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Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World
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On Tuesday evening, February 20th, Manhattan Concert Productions will present Broadway Classics in Concert
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This star-studded event will feature songs from some of Broadway's most beloved
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award-winning composers and writers who we caught up with here at Sardi's
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right before the legendary night. And there was pistons Fusing, skipping a beat
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Singing a dream, a-la-la-la-la-la A strange insistent music Floating out heat, picking on steam, a-la-la-la-la-la
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The sound of distant thunder suddenly starting to fly Because the music of something beginning, an era exploding
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A century spinning in, witches enthralling Rhythm and rhyme The people call it Ragtime Ragtime Ragtime Ragtime Ragtime Ragtime Ragtime
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Interesting thing to think about what unlocked Ragtime I think it was probably
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just reading the novel and realizing that there were two different sets of characters
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There were the fictional characters, and there were the historical characters. And once we decided that the fictional characters
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were the main characters, then we could figure out how all the historical people revolved
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around those fictional characters. So Mother began to interact with Evelyn Nesbitt
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who was sort of a woman of her time and Mother was going to become a much more liberated woman than Evelyn Nesbitt Younger brother became attached to the revolutionary Emma Goldman
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Harry Houdini became sort of an icon for the immigrant character of Tata
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So little by little, that began to unlock how the musical would be structured
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and how these different characters would interweave during the course of the show
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So Back to Before was written in a very early morning burst of energy
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I woke up and I thought, Mother needs to sing something, and she needs to sing it in Act
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Two, and she needs to sing it in a belt. And I wrote a lyric, fully fledged, very early in the morning, and this was in the days when
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I would communicate sometimes with Stephen by fax. And I faxed him this fully fledged lyric, thinking that it would be a completely different
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rhythm and melody, and he got this long lyric, and he said he went and started pacing around
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and I think he might have gone up on his roof, and he came up with this gorgeous melody for Mother
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to sing the statement of her coming of age, really, a woman stepping from the 19th into
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the 20th century and assuming her power, and that's what that song is. Ragtime stays relevant
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because I think it is about the inherent nature of America and Americans
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I really believe that no matter how far we think we've come, we've never come as far as we think
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The problems that they were having at the turn of the century in 1902
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are exactly the same problems that we have today, problems of immigration, problems of women's rights, Black Lives Matter
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It was all going on at the turn of the century when the show is set
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and it continues on as we grow and change as a country
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And, you know, we always think we've solved our problems, and actually, no, we haven't
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We're still in the same discussion as always
