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[0:00] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Welcome, everybody, to a musical theater podcast where we discuss the cultural and emotional impact of some of our favorite musicals in theater history. My name is Jeffrey Scott Parsons. You can call me Jeff. Today, we are covering the musical Ragtime, which was a listener request from three of you wonderful listeners, Tyler, Kelsey, and Jeff. You all have great taste. But it did take a while to create this episode, because I knew an epic show like this needed an epic guest, and boy, oh boy, did we get him. He started out his Broadway career in the original cast of Merrily We Roll Along and has since then become one of our most celebrated musical directors and conductors. His credits include Broadway productions of The Scottsboro Boys, Sondheim on Sondheim, She Loves Me, you know we love She Loves Me on this show, and of course, the original production of Ragtime. Everyone, please welcome David Loud.

[3:50] David Loud: What a nice introduction. Thank you so much.

[3:52] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Oh, my gosh. I'm so grateful you're here, David. Thank you. Thank you for being here.

[3:57] David Loud: My pleasure. Any chance to talk about Ragtime is a happy day for me.

[4:01] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Oh, that's fantastic. I'm glad to hear that, because I got to say, if we had to put only a couple of musicals in a time capsule to represent American musical theater, I would be more than okay with Ragtime being one of them.

[4:16] David Loud: Absolutely. It's one of the masterpieces of the century, I think. It's extraordinarily well-constructed, that show. The transition from novel to musical was done so gracefully. It's a seemingly impossible task, if you read that book. How could you possibly condense it into a coherent musical? But Terrence McNally did that and made it seem so easy.

[4:41] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Agreed. Agreed. Now, when did you join the team?

[4:45] David Loud: I was not with the original workshopping productions of Ragtime. They workshopped it, and they played it for almost a year up in Toronto before coming to Broadway. I joined the original Broadway company as they came into New York, and then supervised some of the tours afterwards.

[5:03] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: For those who may not know, can you take us through what a musical director does when working on a brand new show like this in New York?

[5:09] David Loud: Sure, sure. The music director is basically responsible for every piece of music that happens during the show and in the preparation for the show. Just every piece of music. No big deal. Just every note. You're in charge of casting the actors, making sure they can sing the parts, teaching the parts, rehearsing the parts, and then I conducted the whole run of Ragtime on Broadway and maintained the show's musical quality and dealt with replacements and understudies and swings going on and all the night-to-night crises in the orchestra.

[5:50] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Which was a big orchestra, too, right?

[5:52] David Loud: It's the biggest orchestra I ever had on Broadway, yes. Opening night, we had 28 people in the pit.

[5:56] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Wow, that's crazy.

[5:58] David Loud: Including a big, gorgeous harp.

[6:00] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Oh, I love that. Boy, can harps bring so much texture to a theatrical sound. How about cast members on stage?

[6:09] David Loud: Fifty-four, opening night.

[6:10] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: I mean, was that the biggest cast you've ever had as well?

[6:13] David Loud: By almost twice as much, yes.

[6:15] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Wow, so the biggest pit you've ever had and the biggest cast you've ever had.

[6:19] David Loud: Absolutely, yeah. It was ridiculously lavish, the Broadway production, and it's one of the reasons that we only ran two years. I mean, two years was a lovely run, but The Lion King opened the same year, and they're still going strong.

[6:35] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah, exactly.

[6:36] David Loud: They maybe just spent a little bit too much money on it.

[6:40] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Let's actually dive right in and talk about how this got made. So we'll start out by talking about E.L. Doctorow.

[6:47] David Loud: Yeah, Edward Lawrence Doctorow was a famous writer of historical fiction, meaning he loved to combine historical characters with fictional characters, and honestly, by doing so, really showcased history in a creative way that really connects to me. I love that kind of stuff.

[7:05] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: I think he invented that.

[7:06] David Loud: Did he really?

[7:07] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: I don't think it was a common practice, certainly, before he did it.

[7:12] David Loud: He certainly got great attention for doing that so beautifully in Ragtime, where there are fictional characters just butting up against the historical ones in really interesting ways. And when you talk about how they transitioned from novel to musical so seamlessly, I feel like in many ways, the musical itself is such a great representation of historical fiction. It sounds like traditional ragtime music, right? But then with this added piece of musical theater, as we know it, and so the musical Ragtime and the novel Ragtime are almost operating on the same level of using their mediums to tell this kind of story.

