Houston Chronicle Interview with Ahrens & Flaherty

IF ever a novel cried out to be adapted to the musical stage, it was Ragtime.

E.L. Doctorow's 1975 best seller, source for the award-winning musical that begins a national tour Tuesday at Jones Hall, evokes a fascinating period in U.S. history. In the colorful and turbulent years at the start of this century, the American melting pot was boiling over. For the privileged Northeastern elite, this gilded age offered seemingly unlimited opportunity. Newly arrived European immigrants and Southern blacks recently migrated to the North struggled against great odds to claim their slices of the American dream.

The collision of these forces would shape the 20th century -- from the civil rights, women's rights and labor movements to popular music and the then-infant film industry.

Doctorow's novel embodied these social forces in its story of three families whose fates converge: the affluent suburban white clan headed by Father and Mother; the Harlem ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. and his beloved Sarah; and the Latvian widower Tateh, who has fled to America with his little girl.

As their lives intertwine, Doctorow's fictional characters cross paths with famous figures of the era -- including industrialist Henry Ford, educator Booker T. Washington, anarchist Emma Goldman, vaudeville star Evelyn Nesbitt and escape artist Harry Houdini.

Doctorow's saga was imbued with the spirit of ragtime, the music that prevailed from the late 1890s through the end of World War I. Characterized by its syncopated melody, set against a steady bass line, ragtime was a lively fusion of African-American and European influences, encompassing jaunty up-tempo pieces as well as lyrical ones.

If Ragtime was a natural for a musical, its scope and complexity also made it an enormous challenge. Producer Garth Drabinsky began work on Ragtime in 1993, and several of his early decisions maximized the musical's potential. First, he made certain Doctorow was involved from the start, with approval over the selection of the creative team.

Next, he assembled top talents: director Frank Galati, who had won two Tonys as director and adaptor of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" ; playwright Terrence McNally, who won Tonys for "Master Class" , "Love! Valour! Compassion!" and "Kiss of the Spider Woman", to write the book; and, for its score, composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens, whose Once on This Island and My Favorite Year had established them as one of Broadway's brightest young songwriting teams.

Finally, Drabinsky gave these artists a two-year schedule that included two workshop stagings before the world premiere in Toronto in December 1996.

From that opening, through the 1997 U.S. premiere in Los Angeles, to the Broadway premiere in January 1998 (as the inaugural show of the lavish new Ford Center for the Performing Arts), Ragtime has thrilled audiences and drawn almost unanimous praise from critics. Most have noted the show's impeccable timing: a musical about the beginnings of this century arriving at its close, as the nation continues to struggle with many of the same issues.

The Los Angeles Times' Laurie Winer may have described its achievement best: "So rich and so heart-rending that you are likely to spend all three hours of its duration fighting back tears, Ragtime is great theater ... the rare musical big enough to address millennial concerns about where we come from and who we would like to be ... (it) has the rare distinction of being timely even as it promises to be timeless."

Among its accolades are four Tony Awards (including best score and best book) and Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards as best musical.

Perhaps even more gratifying to the musical's creators, Doctorow has expressed satisfaction with the adaptation.

"What has been created here," the novelist told the Los Angeles Times, "is just amazing." He found Ahrens' lyrics "so precisely on the subject of the book that I was elated" and praised Flaherty's "endless resource for melody," concluding "the moments they chose for the songs are so astute."

Doctorow later told the Associated Press that while his novel unfolded from a detached observer's perspective, a musical by its very nature could not distance the characters, since they sing their feelings:

"In effect it's an inversion of the book, but what's interesting is that it comes out of the same place as the book does. It registers very clearly the American allegory that's implicit in the book. I'm pleased about that."

Ahrens and Flaherty recalled their audition. After McNally wrote a 60-page treatment outlining how the novel would be adapted for the stage, Drabinsky invited 10 teams (or individual composer-lyricists) to submit four songs based on the outline. Eight responded; their tapes were played for Doctorow and McNally without identifying the songwriters.

"We went after it tooth and nail," Ahrens said. "With six weeks to produce demos of four songs, that actually left just about two weeks for writing them."

Ahrens and Flaherty's quartet of numbers included the musical's title song and "Gliding", a pivotal solo for Tateh. Everyone agreed: The gifted duo had the job.

Along with inspiration, the material had its daunting aspects.

"Every potential adaptation could go a million different ways," Ahrens said. The key was realizing the musical needed to be about the three families and that the many famous people were the secondary characters."

