"Ragtime to Riches"

 

'RAGTIME' TO RICHES / A STORY WOVEN FROM SCRAPS IS MUSIC TO BROADWAY'S EARS

(Newsday)

Blake Green. STAFF WRITER

THE TITLE of "Ragtime," says E. L. Doctorow, did not come  from the syncopated harmonies that infused the era of his novel's story  -  the swaggering, catchy tunes his tragic character Coalhouse Walker Jr. played on the piano.Rather, Doctorow has what he calls a "private" meaning for what he chose to name his 1975 book: Quite literally, it has to do with rags  -as in shreds of material. He had woven the story from tatters andscraps: ideas, situations and images, as well as people, plucked "from the rag bin of my mind."

    The novel's publication, as it turned out, was only the beginning ofthis early-20th-Century "tapestry," as Doctorow has described his epic tale of three families  -  white Establishment, Eastern European immigrant and enterprising black  -  whose lives overlap not only with each other but with the lives of historical figures as far flung as financier J. P. Morgan, anarchist Emma Goldman, and (to heighten theallegory) illusionist and escape artist Harry Houdini.

    "Ragtime," a best-seller in hardcover and paperback, has been translated into at least 30 languages, is used in high-school curricula, was adapted as a 1981 movie  -  which Doctorow didn't like  -  and, now,has become a lavish, panoramic, ambitious stage production destined tobe Broadway's first musical extravaganza of 1998.

    The critics will weigh in on the show's artistic merit shortly; onSunday, "Ragtime" opens after three weeks of previews  -  and, notincidentally, christens the brand new Ford Center for the Performing Arts, itself created from remnants of old theaters blended with new designs and materials.

    Regardless of the author's original idea of "Ragtime," the strandsof his narrative have been set to music big time.  Composer Stephen Flaherty has said that the first notes he wrote for the musical'sspectacular opening number were inspired not by Doctorow but by ScottJoplin.

    But Doctorow, whose permission to make the musical from his bookcarried the condition of approval of the show's creative team  -Flaherty, lyricist Lynn Ahrens, librettist Terrence McNally, directorFrank Galati and Graciela Daniele, who did the musical staging  -  seems pleased with the result of this latest pastiche, going so far as to deem it a "major contribution to American musical theater."

    Recently, in the mid-afternoon of an overcast winter day, thebearded writer escorted a visitor to the front door of his Victorianhouse on one of Sag Harbor's side streets and, with the twinkle that frequently visits his eyes, said, "I've heard people muttering `Porgy and Bess'  -  and I like that."

    Doctorow and his wife, Helen, bought this house after the success of"Ragtime," the book; and "in a room I have up in the attic," he has worked on his five novels published since. ("Waterworks," the ninth, is the most recent.)

  But it was their primary residence, a turn-of-the-century house atop a hill in New Rochelle  that was the inspiration for the home of the middle-class family in "Ragtime." That beginning was quickly entwinedwith so much more from the "rag bin": an old photograph of a Jewish peddler Doctorow saw long ago, a story he heard about a German named

Kohlhass who precipated a national crisis, a newspaper article he'd read20 years before about a poor woman who abandoned her baby in the garden of a wealthy family  -  as Sarah (played by Audra McDonald) does in New

Rochelle. "That's what writing is," Doctorow says: "putting things together that never had any reason to be put together before."

    He doesn't consider his most popular novel his best, but addsquickly, "I'm happy with the book; it has a nice kind of impudence to it"; and he's proud that its particular marriage of fact and fiction"historically turned out to have opened up things for fiction in this country."

    At the time he began writing it, the 66-year-old author says,speaking quietly from an overstuffed chair in his living room, "I had this sense fiction had been put on a reservation, diminished in scale.Writers had come indoors and wrote about what went on in the bedroom andthe kitchen. My sense was that the novel should be reckless, all embracing, take on the world, using everything: legend, myth, biography,

confession, dreams, hallucinations, the mutterings of mad people  -anything was legitimate material for fiction. History was up for grabs."

    The idea of using historical characters in fiction was "nothingnew," he continues, citing Napoleon in Tolstoy's "War and Peace," but "I wanted to expand this with a kind of ironic spin."

    Regardless of his novel's intentions and expanded horizons  -  thestuff of literary debate over the liberties he took with some of hischaracters  -  Doctorow insists that music played little part beyond theprofession of Walker, one of the novel's main characters. If he'd

sometimes arranged for period music to be played as background for readings he did from "Ragtime," this was "only to make it moreinteresting for myself," he says  -  and perhaps offer a chance for himto work with his daughter Caroline, a singer and guitarist who'sappeared often on Long Island.

    "Critics have said that the book assimilates ragtime music, but ifit does it was nothing intended," Doctorow says. The book is in four parts, like a musical rag, because, he explains, "during my writing, I

felt the movement required breaks." Yet Doctorow is willing to drawcomparisons: "The sense of history marching forward is the steady, unchanging beat of the left hand, while the struggles to escape are the improvised syncopated melodies [of the right hand]." And on one of the

novel's first pages are composer Joplin's instructions: "Do not playthis piece fast. It is never right to play Ragtime fast."

   It was left to producer Garth Drabinsky, head of Livent, a relativenewcomer to the Broadway scene, to grasp the possibilities of transferring "Ragtime" to the musical stage. Observing that he saw the story as a historical sequel to"Show Boat," the period musical Livent revived to great acclaim several years ago, Drabinsky convinced Doctorow to let him tackle the project.

