![]() ![]() They together can achieve an almost Walt Whitman-like poetic celebration of the nation and its people, but with attention also to the darker colors in the picture. Lynn Ahrens continued the lyrical development of the characters and their actions with her lyrics for the music of Stephen Flaherty, which made sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious use of ragtime and its dramatic propulsion in his score. He allowed the main characters and the celebrities to continue to speak their own thoughts, often in the third person, and he constructed strong dramatic scenes as the story called for them. Terrence McNally carefully and brilliantly turned Doctorow’s novel into the book for a musical. Washington, the anarchist and union organizer Emma Goldman, the immigrant and escape artist Harry Houdini, and a beautiful woman who anticipates in Ragtime the women in Chicago who gain notoriety and success in vaudeville when the tabloids celebrate a scandalous murder trial. Morgan, the inventor and industrialist Henry Ford, the educator and Black spokesperson Booker T. Doctorow, fleshing out his story, brings in some of the famous ones of the time to explain how what they are doing is also creating their new America: the financier J.P. In the way of America, these three families become entwined with each other, for good and for ill, with suffering and happiness. Third are immigrants from Europe pouring into the Lower East Side, with a focus on Tateh, a Jewish artist from Latvia, and his young daughter. Second are the Black residents of Harlem, including a beautiful young woman named Sarah, who loves the ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. Father runs a very successful fireworks factory Mother keeps the orderly house and their young son Edgar, and with them live Mother’s Younger Brother, who creates the fireworks, and Grandfather. The white family lives in suburban peace and comfort in New Rochelle, New York. With that rhythm in his words, Doctorow chose three contrasting families to make and suffer from the conflicts that eventually worked out ways to together make the new century happen. ![]() It became the accompaniment for the birth of what was to become, in perhaps too many ways, the American Century. That was the name of the music with a propulsive, jagged, fascinating style that spread from the piano players in the Black communities throughout the whole country. It began with a novel by E.L Doctorow that he called Ragtime. Call it a play with music – or perhaps, at times, when the whole company unites like the chorus of an oratorio, call it music with a play. It is a Broadway musical played by an opera company, erasing unhelpful distinctions. ![]() The brilliant Ragtime was created by several artists at the top of their games, and indeed, in the way of the theatre, it is created anew at each performance by the Union Avenue Opera artists. ![]()
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