Ragtime Review/ Interview

Nashville Tennessean

Musical Melting Pot

By Kevin Nance staff, The Tennessean

published: March 12, 2000

'Ragtime' combines three cultures to create one American story.

Lawrence Hamilton and Lovena Fox star as the fiery ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. and his lady-love Sarah, whose stories bring them into sometimes violent conflict with whites in Ragtime . The average American musical travels in a straight line, taking its hero and/or heroine from the beginning of the story to its end with a minimum of digressions and distractions.

The formula: Introduce a main character. Give him conflict. Resolve it. Lower the curtain.

But Ragtime is not your average musical. This extraordinarily ambitious stage adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's panoramic 1975 novel, arriving Tuesday for a two-week Broadway Series run at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, uses multiple storylines and characters in an attempt to do nothing less than capture the spirit of an era.

Ragtime shows how three different families -- made up of middle-class whites, African-Americans and European Jewish immigrants, respectively -- collide (sometimes violently) and gradually blend in turn-of-the-century America. Along the way, we meet a parade of real-life historical figures, including Henry Ford, Harry Houdini and Booker T. Washington.

In short, Ragtime bites off a huge hunk of American history. For the creative team, it took some serious chewing.

"Going in, we knew that it would be a real structural challenge," says lyricist Lynn Ahrens, who worked alongside composer Stephen Flaherty, playwright Terrence McNally and director Frank Galati. "Most musicals have one main story and one subplot, but we had three main stories and a whole bunch of other satellite stories. The trick was to give emotional weight to each one of the main characters while maintaining that tapestry effect of the novel. But I guess we somehow pulled it off."

. So they did. Ragtime was one of the two "event" musicals of the 1998 Broadway season, competing against Disney's The Lion King for Tony Awards. Ragtime ended up winning four Tonys -- best musical score, best book, best featured actress (Audra McDonald) and best orchestrations -- but losing the big one, best musical, to its rival.

But to become a Tony contender, the creative team had to make a great many choices at the outset. If all of the events of Doctorow's novel had been dramatized onstage, Ragtime would have been four or more hours long; as it is, the show clocks in at a jam-packed two hours and 50 minutes.

"With a novel, you have time to digest things at your own pace," Ahrens says. "You can read as long as you want, put it down, go back, go forward, whatever you want. In the theater, you have a finite time on that stage. There's no time to develop things in a leisurely way."

'Hybrid music'

Doctorow was adamant that the spirit of his novel -- with its panoply of characters and events constantly intersecting and reconfiguring in an almost kaleidoscopic manner -- be kept intact. That meant giving full weight to the three main narrative threads, including those of Mother and Father, who struggle with Victorian morality and gender roles in ways that prefigure modern feminism; of Tateh, the Jewish immigrant who struggles to make a living before stumbling into the motion-picture industry; and especially of Coalhouse Walker, the young black man who, after his car is vandalized by racists, launches a terrorist campaign that eventually finds him barricaded inside the New York home of J.P. Morgan.

It also meant stage time for an array of secondary characters, including Brother, the young white man who eventually joins Coalhouse's band of insurgents; Evelyn Nesbit, the vaudeville star with whom Brother becomes infatuated; and Emma Goldman, the left-wing political activist.

According to Flaherty, the author was not satisfied with the 1981 film adaptation directed by Milos Forman, viewing it as too direct and too perfunctory in its treatment of secondary characters. As part of Doctorow's agreement to grant the rights for a stage adaptation, he had writer approval. "He wanted to see the writers' take on the material," says Flaherty, who worked with Ahrens on the Caribbean musical Once on This Island and is collaborating with her and Galati on The Seussical, a new Broadway musical based on the works of Dr. Seuss. "The film version of Ragtime is much more linear, whereas the novel has several major storylines and characters, and he wanted to make sure that was preserved in the stage adaptation."

Executives at Livent Inc., the show's original (and now bankrupt) Canadian producer, first hired McNally, the Tony-winning playwright of Master Class, Love! Valour! Compassion! and the script for Kiss of the Spider Woman. Then they approached several different songwriting teams to write songs "on spec," eventually settling on Flaherty and Ahrens. Finally they brought in Galati, the Tony-winning director of The Grapes of Wrath. "At the time, I was searching for a subject for a musical that I wanted to be an American piece based on American musical styles," Flaherty says. "So when Ragtime came along, it seemed like the perfect thing."

As it happened, Flaherty was a fan and student of ragtime music. He had been a member of a ragtime orchestra at the University of Cincinnati and, during his graduate school years at New York University, had worked for the Shubert Archives, which he calls "treasure trove of period music from the turn of the century to the late 20s." Once he began working on Ragtime, Flaherty developed a plan to have the music mirror the story in the way it depicts the gradual assimilation of the three different cultures. As the show progresses, the "white" music begins to combine with the ragtime and spirituals associated with the black characters as well as the Eastern European and Hebrew melodies associated with Tateh.

For example, in a second-act sequence called "New Music," Coalhouse's love duet with Sarah becomes a trio with Brother, then swells into a large ensemble number that conveys how the lives of the black and white characters are infiltrating each other. "That creates a kind of hybrid music," Flaherty says. "And that's what the show is about: assimilation, taking all these totally separate elements and mixing them together to create what we know as America. Even on first hearing, the audience is able to grasp that. It's one of the ways that music can clarify things on the stage."

'Creative discussions'

That still left the matter of giving Doctorow's novel its due while creating a theater work within reasonable time limits. "Basically it was a matter of three writers sitting in a room hashing things out," Ahrens says. "You just try and simplify the story enough so that it's clear and emotionally direct without being simpleminded."

Were there arguments? "I would call them 'creative discussions,' " she says with a hint of humor. "I was usually the one who favored cutting things, while Stephen wanted to keep everything. Part of it is that he tends to fall in love with his songs before I do. For example, there's a duet between Evelyn Nesbit and Harry Houdini that we loved, and it ended up on the first cast album, but it was cut from the show."

One scene from Doctorow's book that was relatively easy to omit: the passage in which a romantically obsessed Brother spies on Evelyn Nesbit from inside her closet, then stumbles out in what might be described as a state of extreme erotic excitement. "That was one of the things we had a lot of 'creative discussions' about," Ahrens says. "But we always knew that that scene would be hard to dramatize without getting arrested."Bongo Java moving across the river to roast coffe

Perhaps their greatest obstacle of all was the financial collapse of the Toronto-based Livent and its top executive, Garth Drabinksy, in 1998. The future of the touring productions of Ragtime was in doubt until they were taken over by Pace Theatrical Group. The new tour has been scaled down, using a simpler set and fewer performers, though it still has a relatively large cast of 43. But Flaherty notes that the original creative team -- including himself, Ahrens, McNally, Galati, choreographer Graciela Danielle, costume designer Santo Loquasto and lighting designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer - was kept intact for the new version.

"I caught this production in Pittsburgh and was amazed at the clarity of it," Flaherty says. "The scenic elements on Broadway were so gargantuan, and the cast was slightly larger, but I think the storytelling in the new version is much clearer, much more vivid. By not having all the scenic elements that we had in New York, it actually focuses the action probably better. This version is something we're all very proud of."