It is just the sound of a piano, heard on a standard audio cassette tape, but the strong, bedrock rhythms are there. And before long, a boyish voice begins, “In 1902 Father built a house … “
It is October, 1994, two years before the premiere of “Ragtime,” and at this point there is only the music, coming from a hastily assembled taped performance by composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens. But the basic strains of what was to become the complex, captivating opening sequence of the Broadway musical are in place. The essential voice of a landmark three-hour production has been found.
The pianist here is Flaherty himself, a self-described aficionado of ragtime music who, with his partner Ahrens, had been looking for “an American-themed piece” to develop. With two musicals (“Once on This Island” and “My Favorite Year”) behind them, they were one of 10 individuals and composer/lyricist teams that, in an unusual (and costly) process, were invited by producer Garth Drabinsky to submit four songs for possible use in a stage musical to be made from E.L. Doctorow’s novel “Ragtime.”
From its beginnings, “Ragtime” had been a story, set in early 20th Century America, that cried out for music. “Even before the book was published (in 1975),” Doctorow recollects, “when I gave a few readings from the novel, I would bring a musician with me to play popular songs at certain intervals. There’s so much music from that period that it seemed natural to use them.”
Still, when Doctorow met with Drabinsky and associate producer Marty Bell in 1993 for lunch at the Russian Tea Room in New York, he was not sure he would approve of the plans for his book. “So I asked Garth the important test question: What did he think of the (1981) movie of `Ragtime.’ When he said he was `greatly disappointed’ in it, he passed the first part of the test. And when I asked him for his impressions of the book, he spoke very well about it.”
With Doctorow’s permission, and with the assurance that the author would approve major creative appointments for the project, Drabinsky, then at his peak as founder and chief executive officer of the theater producing firm of Livent Inc., went forward with his plans. He had an eager associate in playwright Terrence McNally, who had adapted another tricky novel, “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” into a Tony Award-winning musical for Drabinsky, and who now happily volunteered to write a first draft of “Ragtime.”
Even at this early stage, McNally’s work was a masterful transfer from page to stage, introducing the many real and fictional characters who were to become a part of “Ragtime’s” multi-layered story.
When Flaherty and Ahrens read it, they decided to go with McNally’s concept, which basically adopted Doctorow’s original narrative technique. “It’s such a dense novel,” Ahrens says, “and there are so many different ways to interpret the material. But we were awed by Terrence’s writing.”
In 11 days, Flaherty and Ahrens managed to complete four songs, assemble a small cast of Broadway singers and record the music.
Soon after their demonstration tape was delivered to Livent, Drabinsky asked Doctorow to hear the 10 audition tapes that had been submitted for the “Ragtime” project.
“I went up to Toronto (Livent’s headquarters) to hear the music,” Doctorow says, “and after a while, I thought, `This isn’t going to work.’ Then at the last moment-they were very shrewd about this-Garth and Marty played the Flaherty/Ahrens tape. What I was hearing was basically the opening number for the show, and they had it. They had the spirit of the piece right. It was all there.”
But how was one to use that music in theater imagery? How did one set the stage, introduce the themes and characters, start off the story with a burst of visual surprise to match the musical energy of the song?
Drabinsky’s choice for a director to answer these questions was Frank Galati, the Chicago-based teacher/writer/director/philosopher who had won a 1990 Tony for his staging of another big American novel, Steppenwolf Theatre’s production of “The Grapes of Wrath.”
In McNally’s draft, and in the Flaherty/Ahrens demo tape, the story had been introduced by a small boy, the musical’s narrator, standing next to and listening to the piano of Coalhouse Walker Jr., the black ragtime composer who is the story’s protagonist.
But Galati was after something bigger to “wind the clock of the story.” He wanted to establish all the many characters of the story in one swirl of invention. “I didn’t want to just bring on the characters from off stage,” he says. “I started thinking about a stereoscope, which creates a three-dimensional picture when you look through the eyepiece at its two photographs. There is a mention of it in the novel, and I thought that, yes, maybe this could be our gateway into the past. We could have the cast revealed as in a photo. Maybe this would bring our audience into the story.”
