Interview from the Cleveland Plain- Dealer

Redefining the Form

Composer-lyricist team for 'Ragtime’ creates music that fits the story

Tuesday, March 28, 2000 By Tony Brown

Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens are the chameleons of Broadway composer-lyricist teams. If you were to try to classify them on the basis of "Ragtime," which opens a three-week tour stop in Cleveland tonight, you’d have to say their style is exactly what the title says: Scott Joplinesque, two-step rag.

But then listen to the score of their first Broadway hit, "Once on This Island" (1991), and you’d imagine they write in a Calypso vernacular. Cue up a recording of their adaptation of the movie "My Favorite Year," and you’d hear a brassy, big-bandish sound. And when their next big project, "Seussical" - a musical celebration drawing on 16 of the late Theodore Geisel’s "Dr. Seuss" books - begins previews this summer in Boston and opens in New York next fall, it will be a combination of "rhythm & blues, rock ’n’ roll and neo-Spike Jones," Flaherty said. What’s the deal? What is the Flaherty-Ahrens style? "I think the important thing in creating musicals is making sure that each piece has its own identity, its own personality," composer Flaherty said in a telephone interview from his apartment in New York.

"Each score should sound of a piece but you shouldn’t be able to confuse shows. Our shows relate to one another if you look closely, even if at first glance it is hard to believe there are connections between 'Once on This Island’ and 'Ragtime.’" The hallmark of a Flaherty-Ahrens musical is the pair’s ability to write songs that fit and therefore help tell the story.

Nowhere does this work better than in "Ragtime," the 1998 Tony Award-winning musical adaptation of the best-selling E.L. Doctorow novel. The Tony was sweet for Flaherty and Ahrens because the musical was put together while the producer, Livent, was going bankrupt. "The creative experience of doing 'Ragtime’ was the greatest artistic experience I’ve had in the theater industry," lyricist Ahrens said in a separate interview, speaking on the phone from her apartment in New York. "We were, like, right in the middle of it all [the Livent debacle], but, creatively, it was a high point for us."

Flaherty, 39, and Ahrens (somewhere in that age vicinity but reluctant to say exactly) remember being high school students when they read and became immediate fans of Doctorow’s historical novel in the weeks after it burst on the literary scene in 1975. "When I read it, I thought it was one of the greatest books I ever read," Ahrens said. Hailed as a revolutionary collision of fiction and history, the novel used a highly reportorial style to mix a microcosmic series of family portraits with a sweeping view of the era of rag, the early part of the century just past.

It was the age of escape artist Harry Houdini, industrialist Henry Ford and anarchist Emma Goldman, all of whom figure prominently in the book. The challenge for Flaherty and Ahrens was figuring out how to capture the flavor and spirit of the novel, but to keep the show from being longer than about 2½ hours. "There is such a wealth of wonderful characters and moments in the novel that made it incredibly difficult to distill the novel down," Flaherty said. "We had to be ruthless. There are wonderful passages and characters that couldn’t make it to the stage. Late at night, when we were working on it, we would say it’s too bad we can’t make this a miniseries, a theatrical event like Nicholas Nickleby,’ something with that kind of sweep." The result was a musical that, like the novel it was adapted from, redefined the art form. "It was not a traditional story, and it is not a traditional musical," Ahrens said. "In a traditional musical, you have the structure of two couples, a musical couple and a romantic couple. We have not so much a couple-couple structure as a tapestry." The musical adds heart to the book, which Doctorow deliberately wrote as an emotionally elliptical report. It’s dangerous, though, to try something different with a work whose creator is still alive and creating; he might hate it. "Fortunately, he was thrilled," Flaherty said. "He was around some during the creative process and gave us the most elegantly and eloquently composed sets of notes I have ever received. Mostly, he felt that taking the tack we took, while decidedly different, added to what he had already done. It’s like the opposite side of the same tale. Both are interesting and valid, and both have had their own lives."

The Broadway production captured much of the book’s sweep with its huge set and technical achievements. A metal bridge high above the stage, for instance, slowly lowered financier J.P. Morgan. When immigrants surge toward him, the bridge crushes them. "They get crushed by that which they want to be," Flaherty said. That effect could not be duplicated on the tour. But the same folks who worked on the original New York production - director Frank Galati, choreographer Graciela Daniele and set designer Eugene Lee - found alternatives that work just as well if not better, Flaherty and Ahrens said. In the J.P. Morgan scene, for instance, the banker enters, not on a bridge, but via railroad handcar, running over the poor who want to embrace him. "It’s slightly smaller, slightly scaled down, but not as much as I thought," Ahrens said. "I think, in many ways, it’s a little better. The actual story, the emotional content of the story is so front and center, it’s quite beautiful and focused."