History Set A `Ragtime' Beat -- From Controversal Book To Smash Broadway Musical, E.L. Doctorow's Celebration Of America Has Had A Notable Journey

"In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York."

So begins the 1975 novel "Ragtime" by E.L. Doctorow. And so begins the musical "Ragtime," a Broadway pageant that mingles myth and history, entertainment and instruction, romance and tragedy on one enormous canvas of American life and music.

When it opened last season on Broadway, after a development period spanning several years and two lengthy tryout engagements in Toronto and Los Angeles, "Ragtime" became a resounding hit.

It also inaugurated the Ford Center for the Performing Arts, Broadway's newest showplace and another feather in the cap of the then-high-flying "Ragtime" producers, Livent Inc. (The company recently filed for bankruptcy, which threatened to derail the touring run of "Ragtime." But thanks to some fast backstage maneuvers by the Seattle presenters, the show will open as planned Wednesday at the Paramount Theatre.)

As it glances back vividly to an America of yesteryear - an America swelling with new waves of immigrants, embarking on expeditions to remote frontiers, being fissured with racial and economic inequities, dancing to an intoxicating new beat - "Ragtime" is well-attuned to popular entertainment's millennial obsession with historical hindsight.

Just consider what else was in the spotlight when the show opened last winter: Broadway revivals of the World War II-themed "Cabaret" and "The Diary of Anne Frank." On film, the blockbuster "Titanic," and Steven Spielberg's cinematic account of a 19th-century slave uprising, "Amistad." And, display windows of bookstores featured Don DeLillo's Cold War novel "Underworld," and Charles Frazier's post-Civil War tale, "Cold Mountain."

Doctorow on `Ragtime'

"Dealing with times past is really a way of talking about the present," said celebrated author E.L. "Ed" Doctorow recently, from the home study in New Rochelle where he wrote "Ragtime" and such other historically inflected novels as "World's Fair" and "Billy Bathgate."

"Inevitably when you're writing about the past, you are writing about today," said Doctorow. "The novel of `Ragtime' reflects my thoughts, concerns and perceptions about the United States in the 1970s.

"As it turns out, the phenomena in the book are still around, and still current. And insofar as the piece talks about the structural seams of our society, it's still sadly valid."

The question of historical accuracy comes up

invariably when artists portray and interpret actual events. Both the book and stage versions of "Ragtime" (and, to a much lesser degree, the 1981 Milos Forman film based on the novel) weave a tapestry of real and imagined occurrences, and a slew of invented and documented characters, deliberately blurring the borders of fact and fiction.

In 1975, Doctorow was admonished for playing fast and loose in his novel with such towering American figures as automobile magnate Henry Ford, banking mogul J.P. Morgan, anarchist crusader Emma Goldman and African-American leader Booker T. Washington.

"I was criticized heavily for building on historical lives," he recalled. "At the time, people thought it had never been done. But I remember reading Tolstoy's `War and Peace,' which had Napoleon as a character. That didn't seem to alarm anybody."

Noting that what passes as established fact can turn out to be apocryphal anyway, Doctorow added, "If you want to read real fiction, read J.P. Morgan's authorized biography. What I wrote in `Ragtime' was true to the spirit of the souls of these characters, as I perceived them - which is all you can ask of any writer."

In the film, a narrow view

When the film of "Ragtime" starring James Cagney and Henry Rollins came out, Doctorow did not admire it - despite the movie's strong reviews and eight Oscar nominations.

The main reason: It didn't attempt the book's kaleidoscopic sweep, and dwelled mostly on the tense standoff between Rollins' embattled Coalhouse Walker, a proud black jazz musician whose car is trashed by racist firefighters, and Cagney's tough-minded police chief.

"I am on record as not liking the movie," Doctorow agreed. "It narrowed things down, which was a mistake. It wasn't the whole mix.

"He's a very gifted director, Milos Forman. And in all fairness there's something about film that doesn't mix with this book. Film tends to be quite literal. So much of this book operates as a historical fantasia, a great exuberant riff, that just by filming various events and characters you tend to lose the spirit of the thing, the metaphoric dimensions."

In 1994, Livent chief Garth Drabinsky came to Doctorow with a proposal to turn the book into a Broadway musical. And the writer was surprisingly receptive.