    The novel's rights in hand, Drabinsky turned to playwright Terrence McNally, also a part-time Long Islander (Water Mill), who won a Tony as librettist for Livent's megamusical, "Kiss of the Spider Woman."

    Sipping tomato juice in a restaurant around the corner from his Greenwich Village apartment, McNally recalls that he had read "Ragtime"when it was published, "but I don't read novels with an eye to making amusical from them. When Garth called, my instinct was, `Yeah, I guess

that could be done,' but I wanted to reread it.

    "After a couple of chapters, I could really see the musical

possibilities. You have to hear music in a piece."  He laughs. "If

someone had asked me to make a musical out of `Pygmalion,' I'd have said, `No way.' I could never see those people singing. But these I could. And so I wrote a treatment, and he [Doctorow] was pleased with the tone of the piece, the point of view."

    Doctorow says he had many concerns about the transition to thestage, beginning with the voice of the novel.  "It keeps its distancefrom the characters," he explains, some of them given only genericnames: "Mother, Father, The Little Boy, The Little Girl, Mother's Younger Brother."

    "It's not the nature of musicals to keep their distance from

characters," Doctorow says he realized, and perhaps the best indicationof his pleasure with the musical is that he appears delighted thatMcNally gave "The Little Boy" the novelist's own first name: Edgar.

(Doctorow's father, owner of a music store in the Bronx, "liked a lot ofbad writers" and named him for Edgar Allan Poe, his son says, consoling himself with the belief that "at least Poe was our greatest bad writer.")

    The author's main criticism of the Milos Forman film was that thestory had been abridged and drained of much of its topsy-turvy sense of lives spinning out of control. And in a musical, says Doctorow,explaining his reservations, "when people are singing and dancing on stage, that takes a lot of time and means the librettist is faced with even more of a problem of compression."

    McNally worried that "the book is so dense and populated that everychapter could be turned into a full evening's entertainment; almost every sentence suggests a dramatic situation. So I could only hope that I had instinctively made the right choices."

    What first impressed Doctorow about McNally's treatment was that thelibrettist "felt it was important to emphasize all three stories"without diminishing the sweeping issues of racism, immigration,terrorism, politics, the cult of celebrity and social change. As in thebook and the film, the dramatic climax of the musical comes when Coalhouse Walker (played by Brian Stokes Mitchell), the ambitious black pianist driven to terrible deeds, occupies the Pierpoint Morgan Library

with his band of radical sympathizers, including Mother's Younger Brother (Steven Sutcliffe). An example of the novel's intricacy: Mother's Younger Brother happens to be in love with Evelyn Nesbitt(Lynnette Perry), the beautiful and infamous "Girl on the Swing."

    McNally  -  who himself created a play, "Master Class," around areal figure (Maria Callas)  -  says he had no problem with Doctorow's intermingling of famous historical people with fictional characters."It's one of the things that's so delightful. Houdini and Emma Goldmanobviously met people in life. Famous people don't just interact with other famous people."

    Certainly not everything could be captured in the stage production

-  Doctorow mentions the omission of the feeling of society's surrealityas well as of the "strain of satirical eroticism that runs through the book." But, he insists, "I never resented any of the various reductions.

They were very astute, and they still teased out the American

allegory."The musical, he says, shows "honor and devotion to the book, whichthey treated as their Bible." And thereductions rang both ways.

Doctorow says he suspects his objection contributed to the disappearance of a musical number, "Show Business," recorded on the CD while the production was being tried out in Toronto. "It was totally

incongruous," the writer says. "Just for starters, the phrase wasn't even in currency until the '40s.

Much like the novel, the production became a process of parts addedto create the whole. "When I wrote the treatment, I didn't know who thecomposer and lyricist would be," McNally says. Flaherty and Ahrens, who were invited to submit music along with other candidates to write the score, were selected because Doctorow felt their music also "understood the spirit of the book."

    "Because we all had the same vision, there was never a serious artistic difference," says McNally, whose experience in the theater hasn't always been this way. He speaks of the production as "havingthree authors [himself, Flaherty and Ahrens] based on a fourth [Doctorow]"; the goal is that "it should seem as if one person wrote it."

    Rather than seeing himself as a collaborator, Doctorow prefers"navigator," and says he believes that "I was good for them at thebeginning," passing along notes to producer Drabinsky after he attended the first workshop and after visiting rehearsals and performances in Toronto, Los Angeles and here in New York.

In the process, he made a discovery about the theater's own special drama.

    "I thought they were neglecting J. P. Morgan for the longest time,"he recalls. "I'd suggest scenes not even necessarily from the book thatgave him a larger role because a lot of children will see this and they don't know who Morgan was. You need him early if it is to make sense that Coalhouse would take over the Morgan Library.

    "They figured out how to do that in an almost entirely nonverbal way," says Doctorow, impressed with a musical number, "Success," during which the corpulent Morgan (played by Mike O'Carroll) arrogantly strides

across a catwalk suspended above the heads of the impoverished Lower East Side immigrants, conveying the contrast of the powerful andhelpless. "That's what you can do on the stage," says "Ragtime's"author, smiling.

Copyright 1998, Newsday Inc.