As she worked on Ragtime, Ahrens realized the show's era had much in common with our time.

"It was a time of great change, of conflict between different groups. Then and now, the nature of America is its diversity. We're a country that welcomes immigrants from every part of the world. Then and now, the dream of success attracts people. Some make it, some are disappointed," Ahrens said.

Another exciting aspect for Ahrens was the opportunity, within one show, to write for such a broad range of characters: Jewish immigrants, blacks and the well-to-do whites of 1900 New Rochelle.

"With that incredible opportunity came the responsibility to express each character honestly and honorably. We found that each major figure grabbed us in a different way. Mother, of course, I warmed to immediately because her character is all about a woman finding herself. At the start, she is cool, a withheld character. But in her husband's absence (Father is on an expedition to the North Pole with Admiral Robert E. Peary), Mother decides to take responsibility for the black baby found buried in her yard, and for the infant's distraught mother. That changes her life, sets her on the path to make her own way in the world."

"The immigrant Tateh struck me as a figure much like my father, a photographer whose parents were Eastern European immigrants. He was a little man with great vitality and humor, so I drew on that.

"Sarah was a challenge, because in the novel, she never says a word. You know only that Coalhouse loves her. Yet so much hinges on what happens to her later and on Coalhouse's reaction. ... We had to make the audience understand the pain of this innocent, uneducated girl."

The result, "Your Daddy's Son", is one of the show's most haunting numbers.

Another tricky element was keeping the three families balanced.

"The challenge there was that each story moves in a different way," Ahrens said. "Coalhouse is the most active figure. Tateh's story has a lot happening, but it's things happening to him. Mother's journey is more internal."Ahrens drew inspiration from the novel and McNally's treatment.

"The first few pages of Terrence's outline version introduced the device of having the characters narrate, speaking about themselves in the third person. Those pages became the long opening sequence that introduces all the characters."

The score contains several extended musical sequences that span weeks or months in the characters' lives.

"The show covers so much ground that just getting from here to there was the first challenge. Every song is tremendously hard-working in terms of pushing the story forward -- even the few that don't seem to be. When I look at other musicals now, that run the same length and only tell one story, I have this feeling, `That's not enough!' "

Flaherty was thrilled at the prospect of Ragtime from the moment he worked on the audition numbers.

"I didn't mind auditioning because I was beginning to realize one can be typecast as a composer, just as actors are. After Once on This Island and My Favorite Year, we were not the team people thought of for a large-scale dramatic piece about important American themes."

They are now.

"I'd read the book when it came out and loved it. The period was fascinating, something I had special interest in, since I'd played with a ragtime orchestra in college. In grad school, I worked for the Shubert Archives, as music director of some lost scores of that period, so I was familiar with the era's dance rhythms. This would be a showcase score, letting me work in many different American styles, at a time when I was looking for such an opportunity. (As well as authentic-sounding rags, Flaherty's score includes cakewalks, marches, waltzes and period gospel.) It was the rare opportunity to write the great American musical, something we just had to go for."

When Ahrens and Flaherty began working with McNally in early 1995, the three collaborators thrashed out the show, scene by scene.

"We'd sit in a room together, Terrence would read a scene, we'd play a song and that's how we worked for the first few months, writing it chronologically. The numbers connected in a natural way."

With a vast panorama to encompass, Flaherty said McNally's initial plot blueprint proved invaluable, providing a shorthand to carry the show from one scene to another.

"Though it's this huge epic, the process is a gradual narrowing of focus. It starts with these three large groups: blacks, whites, immigrants. By late in the second act, it is chiefly about Coalhouse, Mother, Tateh -- one representative of each group. It ends up being about the new family that will carry the three original groups into the next generation."

Flaherty said the show's opening notes were inspired by ragtime composer Scott Joplin, whose quote was the epigraph of Doctorow's novel: "Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast."

"Doctorow has said ragtime was all about change. As it turns out, that's what this score is about, too. My assignment became laying down different musical colors for the characters and watching them change as the story progresses. Ragtime is about how these people change each other in unexpected ways."

Ragtime uses a device Stephen Sondheim has employed in "Sunday in the Park With George "and "Into the Woods "-- its score weaving a fabric of related and recurring musical motifs. Fragments of songs recur in later songs, as early themes are expanded and developed into new ones. For one example, note the musical links between Mother's solos "Goodbye My Love", "What Kind of Woman" and her powerful apotheosis "Back to Before".

