Bay Street Musical 'Ragtime' Has Many Local Ties

With previews beginning August 2, and opening night on August 6, Bay Street Theater will be bringing the Gilded Age of New York to Sag Harbor with “Ragtime,” the musical, the final production of the 2022 Mainstage Season.

“Ragtime,” which is based on the 1975 novel of the same name by E.L. Doctorow (who lived in Sag Harbor), was adapted as a musical which opened on Broadway in 1998. Set at the turn of the century in the New York area, “Ragtime” is an American epic tracking a diverse group of characters navigating the melting-pot world of the time. With music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens and a book by the late Terrence McNally, “Ragtime” received 13 Tony nominations and continues to be produced the world over. The original Broadway production was an enormously large one, with a $10 million dollar budget, a working Model T and fireworks. For Bay Street Theater, it’s the largest musical production in the theater’s 31-year history.

Despite the moving parts and larger cast, director Will Pomerantz is keeping “Ragtime’s scale human-sized.

“What’s really beautiful, I think, about live theater is it’s so handmade …,” Pomerantz said recently amid rehearsals. “It’s very analog. It’s very human. It takes place in time, real time, real space, real bodies in the space. And because of that, there are thousands of little decisions to be made.”

Pomerantz, Bay Street’s associate artistic director, has directed other productions at the theater, including “Evita” in 2018. He notes that Bay Street’s intimate stage presents many opportunities for creativity due to the fact that stage space is limited, there’s no fly space, they can’t trundle in trucks on tracks.

“For me, what makes our space and this style of production so compelling is because it’s all actor-driven,” Pomerantz said.

The stage will be set as an attic, with objects from the past. Other locations will be established — the wide-ranging musical moves across New Rochelle, Ellis Island and Atlantic City, among other places —but anchored within the attic, which Pomerantz described as a “conceptual envelope that the production lives in.”

“Ragtime” tells the story of three groups in early 20th century New York: an affluent white family living in New Rochelle, Black residents of Harlem and European immigrants living in Manhattan’s East Village. Each social group has a representative of sorts, in Mother, the matriarch of the upper-class white family, Coalhouse Walker Jr., a Black musician, and Tateh, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia.

While it’s simplistic to reduce the freewheeling production to a solely issue-based story, the social positioning of the characters allows “Ragtime” to delve into the subjects of women’s rights, racism and immigration — issues as relevant to the American experience today as they were when the musical was set, or when Doctorow penned his novel.

The cast is made up of what Pomerantz described as “triple-threats”; the Broadway production of “Ragtime” had a cast of around 50, with dancers, singers and actors. For a Bay Street-sized production, cast members do triple duty.

For actor Derrick Davis, the character of Coalhouse Walker Jr., a pianist from Harlem, was a “dream role.”

“He is a St. Louis native who transplanted over into New York and he’s a Harlemite at the turn of the century,” Davis said of Coalhouse. “He’s a very, very intelligent individual. And he is for his people. He’s a great part of the movement towards justice and equality.”

Sarah, Coalhouse’s lover and a young mother, is played by Kyrie Courter. This is her third production of “Ragtime,” and second time playing Sarah.

“Every single time that I’ve done it, including this time, it doesn’t escape me how relevant the piece still is,” Courter said.

What still stands out about “Ragtime” is the way in which it transcends its historical particularity. Even with turn-of-the-20th-century figures making appearances — Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, Booker T. Washington, just to name a few — “Ragtime” speaks to now as then. Or, rather, sings to it.

“I knew that it paralleled the current state of the country and the world, but as we’re digging deeper into the different moments of the scenes and the different characters and discussing it with the different actors in the production, and then walking out into the world, the mirror is just so blindingly painful that what we were fighting against a century ago is still a very present fight today,” Davis said.

And then there’s the music. As its title would suggest, ragtime plays a role, but that’s not all — polka, jazz and more styles all come together.

“The harmonies are so beautiful,” Courter said. “This writing duo is so phenomenal. They’ve created so much beautiful work and it’s always filled with such heart, emotion, intelligence and also really knowing the mechanics of how to tell a story and how to tell it well through music. It’s one thing to write a story with text. It’s another thing to evolve that story with music and they do it so masterfully and it’s a pleasure and an honor to be able to perform that.”

Although the action of “Ragtime” takes place about 100 miles west of the East End, and over 100 years ago, local connections tie it to our community.

“As I like to say: “I’ve been coming to Sag Harbor since before I was born.” Richard Doctorow, E.L. Doctorow’s son, wrote in an email.

Doctorow’s parents began coming to the East End in the 1950s after hearing about the area from an artist friend and eventually bought a place in the 1970s, when there were still otters in Otter Pond (though truth be told, they were likely muskrats) and unpaved roads, as Doctorow remembered. Doctorow, director of the Sag Harbor Whaling & Historical Museum, was in his early teens when his father was writing “Ragtime,” clacking away at the typewriter in their New Rochelle home.

“I think more than anything, he used history as a framework for the story and themes he wanted to explore and examine,” Doctorow noted of his father. “Of course, being a novelist rather than a historian, he was free to bend the historical truth to suit his needs. I recall working on a newspaper article about the Sag Harbor whaling fleet, and I was having trouble finding some specific information I needed. He said, ‘Just make it up.’ We both had a good laugh over that.

“He was very much a New Yorker, and New York is featured quite a bit in his work, including ‘Ragtime,’ but the inspiration for writing ‘Ragtime’ actually came from our house in New Rochelle, which was built at the turn of the century,” Doctorow recalled. “He was staring at the walls, wondering what to write, so he began writing about the wall, the house, and thinking about what was going on in the country at the time it was built. And that was it — he was off and running.”

E.L. Doctorow died in 2015 at age 84, and his son feels his father’s work remains very timely today.

“There’s a production mounted somewhere every few years, and that’s because the central themes are still so relevant, so meaningful. The discussions the country was having in 1900 are still being had today. Like a novel being written, America is still very much a work in progress. And the question is, who gets to hold the pen,” Doctorow said.

McNally, who wrote the Tony-winning libretto for “Ragtime,” (one of five Tonys he won in his lifetime) spent plenty of time at Bay Street Theater with his husband, Tom Kirdahy. The two first met at Guild Hall and had a place in Water Mill. McNally, a lauded playwright and writer, had a decades-long career on Broadway and died in 2020 due to complications of the coronavirus.

“Terrence loved ‘Ragtime,’” said Kirdahy, a Tony and Olivier Award-winning theater producer, who produced “Ragtime” in 2009. “He thought Doctorow’s book was a masterpiece and working with Lynn Ahrens and Steven Flaherty was one of the greatest experiences of his life, professionally and personally. He’s always been passionate about civil rights and feminism and what it means to be an American. And so working in the musical form was a dream for him.”

For Kirdahy, the East End provided a sense of gay community — the two met at a panel conversation he produced as co-chair of the East End Gay Organization (EEGO).

“Terrence and I found so much happiness on the East End and enjoyed countless evenings in Sag Harbor at the Bay Street Theater,” Kirdahy said. “It’s very painful for me that he won’t be there on opening night, but I know his spirit will be there and that gives me great comfort. He would be so happy that this production is happening, and I can’t wait to celebrate his legacy.”

“Ragtime,” the musical, begins with previews on Tuesday, August 2, at Bay Street Theater. Opening night is Saturday, August 6, and the production runs through August 28. Bay Street Theater is on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor. For tickets, visit baystreet.org.