Word: doctorow
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...RAGTIME The musical version of E.L. Doctorow's best-selling novel could have been a high-minded bore, a musical for people who hate musicals. Or, given all the promotional hype (the show has been trumpeted seemingly since the Ice Age), another mega-disappointment. In fact, it turns out to be a landmark American musical. Doctorow's turn-of-the-century tapestry, mixing fact and fiction, has been expertly refashioned for the stage by playwright Terrence McNally; director Frank Galati has showcased it in a crisp and beautiful production; the score by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty gets better with...
...just might be. In its stunning L.A. version (with some new sets and other minor revisions since Toronto), Ragtime combines big social themes, imaginative staging and emotionally involving storytelling in a way that has all but vanished from the American musical. Terrence McNally's adaptation deftly re-creates Doctorow's tapestry of early 20th century America, with historical figures (Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman) mingling with fictional ones like Coalhouse Walker Jr., the ragtime pianist turned antiracism firebrand. Composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens supply a score alternately catchy (the ragtime numbers) and affecting (a wife's proto-feminist lament...
...author and the theater mogul first met three years ago for lunch at the Russian Tea Room in New York City. E.L. Doctorow was impressed, first of all, that Garth Drabinsky--the Canadian producer who wanted to turn his novel Ragtime into a musical--agreed with him about the 1981 movie version: they both disliked it. He was impressed too that Drabinsky seemed to have read the book closely and thought about it deeply. "He's an interesting amalgam of old-time entrepreneurial showman and genuine theater enthusiast," says Doctorow. "He has real taste. And he's not afraid...
...mother of all government secrets. Broadway Books is hoping it will have a best seller this summer with Los Alamos, a compelling and literate murder mystery from first-time novelist Joseph Kanon. Set amid the wartime development of the first atom bomb, the book has been compared to E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime for its intermingling of real and fictional characters. But a more apt comparison might be to the film Chinatown, with its small-scale moral muddles foregrounding grand-scale moral muddles...
...made its debut to much fanfare at California's La Jolla Playhouse last year and will resurface Sept. 30 at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. (Look for long, circular conversations between Faust and the devil.) Terrence McNally (Master Class) is tackling the book for Ragtime, a musical based on E.L. Doctorow's novel, which begins a pre-Broadway run in Toronto in December. And Britain's prolific Alan Ayckbourn (Absurd Person Singular; Woman in Mind) wrote the book for and is directing a revamped version of By Jeeves, based on the P.G. Wodehouse character, at Connecticut's Goodspeed-at-Chester theater...