"Garth had read the book very carefully, which is the only reason I even considered getting involved," Doctorow explained. "He persuaded me he really knew what he was doing. I asked for approval of the librettist, director and composer, and he gave me that, too."

A native New Yorker who is savvy about theater (and the author of one play, "Drinks Before Dinner"), Doctorow had no objections to the artists Drabinsky proposed.

Chicago-based director Frank Galati, noted for his forceful theatrical adaptations of such classic novels as "The Grapes of Wrath," was recruited to stage the piece. Ten veteran lyricist-composer teams were invited to submit songs, and compete for the job of crafting the score; Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (who wrote the lyrics and music for "Once on This Island") won out.

Eugene Lee, who concocted the remarkable sets for Livent's "Showboat," signed on as designer, with Graciela Daniele as choreographer. And to compress the sprawling novel into stage form, Drabinsky turned to Tony Award-winning dramatist Terrence McNally.

As work on the musical progressed, Doctorow "gave notes" and offered his suggestions - some taken, some overruled.

But as Galati noted in a recent interview, many of Doctorow's original characters and a good deal of his novel's language were retained in McNally's adaptation.

"The opening sentence of the book is the springboard for the action of both the novel and the musical," Galati pointed out. "The audience is invited by the speaker to share in this experience that's about to unfold. We are invited into a world poised, in the early 20th century, on the brink of something humongous in terms of change and danger."

Also faithful to Doctorow were the intersecting sagas of three fictional families: a well-to-do New Rochelle clan; the black ragtime pianist Coalhouse and his lover Sarah; and the Jewish immigrant Tateh and his young daughter.

Punctuating their interwoven stories are hovering appearances by the legendary magician Harry Houdini, the fetching showgirl Evelyn Nesbit (whose husband murdered her lover, famed architect Stanford White); the social crusaders Goldman and Washington; and tycoons Ford and Morgan.

But "Ragtime" the musical bypasses most of the fantasy tangents that the novel sends its American celebrities off on. And it eliminates the element of dark "satirical eroticism" that courses through the book.

Doctorow explains why those choices were made.

"The minute you have people singing on stage it takes up a lot of time. You have to find ways to economize, so they've made the historical characters into demiurges - godlike figures who propel the action in certain directions. It was a very deft move, a clever way to bring the whole thing reasonably into the terms of a three-hour musical."

A controversial ending

While the show's critics have generally applauded McNally's telescoping of the plot, some have maligned the show's musical finale as an overly sentimental and uplifting paean to racial harmony, unfaithful to the bitterly ironic tone of the book's ending.

Galati, the director, challenges that perception.

"The plot is exactly the same as it is in the novel: a new family is made from three dismantled families. You can say it's sentimental when they walk away together.

"And, yes, there is hope, aspiration and affirmation there. But it's more complicated than that. They're not walking into the sunset, but into a century of barbarity, racism, Hiroshima."

After seeing the show in Toronto, New York and most recently in Washington, D.C. (with the same touring ensemble that will appear at the Paramount), Doctorow voices no objections to the ending.

Rather, he is clearly proud of the way Drabinsky and company have pulled a full-blown musical from the pages of his free-wheeling overture to the so-called "American Century."

"I don't remember seeing many musicals, if any, with this kind of ambition, this attempt to really wrestle with American identity in a big way," he marvels.

"Musicals in the past have usually been the repositories for stock sentiments, and easy, modest entertainment-driven feelings. So when something comes along that has a very big bite, like `Ragtime' does, you have to be impressed." ------------------------------- Ticket information "Ragtime" previews Wednesday at 8 p.m. and Thursday at 2 p.m. at the Paramount Theatre, 911 Pine St., Seattle. Officially opens on Thursday at 8 p.m. and plays Tuesdays through Sundays through Jan. 3. $20-65. 206-292-ARTS. ------------------------------- `Ragtime' by the numbers

Cast members: 55 Tony Award nominations: 13 Tony Awards won: Four, for best score (music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens); musical book (Terrence McNally); orchestrations (William David Brohn) and featured performance by an actress in a musical (Audra McDonald) Show's official opening in Canada: Dec. 8, 1996 Show's official opening on Broadway: Jan. 18, 1998 Approximate running time: Three hours