Ragtime - Shaw Festival Theatre

RAGTIME
WRITERS
PLAYWRIGHT Terence McNally (b.1939) was born in Florida, grew up in Texas and went to school in
New York City. After graduating from Columbia University he took a writing fellowship in Mexico,
came back to New York to do an apprenticeship at the Actor’s Studio and became a tutor to author
John Steinbeck’s children. As a playwright, his first major success came with Frankie and Johnny in the
Clair de Lune (1987) which he adapted into a film featuring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer. Other
plays include Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), Love! Valour! Compassion! (1995) and Master Class
(1996) – the latter two winning the Tony Award for Best New Play. In 1997, McNally stirred controversy
with his play Corpus Christi, which imagines Jesus and his Apostles as gay men living in modernday
Texas. His work on musicals includes librettos for Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993, Tony Award,
Best Book of a Musical) and Ragtime (1998, Tony Award, Best Book of a Musical), The Full Monty, The
Rink, The Visit, A Man of No Importance and the opera Dead Man Walking. Recently, his new play
Golden Age was featured in a Kennedy Center celebration of his work and his new musical, Catch Me
If You Can, opened on Broadway in 2011.
LYRICIST Lynn Ahrens (b.1948) was born in New York City. She began her career as a lyricist when she
worked on a children's television show and began writing songs for Schoolhouse Rock (including A
Noun is a Person, Place or Thing). Ahrens met COMPOSER Stephen Flaherty (b.1960) at a musical
theatre workshop in 1982 and they started working together the following year. Born in Pittsburgh,
Flaherty studied music at NYU and played ragtime piano in a dance band. Their first musical together
was Lucky Stiff (1989), and premiered Off-Broadway. Their next musical, Once on This Island (1990)
premiered on Broadway and was nominated for eight Tony Awards. Ragtime followed, opening on
Broadway in January 1998 and running for 834 performances. They followed this with Seussical: The
Musical which opened on Broadway on November 2000, and it became one of the most performed
musicals in the U.S. Ahrens and Flaherty's next musicals, A Man of No Importance (2002), Dessa Rose
(2005), and The Glorious Ones (2007) were produced at the Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center and
they wrote original songs for the Chita Rivera autobiographical show, Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life.
They also collaborated on songs for the animated movie Anastasia, receiving Academy Award and
Golden Globe nominations for Best Song and Best Score. Currently they are at work on two new musicals:
one based on the film Rocky and another based on the painter Edgar Degas.
NOVELIST E.L. Doctorow (b.1931) is known for blending fiction and fact in his novels about the
history of America, combining real and fictional characters. Selected books include: The Book of
Daniel (1971), based on the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case; Ragtime (1975), named one of the hundred
best novels of the 20th century; World's Fair (1985; National Book Award), a semiautobiographical
work set in the Bronx of the 1930s; Billy Bathgate (1989), a tale of Prohibition-era
gangsters; The March (2005), a fictionalized account of General Sherman's Civil War march through
Georgia; and Homer & Langley (2009), his version of the lives of two New York hoarder-hermit brothers.
8 C ONNECTIONS
Shaw Festival Study Guide