Full title: Songs From Ragtime The Musical. This recording is from the show's premiere run in Toronto prior to its Broadway debut a year later. The cast is largely the same, but the score is somewhat different from the final version.
Music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens. Principal cast: Brian Stokes Mitchell (Coalhouse Walker Jr.); Peter Friedman (Tateh); Marin Mazzie (Mother); Audra McDonald (Sarah); Mark Jacoby (Father); Lynnette Perry (Evelyn Nesbit); Steven Sutcliffe (Mother's Younger Brother); Mary Bond Davis (Sarah's Friend); Jim Corti (Harry Houdini); Michael Fletcher (Henry Ford); Camille Saviola (Emma Goldman); Nicholas Rose (Little Boy); Alan Swann (Admiral Peary); Afton Eddy (Little Girl). Recorded at Manta Eastern Sound Studios, Toronto, Canada on July 15-17, 1996. Includes liner notes by E.L. Doctorow and Marty Bell. Ragtime -- the musical genre -- is one of the principal crossroads amongst African-American rhythms, European-American songs and New World sensibility at the turn of the 20th century. As such, it works as a perfect metaphor for this mega-musical that takes on this whole wild and wooly nation. Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, whose prior collaborations include "Once Upon This Island" and "My Favorite Year," have crafted an ambitious, tumultuous, but upbeat American epic based on the E.L. Doctorow bestseller. Taking their cues from Scott Joplin, Stephen Foster, minstrels, vaudeville and of course their Broadway predecessors, Ahrens and Flaherty effortlessly evoke another time while drawing parallels to another, strangely familiar turn of the century place. High octane performances are turned in by Audra McDonald as the doomed Sarah, Brian Stokes Mitchell as the righteous Coalhouse Walker, Jr. and Mark Jacoby as the everyman, "Father." A chorus of hundreds (actually only about 60 but who's counting?) livens up the elaborate ensemble scenes. Not to be missed are short but sweet time- setting cameo roles of Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, Booker T. Washington, J.P. Morgan and Evelyn Nesbit, the sex symbol at the heart of the first "crime of the century."
