The wealthy white family sings polite parlor songs. The score gives each population its own voice, Flaherty says. And so much of the action of the show is about ripping against structure, ripping against the old guard, trying to wrestle forward - and at the same time trying to coexist with that structure.”Īhrens, the lyricist, adds: “You could use the left hand as a metaphor for John Philip Sousa and the music of white society at the time, and the right hand is the mischievous, syncopated rhythms of the new black America.” The name’s derivation may come from “ragged time, meaning something that’s ripped apart. He found this perfect metaphor.”Ĭomposer Flaherty explains ragtime’s structure this way: Steady, marching notes played by the left hand represent the order of the piece, while the right hand uses syncopated rhythms to go against the order. “Ragtime was just coming into its own,” Lee says, “and it was the shock of the new. Tying the story together is the metaphor of ragtime music. Meanwhile, the family keeps crossing paths with a Latvian Jewish immigrant widower and his young daughter. The baby’s father, a brilliant ragtime piano player, becomes a regular visitor too. Rigid social and ethnic demarcations begin to bend when the matriarch of a wealthy white family in New Rochelle, N.Y., provides shelter to an African American washerwoman who is scared and alone after giving birth. “I’m so taken by it,” Feldman continues, because “it’s about America at a moment of extraordinary change and trying to figure out who we are as a country.” The early-1900s characters, he says, are “good people, who are broken in some way, trying to do good, trying to come together.” “I thought it was one of the most incredible things I had ever seen in my life.
From West Hills, “I drove to the Shubert Theatre and bought rush tickets,” the 39-year-old says. Feldman, who was in high school at the time, lost count of his visits. Lee, who is 68, says he saw the original L.A. the show just steps forward and has a few things to say. When there’s acrimony between different kinds of people. In rehearsal for "Ragtime" at the Pasadena Playhouse, director David Lee, left, talks with Clifton Duncan, who portrays a wronged ragtime piano player.
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