[7:53] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: You're exactly right. And Steve Flaherty's ragtime little themes that he creates to sound like Scott Joplin compositions or other ragtime compositions of that period are so accurate that you would never think that they were written today. It sounds as if he's using historical material as well.

[8:13] David Loud: That's so cool.

[8:14] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: So Dr. O writes this book back in 1975. You've read it, right?

[8:19] David Loud: I have, yes.

[8:19] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: It's one of my favorite books.

[8:20] David Loud: Oh, that's so cool.

[8:22] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: I read it in college after getting to know the musical.

[8:27] David Loud: Because that's how my life works. I'm like, musical? Wait, what is it based on? And so I read the book, and boy, so much more sex.

[8:36] David Loud: Yes, when you get Evelyn Nesbitt and Emma Goldman in the closet, and all those other things happening. It's quite racy.

[8:43] David Loud: It's really racy. But it was written, like I said, in 1975. Interestingly enough, he wrote it from his home in New Rochelle. Go figure. It was later named one of the best novels of the 20th century. It was turned into a movie in 1981 with a stacked cast, which actually, to be totally honest, I've never seen the movie.

[9:03] David Loud: It's not everything you want it to be, but there's some wonderful things in it. So there's this property, right? And now we got to talk about Garth Stravinsky and La Vente, which gets a little tricky. But we've talked about producers in the past on this show, particularly Cameron McIntosh and the way that he revolutionized musical theater in the 80s. But then the 90s come around, and the new cool kid in town is this Canadian guy named Garth Stravinsky, who decided that his company was going to be the next savior of musical theater. And for a while, they were. They brought in really challenging pieces like Kiss of the Spider Woman, as well as the Hal Prince revival of Showboat, which was just the most expensive thing that anybody had seen, and yet introduced an entire generation, including me, to this show from 1917.

[9:54] David Loud: Well, I may be getting that year wrong.

[9:56] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: 27.

[9:57] David Loud: Thank you. 1927, yeah. And so they are interested in huge budgets and complex stories. So like, duh, Ragtime seems like a perfect fit for these people.

[10:07] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah.

[10:08] David Loud: Right. It was Marty Bell, actually, who brought it to Garth Stravinsky originally. But Garth loved the idea, and it became his passion. Now, it seems like one of the first people that they signed on is Terrence McNally to write a treatment of the book, right? To figure out, like you said, to do the impossible. How do we turn this novel into a musical? And Terrence McNally is, of course, one of our great American playwrights. We recently lost him due to COVID. And you, David, knew him pretty well, because not only did you work with him on Ragtime, but also Masterclass, right?

[10:42] David Loud: I had done Masterclass with him, which is this wonderful play that he wrote about Maria Callas that Zoe Caldwell and Audra McDonald did on Broadway. I was so lucky. I played the pianist. I was on stage the whole night with Zoe Caldwell, watching her do this extraordinary play, and playing the piano for Audra McDonald and J. Hunter Morris, and exploring the madness and the life of Maria Callas. It was a great opportunity for me.

[11:10] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: That is kind of like your calling card, though. Wouldn't you say? You excel at being conductors who are seen and part of the show.

[11:14] David Loud: Well, I've done several sort of combo performances like that. I was in Merrily We Roll Along, and I played the piano on stage during that one. And then in Curtains, I played the conductor of the musical within the musical. I played Sasha, the Russian conductor. I had a little song at the beginning of the second act.

[11:38] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Come on! That's so great.

[11:39] David Loud: It was great. I would love to do an entire episode with you just about the Kander and Ebb shows that you've done, because my gosh, what another great opportunity.

[11:49] David Loud: Well, that was my great fortune, to work with them over and over on so many shows. The Steel Pier, The Visit, The Scottsboro Boys, and other concerts of their music. To have John as a friend and colleague is just the greatest blessing of my life.

[12:07] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Wow. I think he's 94 now.

[12:09] David Loud: He seems younger and healthier than anybody else I know.

[12:11] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Oh, my gosh. I didn't know he was 94. Holy cow.

[12:15] David Loud: Well, you'd never know, talking to him. I'm still cranking it out, too.

[12:19] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Absolutely. Okay, so speaking of composers, once they get Mr. McNally on board to write the script, and by the way, he was so creative in the way that he did it. When we watch Ragtime, we see the characters narrating their own stories, just stepping forward, addressing the audience.

