Lynn's extensive background in subtilely educating listeners.

Best of all, they still like everything they've done. "There are things I would do differently," Stephen says, "but they're accurate representations of who we were that year."

Again completing her partner's thought, Lynn chimes in, "Make that those years!"