Interview from Dallas Morning News

08/15/99

A pleasing Musical Score

Songwriting team faced challenges with 'Ragtime'

By Lawson Taitte / The Dallas Morning News

It's a miracle that Ragtime sounds so fresh and up to date. In creating the score for one of the most ambitious Broadway musicals ever, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens had to please a lot of powerful people with a stake in the show - including producer Garth Drabinsky, novelist E.L. Doctorow and playwright Terrence McNally. They also had to write songs appropriate to a cavalcade of characters and to the period in which the show is set, 1906 to 1915.

"The challenge, obviously, is that there are so many different types of musical influences in the score," says Mr. Flaherty, Ragtime's composer. "There are also three major stories to tell. But I tend to like doing that kind of show. I consider myself a storyteller first."

Mr. Drabinsky, since deposed as the head of the now-bankrupt production company Livent Inc., had the vision of putting Mr. Doctorow's 1975 novel onstage. He hired Mr. McNally to do a treatment, then picked the Flaherty-Ahrens team from several who auditioned.

The show debuted in Toronto and opened on Broadway early last year. Mr. McNally won the 1998 Tony Award for best book, the Flaherty and Ahrens team the Tony for best score. (The show narrowly lost the best-musical award to the more populist The Lion King.) The Dallas Summer Musicals brings the touring version to the Music Hall at Fair Park for a three-week run beginning Tuesday.

The novel offered a panoramic view of American history by mixing fictional characters with such historical figures as Harry Houdini, Henry Ford and Booker T. Washington. The lives of three imaginary families intertwine: a businessman-explorer and his vaguely dissatisfied wife, an African-American ragtime composer named Coalhouse Walker Jr. and the young woman who won't tell him she has borne his child, and a Jewish immigrant struggling to provide for his young daughter.

"Each had to be specific and speak in a specific way," says Ms. Ahrens, the show's lyricist. The Flaherty-Ahrens team proved how ingeniously it could bring all this to the stage in one of the four audition songs it initially wrote - now the show's much-lauded prologue, "Ragtime."

After Mr. McNally has the wealthy couple's small son launch the show with the novel's opening sentence, Ms. Ahrens sets up an old-fashioned, gentler America for the white, suburban characters: "The skies were blue and hazy. Rarely a storm. Barely a chill." Mr. Flaherty sets these words to a jazzy tune that seems innocent at first. But as groups of black and Jewish characters enter, the music grows more vivid and varied. This inventive beginning immediately establishes both the conflict and the cooperation among the various groups. It also sets up the show's overriding theme of America as the great but flawed Melting Pot. "I tried to make it seem to our ears the way ragtime would have sounded to the people in the period, downgrading the happy-go-lucky part, emphasizing the music's more dangerous side," Mr. Flaherty says. He says it's "a tricky thing to balance" composing in old forms such as ragtime with preserving his own originality.

"You want it to be your score, with your musical personality in every measure."

Mr. Flaherty's songwriting partner believes he succeeded.

"It's a funny thing," says Ms. Ahrens. "Stephen's music is so original, but it's traditional, too."

It's hard to define the Flaherty-Ahrens sound. It can be bouncy, with a rhythmic flair that comes as much from the words as the notes. But it's definitely lyrical, even romantic - with some big climaxes more reminiscent of real opera than the pop operas such as Miss Saigon that the public loves so much."A musical by its nature is a heightened art form," Mr. Flaherty says. "Putting it in a place and time removed from the present helps create something that's not just reality in the day-to-day sense."

In their previous hit, Mr. Flaherty and Ms. Ahrens had made a score based on older genres very much their own, too. Once on This Island dances to a calypso beat, but nobody else could have written it.

When you stop to think about it, many of the best Broadway scores of the last 30 years flirt dangerously with pastiche. Think of Chicago, with its 1920s Jazz Age style. When it first opened in 1975, it was dismissed as too derivative. The enormously successful 20th-anniversary revival revealed it as Kander and Ebb's most original and successful score.

Talking with Mr. Flaherty helps you to understand how he skirted the danger - with enormous intelligence and craft.

"Mother only sings in 3/4 time, characteristic of parlor music of the period. At first her songs are almost like operetta, but by the end she is belting them out. She has become a modern woman," the composer says.

That kind of conscious planning pervades the whole musical.

The writers, for instance, decided to give all three families equal attention - unlike Milos Forman's 1981 film version. As Ms. Ahrens points out, the movie concentrates on the Coalhouse plot.

They couldn't, however, do complete musical justice to all the novel's many characters. So they decided they had to relegate the real historical figures to the background. They ditched the audition song designed to be sung by Evelyn Nesbit, the performer who became notorious when her husband shot and killed her lover, the famous architect Stanford White.

Even though all three fictional plots are now front and center, Mr. Flaherty says the biggest challenge for him was writing for Coalhouse Walker.

"I'm this white guy from Pittsburgh," he says. "It was also my first time writing for a character who was also a musician and a composer."

He obviously met the challenge, and Ragtime's critical and popular success has definitely put Flaherty and Ahrens on Broadway's A-list of songwriting teams. Maybe not up there with Rodgers and Hammerstein yet, but on a par with Kander and Ebb at least.

Simultaneously with Ragtime, they were working on the score for the animated Anastasia. ("God gave us the opportunity to write a pop tune for once in our lives, and we were on the charts for 20-some weeks," Mr. Flaherty says.)

The pair has been commissioned to write a new TV musical for The Wonderful World of Disney - the subject still a secret. And they are in Toronto preparing the workshop of their new Broadway-bound show, The Seussical.

Wouldn't you know it, Mr. Flaherty and Ms. Ahrens are using all kinds of musical styles for this adaptation of the Dr. Seuss books - from vaudeville to country and rhythm and blues. But you can bet that The Seussical, like Once on This Island and Ragtime, will sound like pure Flaherty and Ahrens anyway.