Galati went first to Eugene Lee, the show’s scenic designer, and put forth the stereoscope image. Could we, Galati asked, set the stage with “a gargantuan version of a stereoscope” that would immediately catch the viewer’s eye? The answer from Lee was, “That’s a smart idea. Yes, we can do that.” And he did, in the first of many stunning stage pictures the designer was to create for the musical. The giant stereoscope rises out of sight, and, with the sound of a doorknob clicking and in a flash of light, a little boy appears and runs to the front of the stage to discover a real, life-size stereoscope. Picking it up and looking through it, he sees his family and friends posed for a group picture in front of the house that Father had built in 1902 in New Rochelle, N.Y. Then, as Lee describes it, “There is a flash from a photographer’s old-fashioned camera, the house just sort of drifts away into the sky and the two-dimensional photograph is replaced by the three-dimensional cast, standing there in an open space, ready to move.”
To make the story and the music move, Galati had the invaluable aid of choreographer Graciela Daniele (“Hello Again,” “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”), whose volatility Galati found a perfect complement to “my more conservative nature.”
“I went over this powerful music with a pianist and my assistant,” Daniele remembers, “building on the pictures that were already in the song-`ladies with parasols, fellows with tennis balls,’ things like that.”
Gradually, from this exploration and from long talks with Flaherty and Ahrens, emerged the concept of what Daniele came to call “the three tribes”: the people of New Rochelle, the people of Harlem and the immigrants. “This is what inspired me, pushed me forward when I got on my feet and started figuring out how to move 60 people around,” Daniele says.
At first, there is just the white-bread New Rochelle family; but when Father says, “There were no Negroes,” a phalanx of Negroes, led by Coalhouse Walker Jr., charges onto the stage; and, a few seconds later, when the residents of New Rochelle sing, “And there were no immigrants,” a mass of immigrants led by Tateh, the Latvian artist who is another central character in the musical, take their positions as they whirl around to the rhythms of the music.
The tensions between the three tribes are put into movement when they suddenly halt and confront each other eye to eye, a moment that Daniele acknowledges owes a lot to the Jets-Sharks confrontation devised by director Jerome Robbins for the early minutes of “West Side Story.”
But at the end of this 10-minute prologue, all three tribes-plus Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, Booker T. Washington and all the other real historical characters who have stepped up to introduce themselves to the audience-come forward to join in the exultation of the song’s final shout: “The people called it Ragtime. Ragtime! Ragtime! Ragtime!”
“It was paradise,” says Daniele of putting together this number. “I adore Frank. He was the poppa, I was the mama, we were all one happy family, working together. It was one of the greatest experiences of my career.”
On rehearsals and workshops, the opening sequence changed, expanded, introduced new elements. The single piano played by Flaherty in the demo tape gave way to the full-scale orchestrations of William David Brohn, who used a 28-piece orchestra, complete with six fiddles, a tuba and an authentic banjo, to give the prologue a big, symphonic sound. “I heard that music in a two-piano arrangement they were using in workshops,” Brohn remembers, “and it sucked me in right away, just a like a giant vacuum. Right out of the box, I knew what I wanted to do. It was to be an overture that would set the ground for everything to follow, and I gave it everything I had.”
As late as the musical’s Chicago opening in November in the Ford Center for the Performing Arts/Oriental Theatre, Flaherty and Ahrens were still tweaking the score. Yet, though Ahrens estimates there were “a thousand versions” before the Broadway opening late last year, the basic structure did not change.
As time went on, however, “Ragtime” became an increasingly lavish (and expensive) show. Before its opening in Toronto, it consumed six weeks of technical rehearsals, including one week alone for the prologue.
This free-spending era came to an abrupt end last August when Drabinsky was dumped by Livent’s new management, which three months later filed for bankruptcy protection in a financial mess that is still unfolding.
“Ragtime,” however, rolls on. The opening number, a key to the musical’s success, continues to deliver its jolt of excitement to audiences in New York and here in Chicago.
“It’s funny,” Daniele says, “I went to see the show a few days ago and even now, after all this time and all these performances, my God, I’m still very moved by the opening. There’s something very basic about its appeal. I feel it’s like looking at my own family album. It’s so real, so beautiful, so wonderful.”
BY THE NUMBERS
10 OTHER GREAT MUSICAL OPENERS
Moss Hart, a director (“My Fair Lady”), playwright (“You Can’t Take It With You”) and consummate Broadway professional, once said that an audience usually decides within the first 15 minutes whether it is going to like a show or not.