[12:40] David Loud: And that's a style that Terrence really invented for Ragtime.

[12:45] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: It's so smart. It's unique and efficient and literary and theatrical all at the same time.

[12:54] David Loud: You're so right, because from what I remember, the novel Ragtime doesn't have a lot of dialogue, right?

[13:00] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: He wasn't able to cut and paste scenes from Dr. O's book.

[13:05] David Loud: That's true. He's often sort of narrating their inner feelings rather than giving them scenes.

[13:10] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Giving them voices, yeah. And yet, like you said, in a very theatrical way, when they talk about themselves...

[13:17] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Lyricist Lynn Ahrens, who we have already talked about on the podcast with our "Once On This Island" episode. They had already had a Broadway darling with that show and a flop with another show called "My Favorite Year," which I actually love that score. They write a few songs as their audition, get some friends to record them, put them on a tape, deliver them. The songs on this tape were number one, the opening number, which blows my mind that that was on a demo, that incredible piece of writing. "Till We Reach That Day," which is the first act finale. A song for Evelyn Nesbitt that didn't make it into the show called "You Don't Know." And then "Gliding," just that sweet, beautiful song for Tate. So three of the four songs, I mean, obviously they booked it because three of the four songs that they wrote for their audition ended up in the show. Extraordinary.

[15:04] David Loud: Extraordinary. They were thinking so far ahead.

[15:06] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yes, exactly. Especially with how much writing went into the show. I mean, there's just, can we talk about this score? What do you love about it? There are so many songs, so many huge, huge numbers. It's not a show of filler.

[15:24] David Loud: It's such a great combination of actual songs that have a song form and then other ways that they find of combining plot with music. The score tells almost as much story as the book does in "Ragtime," and it has to because there's so much to tell.

[15:42] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: There's so much story to tell.

[15:43] David Loud: There's so much story to tell. They've got these three different sagas sort of braided together into this tapestry of "Ragtime." And Garth was so lucky that he chose Lynn and Steve because they're not only great writers, but they're championship rewriters and they're able to keep what was great about what they have and bend it to also do something else.

[16:08] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Wow. Flexible.

[16:09] David Loud: Rather than just throw it all out and start again with something else. They're very, very skilled craftspeople in addition to being great artists.

[16:18] David Loud: I first discovered the show through my two-disc cast album that I memorized before I came to New York and saw it. So I knew this score forwards and backwards before I even stepped into the theater. And this is a show that you can put on and listen to from beginning to end, and it will take you through the entire experience. It'll take you through the show, but you will still find opportunities to, "Oh, I want to hear that song again," because you said there are traditional songs placed throughout.

[16:51] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: It's so thrilling. Like when Tata and father and mother are singing, um, "Two Ships Passing," and you see these stories sort of glancing up against each other, but not colliding yet. It's, uh, it's just thrilling.

[17:07] David Loud: You're so, so right. Now to round out the creative team, we also got Frank Galati, right? Who is not known for directing musicals, but boy, were they lucky to get him because he is, he's a man with an epic vision. Well, he was best known for directing "Grapes of Wrath" and another seemingly impossible American novel turned to the stage.

[17:30] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Absolutely. And that production was so powerful, so actor-driven, and there weren't any special effects or anything. If I recall, it was just a bunch of boards on stage and the spectacular company from Chicago doing that play. It was so moving.

[17:47] David Loud: That sounds amazing. And Frank is, uh, as an artist is somebody who inspires other people with every sentence that he says, sort of like being in the room with these sort of half Santa Claus, half the Pope, half, um, I don't know. He's just the most inspiring person I've ever been in the room with.

[18:03] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Really? Oh my gosh. That's so crazy here.

[18:09] David Loud: Wow. No sessions are like graduate school courses in literature.

[18:15] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Oh wow. You just want to memorize everything he says and become a better person because of it.

[18:19] David Loud: Ah, that's my favorite type of person to be around. That sounds incredible. And then if that wasn't good enough, then you had someone else who was very skilled as a stager of musical theater, freaking Graziella Danielle.

[18:31] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yes. They're such a great team. They complimented each other so well. Graziella, you know, has a great eye for the details and knows how to realize technical things. And Frank always sees the big picture. And that was what was essential in "Ragtime," was seeing the big picture, not getting bogged down in, you know, it always had to be three stories going at the same time, which was really hard to pull off.

