Newark Star-Ledger interview with Lynn Ahrens

LYRICIST LYNN REMEMBERS "RAGTIME"

by Peter Filichia

And the winner is ... ‘Ragtime!’” Lynn Ahrens, the lyricist for the acclaimed 1998 musical, has heard those words before. There was a Drama Desk Award for Best Musical, and a Tony Award for the score that she wrote with composer Stephen Flaherty. But Ahrens again encountered this five-word phrase on Monday night, when the National Broadway Theatre Awards gave “Ragtime” its award as the Best Musical to tour the country this past season.

This is the same production that will open a week-long run at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark on Tuesday night.

The Best Musical Production award actually went to SFX Theatrical Group, who’s producing the tour. But Ahrens and Flaherty each received a prize for Best Song, too, for “Till We Reach That Day.” It’s the anthem that ends the first act, when the blacks, Jews, and WASPS of 1906 express their longing for a better life.

“The funny thing is,” said Ahrens, “is that ‘Till We Reach That Day’ was one of the four songs we wrote when we auditioned to get ‘Ragtime.’ Producer Garth Drabinsky did an extensive audition process. He gave us and eight or nine other teams a chance to write the score, but wound up giving us the job. Of the four songs we wrote, three — ‘Gliding,’ ‘Ragtime,’ and ‘Till We Reach That Day’ actually wound up in the show.”

Ahrens didn’t expect to write Broadway musicals while growing up in Neptune. “But years ago,” she says, “my mother did take out a tape of a family dinner made when I was four. And on it is me singing my own new lyrics to ‘Frosty the Snowman.’ “And that,” she says with a laugh, “was probably the last lyric-writing I did until I was in Neptune High where my friend Pam and I would drive around thinking up dirty lyrics to popular songs.”

But on a high school date, Ahrens discovered Broadway when a date took her to “Fiddler on the Roof.” “My jaw just dropped, and I felt like God smacked me,” she says

. Still, she went to Syracuse University as a Journalism major in the Newhouse School. “But once I got out,” she says, “I took the first job I was offered — a secretary in an advertising agency.”

However, the agency represented the children’s TV show, “Schoolhouse Rock.” “And because I often brought my guitar to work to play during my lunch hour,” she says, “ someone thought I was musical and asked if I wanted to write songs for the show.”

She did — for 10 years. Buoyed by that success, she then joined the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop, where she met Stephen Flaherty. “Our first show,” she recalls, “was a new version of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes,’ done as a fractured fairy tale, about a teenaged emperor who needed to feel accepted by his peers.”

After writing two musicals for Broadway that didn’t see the light of day, she and Flaherty went made their off-Broadway debut with “Lucky Stiff” in 1988, and their Broadway bow in 1990 with “Once on This Island.” Their next show, “My Favorite Year,” based on the 1982 film, was not a success in 1992, but their following it with “Ragtime” made her and Flaherty Broadway players.

Ahrens says she read “Ragtime” when she was a teenager, and was impressed by it. But in addition to the main conflict between Coalhouse Walker, a upwardly mobile black man who is sabotaged by white bigots, she was impressed by the story of the WASP mother who’s at first content to be housewife, but later finds that she has a mind of her own, and will pursue a new and different life.

The lyricist says she likes to acknowledge her New Jersey background when writing — “even though I spent most of my time in Neptune doing things like twirling a flag for the Girls’ Athletic Association,” she says. “We have a trip to Atlantic City in ‘Ragtime,’ and in ‘Seussical,’ I included Shark River Hills.”

“Seussical” closed on Sunday, after a six-month run and a loss estimated at over $10 million. When Ahrens picked up her trophy on Monday night, she told the crowd in a mock-jaded voice, “You close a show on one night, and you win an award the next. It’s the show-biz,” she added, citing another song that she and Flaherty wrote for “Ragtime.”