Musicals, big and expensive creations, work especially hard to generate that early, irresistible energy for their customers; and this often means coming up with a rousing opening number. Many of the prime American musicals of the last 60 years, up to and including “Ragtime,” have taken off to glory from these first few minutes. Here are some of them.
“Oklahoma!”1943. Music by Richard Rodgers; lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Director, Rouben Mamoulian. Choreographer, Agnes de Mille.
What a radical concept. No chorus girls, no lavish scenery or costumes. Just this: Offstage, the opening notes of “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.” Then, enter Curly, the cowboy, in full cry as he sings his exuberant tune to an old woman churning butter in a farmyard. It was fresh, original and enchanting.
“West Side Story,”1957. Music by Leonard Bernstein; lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Director/choreographer, Jerome Robbins.
In the musical theater’s supreme dance sequence, the Jets and the Sharks skitter about, then slash across the stage in the accelerating rite of a gang rumble.
“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” 1962. Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Director, George Abbott (and, uncredited, Jerome Robbins).
In a famous case of show-doctoring during a troubled out-of-town tryout, Robbins inserts “Comedy Tonight,” an opening number full of burlesque and vaudeville shtick that tells the audience this is going to be a funny show. It works; the show becomes a smash hit.
“Fiddler on the Roof,” 1964. Music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick; director/choreographer, Jerome Robbins.
Tevye, the humble milkman, enters with his dairy cart and salutes the symbolic figure of a fiddler on the roof in his little village of Anatevka. In song, Tevye tells the audience about his people and the “Tradition” that binds them. As he recounts the roles of the mamas and the papas and the sons and daughters and rabbis and matchmakers, they burst onto the stage, joining in a joyous folk dance that provides a joyous insight into the time, character and nature of the events to follow.
“Cabaret,” 1966. Music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb. Director, Harold Prince. Choreographer, Ron Field.
The seductive “Wilkommen,” coming from the painted lips of the gleeful Master of Ceremonies and a line of sleazy chorines, stunningly pulls the audience into the glittering, depraved world that the musical will explore in the next two hours.
“1776,” 1969. Music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards. Director, Peter Hunt. Choreographer, Onna White.
A spotlight picks out John Adams, prickly statesman from Massachusetts, complaining about the sluggish pace of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Interrupting him, however, is a massed chorus of “Sit down, John,” which is revealed, in full stage light behind Adams, as the Founding Fathers, posing for their famous portrait. American history meets show business, in a stroke of theatrical magic.
“A Chorus Line,” 1975. Music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Edward Kleban. Choreographer, with Bob Avian, and director, Michael Bennett.
A long, seamless beginning scene introduces in song and dance the cast as they audition for a new show. Gradually, the aspirants, revealing themselves in bits and pieces as they rehearse the jazz and ballet combinations, are winnowed down to 17 dancers who form a line, surge forward in perfect lock step, and then, thrusting their resume photos in front of their faces, present themselves to the audience. This sudden, breathtaking image presents both the “real” and the “show business” lives that the musical will reveal.
“42nd Street,”1980. Music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin. Director-choreographer, Gower Champion.
Near the end of the brassy overture, a series of offstage voices excitedly announce that the producer Julian Marsh is putting on a new show. The music shifts from full pit orchestra to rehearsal piano, the sound system picks up the precise click-clack of tap-dancing, and the curtain slowly rises, just a foot or two, to show dozens of dancing feet, tapping away in one complex combination after another. Gradually the curtain rises to reveal the whole scene, a stage full of dancers in full tap, which lets us know that this is going to be an extravagant and imaginative spectacle.
“Titanic,” 1996. Music and lyrics by Maury Yeston. Director, Richard Jones. Choreographer, Lynne Taylor-Corbett.
“In Every Age,” sings the great ship’s designer, there is a marvel to behold; and here, in front of the Titanic’s gangplank, the assembled passengers of first and second class and steerage gather one by one to bask in the marvel of this unsinkable luxury liner. At last, they are all there, singing in a climactic massed chorus, “Godspeed Titanic.”
“The Lion King,” 1997. Music by Elton John, lyrics by Tim Rice. Director, Julie Taymor. Choreographer, Garth Fagan.
As with the original Disney animated feature, the stage version opens with a spectacular gathering of the animals at Pride Rock. In one incredible costume after another, the actors parade on stage from the wings and the aisles until they are all in place to salute the birth of Simba, the lion prince. The scene was an animation sensation in the movie, and it’s a sensational bit of live theater in the stage production.