[19:01] David Loud: Well, and you know, I love when there are pieces of choreography in a musical that are iconic and they're not necessarily what you would consider dancing. Does that make sense? Like I always think of "Music Man" with "Trouble," right? And in every community theater production, you see, "Oh, we got trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble." Right. And, and, oh, we got trouble. Like we all know what that choreography looks like. And somehow, even though it's just gesture, it's been entered into the lexicon of dance language. And same with this show, the way that Graziella Danielle moved those three different groups of people in the opening number and set up the tension for what this story was going to be, will go down in history.

[19:39] David Loud: Absolutely. It's one of the most exciting pieces of staging I've ever witnessed. And the way she sets it up, because it comes out of complete chaos. You can't tell what's happening, where people are going and why they're moving where they are. And she always called that section, the melting pot. And then the melting pot magically changes to those three distinct communities. And you can't even figure out how she did it.

[20:06] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Well, it's quite thrilling. And yes, it's something that you remember for the rest of your life after you see it. So the production was filled with moments like Henry Ford, the production, when the bodies become these automatons.

[20:16] David Loud: Yeah. It's not joyful movement. It's horrifically mechanical movement that happens in that. And then simple things like Sarah and Colehouse dancing without touching in "Sarah Brown Eyes," because she's gone and he's missing her. That moment just killed me every night too.

[20:38] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Okay, I'm going to have to pull it together. Were you going to talk about the line of silhouettes?

[20:45] David Loud: The line of silhouettes at the end, that Grazia always called. She was always telling the actors to space themselves perfectly. Must be a string of pearls. You have to approach the stage like a string of pearls.

[20:59] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: That's fantastic. I'll never, stolen. I'm stealing it.

[21:03] David Loud: It was hard to do. Some of them had to go past twice. They had to run from one side and then run around and start over?

[21:09] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Come back on. Yeah.

[21:11] David Loud: Oh my gosh. Wow.

[21:12] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: The poor dancers had to work for a living in that show.

[21:16] David Loud: Yeah, I'm sure everybody was working their tails off to tell a story like that. All right. So that's the team. The show, they start writing the show at the end of 1994. Like you said, there are several readings where they figure things out, constant rewrites. The show opens for the first time in Toronto, because that's where the event was in 1996. Then it opens in Los Angeles, what, what? First in America, and then finally in New York in 1998. You all opened at the Ford Center for the Performing Arts, which I always found kind of interesting that this show that takes a really hard look at capitalism and the American, uh, the industrial revolution was named after Ford like that.

[21:57] David Loud: Yeah. Right. Interesting. For sure. The show opens to mixed reviews, which honestly makes me laugh. I mean, can you imagine "Ragtime" opening today and being criticized for being too nostalgic? Like, are you kidding me? So, so silly, but that being said, it was one of the most creative and competitive musical theater seasons of all time. I mean, period. Right? You mentioned "Lion King" opening. Also that revival of the Sam Mendes revival of "Cabaret," even flops like "Sideshow" and "The Capeman" were, you know, incredible and interesting.

[22:39] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah. "Ragtime" at the Tony Awards rightfully wins best score and best book. Audra McDonald wins yet another Tony Award for best featured actress. The show loses best musical to "Lion King," but I mean, I can't blame voters. That is a tough call.

[22:52] David Loud: It's a tough call. Yeah. Yeah. Now, briefly, I just got to say that, you know, the show was huge and lavish and expensive and had a huge cast and a huge orchestra and was probably too expensive. Around this time, the production company, Livent, it comes out that they've been kind of shady with their finances. There was some tricky accounting going on.

[23:19] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah. And did this all like trickle down to you guys in terms of like rumors and what was all happening?

[23:24] David Loud: It did. The whole second year of the run was, you know, Livent being sold from one company to another company and, you know, roomfuls of suits would come down and talk to us about, you know, now we own Livent and we're going to keep this show running. And six months later, they would have sold some other company and somebody else would gather us all and tell us that they were running the show. Now, really without Garth, without his passion and sort of blind need to have the show succeed, it was just too expensive and they couldn't make it make sense of it, you know, financially, which is very disappointing.

