By Broadway, it was not the show we had really written or the show we intended.”īut they had a chance to rework the show for a tour and for a later production at a children’s theater and that version has become popular among theaters around the world. “The show you saw on Broadway is not the show we wrote either. Seuss, struggled on Broadway but has become one of the team’s most produced shows. A lot of ‘Once on This Island’ and ‘Seussical’ was like that. With the title song, the music that gave way to an era, the music came first. He said Ahrens felt passionate about the character “and wanted to do deal with this final moment and she wrote this piece of poetry and handed it off and I wrote the music to it. Take the “Ragtime” song “Back to Before,” performed by the character of Mother late in the show as a statement of her growing sense of independence. The songwriters don’t have a standard way of working, but they do “like to work in the same room together. Everybody thinks there’s one way to write a musical and they ask: ‘Which comes first, the lyrics or the music?’”īut it depends on the song or the show. I tried my darnedest to get every detail in the correct place,” he said. “I knew I would get maybe one chance in my lifetime to write one of those big, bold political American musicals that spoke to large ideas, presented on a large scale. The composer saw it as a big opportunity. They had about 11 days to write, arrange, teach and mix the songs while operating on two continents.įlaherty said they put everything into writing the songs, at least two of which are in the show pretty much the way they wrote them for the audition. That was the excitement of the assignment.”įlaherty was actually was working in London, while Ahrens had a separate project in New York. I knew it was in me and had to just prove it.
Some friends worried that after two Broadway shows it might be insulting for the team to have to audition for a new job, but Flaherty said “It wasn’t at all. I knew we were the people to write this show. “And then the songwriting derby began,” he said. Doctorow, who wrote the book on which the musical is based, felt burned by the film version of his novel and was one of those determining who would get the job. They don’t have the larger budgets and there is a way to get the message of the show across,” Flaherty said.Īhrens and Flaherty were one of about a dozen songwriting teams that were asked to audition to write the score for the show by submitting four songs. “All of these different versions speak to our times more resourcefully. There’s been more interest lately in more chamber-size productions,” he said. There are other ways to produce it other than the gargantuan way it was in 1998. Flaherty said it deals with issues of racism, immigration and women’s rights that raise and “a need and urgency to produce this show and present it in these times. “It feels like this ‘Ragtime’ is a ‘Ragtime’ for our time.”Ĭoming to Sarasota allowed Flaherty to be reunited with the musical’s book writer Terrence McNally, a part-time resident of Sarasota, and the original director Frank Galati, who is now a Sarasota resident and an associate artist at Asolo Rep.īecause of the epic scope of the original production, which had a cast of nearly 60 actors, it was expensive to produce. “We had lines of communication and he had asked if we had qualms if it was pared down or if it would lose some of the impact, but I think in many ways, it amplified the emotion,” Flaherty said. With their 2017 production of “Anastasia” continuing, they now have, for the first time, two musicals running simultaneously on Broadway.įlaherty, who met Ahrens in 1983 at the legendary Lehman Engel BMI Musical Theatre Workshop, keeps a close eye on his shows, particularly “Ragtime.” He attends different productions of the work about every four months, but until the Asolo’s version he hadn’t seen the way Rothstein scaled down “Ragtime” in 2016 at Theatre Latte Da in Minneapolis, where Rothstein is founding artistic director. It’s also a heady time for the songwriting team, whose 1990 musical “Once On This Island” just earned eight Tony nominations, including best revival. The new production, staged by Peter Rothstein, using a cast less than a third of the size of the one featured in the Broadway original, comes 20 years after the musical first opened in New York, and 30 years after Ahrens and Flaherty introduced themselves in the 1988 off-Broadway musical “Lucky Stiff.” Stephen Flaherty was still glowing from the opening night of his Tony Award-winning musical “Ragtime” at Asolo Repertory Theatre when he sat down to talk about the show and his 30-plus years of creating musicals with his lyricist partner Lynn Ahrens.
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