Composer Stephen Flaherty strikes a chord for ‘Ragtime’
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Ragtime” seemed like an impossible dream of a musical for the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama until its Tony Award-winning composer, Stephen Flaherty, pointed out that the award-winning musical comes in all shapes and sizes.
The original 1998 Broadway production had a cast of 52 and a 28piece orchestra, “but there’s actually many different ways to do it.”
Mr. Flaherty suggested “a somewhat new, reduced orchestration” that had been done in Chicago at the Drury Lane Theatre, and that’s the one CMU will use when the show opens Thursday.
The musical adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel and 1981 film is a lush exploration of immigrants and African-Americans seeking the American dream and an upper-class family whose lives become entwined, set against events of the early 20th century.
Mr. Flaherty, a Dormont native, came to CMU in 2015 for the annual junior showcase, in which students perform the works of a single composer. Among the shows to choose from were “Ragtime,” “Seussical,” “Once on This Island” and “Rocky.”
He was on the phone last Sunday between rehearsals for his latest Broadway-bound show, “Anastasia,” with longtime writing partner, lyricist Lynn Ahrens, and book writer Terrence McNally. The first preview is March 23, with an April 24 official opening.
It seems as though there is always a production of “Ragtime” playing somewhere in the world, and Mr. Flaherty is informed about or attends as many as he can, including CMU’s March 3 performance.
“The most recent production I’ve seen was quite successful in London at the Charing Cross Theatre,” he said. “All the actors were actor-musicians, which I had never seen. Evelyn Nesbit played a cello and Harry Houdini played, I believe, a violin, concertina and piano. ... The immigrant characters would play things from Eastern Europe that they could have carried on their backs.”
The “most extreme version” of “Ragtime” was done in Minneapolis in the Women’s House of Detention, he said, where six actors played multiple parts.
“It is about a miscarriage of justice, so the audience really responded to it,” he said.
Audiences respond to “Ragtime” on many levels, including the soaring music that earned Mr. Flaherty a Tony for best original score. It’s a story about how the American dream works for some and is denied others — a message particularly prescient when it comes to the immigrant father who becomes part of the fledgling film industry.
In August 2016, a concert featuring Broadway stars singing songs from the musical was presented on Ellis Island for an invited audience as “an opportunity to live out the narrative of ‘Ragtime’ in this meaningful site,” the announcement said.
Just last month, a production at Cherry Hill High School East in New Jersey made national news when the vice president of the local NAACP chapter opposed the use of the N-word in the musical. Students and supportive parents and teachers argued that the offensive language is necessary to show how racism destroys the lives of musician Coalhouse Walker and Sarah, the woman he loves.
Brian Stokes Mitchell, the musical’s original Coalhouse, weighed in, telling Howard Sherman of the Arts Integrity Initiative, “‘Ragtime’ is about how we get through ugliness, how we talk together, work together, get through it together.”
The school board held a nearly three-hour town hall meeting and decided to allow the show to go on as originally scripted.
While the CMU production is underway, that high school production will open March 10, the same day “Ragtime” takes the stage at historic Ford’s Theatre in our nation’s capital.
“It will be really interesting to see that show play in Washington, D.C., in the Trump era,” Mr. Flaherty said.
When the composer visited CMU in 2015, he worked individually with students such as John Clay III and Arica Jackson, now seniors who will play Coalhouse and Sarah.
“I thought it was a tremendously talented group, and clearly they are doing excellent training at Carnegie Mellon,” said Mr. Flaherty, who attended the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati. “They can clearly sing, but it’s all about character and telling stories. At the event I did, which was a concert of my songs, they were wonderful. Now it will be interesting to see them take on full-fledged characters.”
On Oct. 16, Mr. Flaherty, 56, married his partner of 25 years, Trevor Hardwick. They tied the knot quietly, before what he called “the busy season” for Broadway shows getting underway.
The busy season for “Ragtime” is always in full swing. There are many ways to do it, but certain things remain the same. For example, songs such as “Wheels of a Dream” can coat an audience with optimism and goosebumps.
“And theater should be about dialogue, it should be provocative, and it should get people talking and thinking,” Mr. Flaherty said.
“Ragtime” fulfills all of the above.