"Sometimes the connections just came subconsciously," Flaherty said.

Coalhouse gave Flaherty his first opportunity to write for a character who is a musician.

"I was influenced by how Coalhouse would create (music), what chords he would use. His piano solos are influenced by improvisation. I got to play with the differences between the black ragtime of Harlem (as in Coalhouse's Gettin' Ready Rag) and the later Tin Pan Alley style of ragtime that made it mainstream by smoothing the edges a little (the ensemble number Atlantic City).

"Wheels of Dream", the soaring duet for Coalhouse and Sarah, grew out of a specific need in the story.

"We had to have a moment in which Coalhouse expresses to Sarah the desires he believes America will deliver -- which later events will prove are distant from the reality available to him at that time. It had to touch on his hopes for his son, who we knew would figure in the close of the show. It had to be resonant of all that, without telegraphing exactly what is going to happen.

"A lot of the moments we musicalize are those that in a traditional show would be a scene change. We have numbers on boats, on trains, in cars. These are people in transit."

"Writing Ragtime has been an incredible journey," the composer said.

"The feeling of working on it was the same feeling you get when you're having the all-time great love affair of your life. For several years, it's been the center of my experience, on this elevated dreamlike plane. It's hard to let go of it, but finally, you have to. Since finishing writing it, there's a different joy in seeing a variety of actors play the roles, seeing the different things they bring to the show."

Director Galati joined the project early in the writing phase. His goal was to keep the story moving, avoiding the padding sometimes used when shows bump into the reality of stage space.

"I wanted to promise the writers I would never ask them to write more music or create more text, just so I could accommodate a scene change. The goal was for the action to flow across the stage as smoothly as the musical score."

Galati expressed gratitude for the gift of time during the show's development.

"We were fortunate to have two readings with a full cast of actors and singers. By the time we opened in Toronto, we were in pretty good shape. There are two whole shelves of scripts and scores, charting the different versions over the time the show developed."

With this tour, Ragtime reaches a new juncture in its journey. So far, the show has been presented only in a duplication of the mammoth original -- including a multimonth production in Chicago and a tour that played a month or longer in each of five cities. Now, Ragtime will be streamlined for touring and more standard one- and two-week engagements.

Galati and his colleagues are doing several things to make the show lighter on its feet. This version features a cast of 43 (down from Broadway's 58), including a smaller chorus and players who do double and triple duty in small parts.

"Everyone's a bit busier. The concept is an ensemble of storytellers representing America in all its colors and ethnicities, who assume different roles to move it forward. The orchestra is somewhat reduced in size, though with the current musical technology, that's not too noticeable."

Eugene Lee's scenic design for the show is undergoing some major changes. Chiefly, the massive Pennsylvania Station structure that frames the entire stage in the Broadway production is being dropped, as it's simply too heavy and elaborate. A replacement framing device, Galati said, will be "like a child's erector set," fitting the concept of the Little Boy whose narration opens the story.

Most of the set pieces within the framework, where the show's action occurs, will be the same as in the Broadway version -- minus a moveable catwalk. Galati is devising a new way for tycoon J.P. Morgan to "crush" the masses of workers during that key scene.

Most of the staging, however, will be the same -- as will Santo Loquasto's beautiful costumes and Graciele Daniele's acclaimed choreography, which Galati said is "painstakingly re-created."

While the original Broadway cast set a standard of excellence hard to duplicate, Galati expressed satisfaction with this team, which features many players with experience in other Ragtime productions. Its Coalhouse, Lawrence Hamilton, was standby for that role on Broadway and played it on occasion. Jim Corti, the touring Tateh, originated the role of Houdini in the Toronto and Broadway productions. Aloysius Gigl as Mother's Younger Brother and Cyndi Neal as Emma Goldman return to roles they played in the previous tour.

Galati, Ahrens and Flaherty are well into their next project, The Seussical -- an original musical based on the writings of Dr. Seuss.

"It's fun because it's so different," said Flaherty, "yet it also draws on an incredible wealth of exciting American literature. The hard part is distilling the Seuss canon into one evening. While it includes inspired nonsense, there's a lot of common sense and real advice in stories like The Lorax and The Butter Battle Book, which will be part of the show."

If all goes as planned, The Seussical will open out of town in spring 2000, and on Broadway that fall.

Galati also will direct the world premiere of A View From the Bridge, William Bolcom's opera based on Arthur Miller's classic, opening this fall at Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Like Ragtime, that promises to be a powerhouse source for lyric theater