[24:03] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: It is. To have a show of that quality and with all of that work put into it and have it just be squandered a little bit by the producing element, you know, we were never on solid ground, really. I think "The Times" from the beginning was doing articles questioning Livent's finances. It smelled a rat long before it was proven. I mean, they were kind of bad boys in the producer world. They were not following the same standards and norms that everybody else was doing. They spent so much money on advertising and I guess wouldn't necessarily tell their… It wasn't so different from what other companies do, but they were a publicly traded company.

[24:46] David Loud: Oh, interesting.

[24:46] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: So, it became about investors and stockholders being swindled and just terrible. The last thing you want to think about when you go to the theater.

[25:00] David Loud: Absolutely. Well, I find it really sad and at the end of "Ragtime," they say it's the end of an era, you know.

[25:05] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: That's right.

[25:05] David Loud: It really does feel like the end of an era. I'm not sure. And maybe all of this proves that doing a show this lavish, this big isn't possible, you know. I'm not even sure, but it definitely feels like maybe it won't get done that way ever again.

[25:23] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: I can't imagine that it would be, but it was so exciting to be part of it.

[25:26] David Loud: Yeah. It's too bad that it happened the way that it did, but aren't we so glad?

[25:33] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah.

[25:35] David Loud: All right. I got to share my experience of seeing the show. So, at this point, I think I'm like 17 in New York with a group going to see shows, and my father had just passed away. And I talked about this on the "Lion King" episode because I was being in the theater and watching "He Lives in You" and all of the Mufasa stuff. It felt like the message that I needed to hear. And then I went to "Ragtime" and from the second the piano started, the show just broke me open. And I mourned the death of my dad for those three hours. And respectfully, in a New Rochelle sort of way, just to be clear, the people around me were not disrupted. But at the end of the show, I was so moved and kind of exhausted, and I was sitting in the mezzanine.

[26:35] David Loud: And I got up to leave and I couldn't see because there were so many tears in my eyes. So like, I ducked behind the door to exit to like kind of gather myself. And this sweet usher lady came up to me and was like, Are you okay, honey? And I was like, Oh, you know, you know, I just I think I didn't want to say anything. But I'm like, I think that maybe just the show made me emotional. And she put her arm around me. And she's like, Yeah, I understand it does the same thing for me. That's so beautiful. It is. It's so beautiful. Because like, what makes me emotional isn't even what I was going through at the time. But this moment of connection between two strangers for a moment in the darkness, right?

Yeah. And, and the fact that theater enabled that is one of the most profound experiences I've ever had in the theater. It was so instructional for what I would end up doing for the rest of my life, you know? Wow. So I don't know who that sweet usher was at the Ford Center. But thank you so much for sharing that.

[27:48] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Oh my gosh, are you kidding me? Thank you. Thank you. Do you have any specific memories of running the show? Because I mean, obviously, you were there a long time. The podium on a Broadway show is an extraordinary place to be.

[27:59] David Loud: Oh, I'm sure you're at the center of a beating heart of this organism that has been collected to tell this story. You've got the musicians below you, and the actors in front up above you. And you can feel the audience behind you. You feel them on the back of your neck. And you're in the center of it, you know, giving the beat, giving the heartbeat of the story to the audience, the actors and the musicians. It's a privileged place to be. And I loved my time on the podium, conducting Broadway shows. But especially Ragtime, because it seemed like each of the actors had a moment when they were down stage, connecting with the audience in a way that most shows don't get. And I think of Marin, singing Back to Before, barefoot in front of me, with that lighthouse behind her and this beautiful panorama of empty sky.

Or Audra, apologizing to her baby, you know, literally like five feet away from me. She sang Daddy's Son. Stokes, singing Make Them Hear You at the end of the night with the last bits of voice that he could cobble together each night. I mean, he gave so much at every performance. Those images are so powerful in my mind. It's like, they're larger than life, but they're also the essence of life. And the essence of theater, I think, was achieved in that show.

[29:36] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Wow. Thank you for sharing that. My gosh. All right. I have taken some notes, to say the least, so that we can go through the show, but that it won't feel like the insane task of trying to tell this entire story. Obviously, some details are going to be left out, but there are so many profound moments and themes explored in the show through the different characters. So we're going to try and set it up for our listeners, so that in case they haven't seen it, they know what the show is all about. And for those who have seen it, buckle up, because you may be seeing it in your mind in a way that you never have.

[30:18] David Loud: All right. So at the very beginning of the show, we have these different groups of people, and we'll break them up for you thus. You got the WASPy people in New Rochelle. They're dressed in gorgeous white clothes. Everything's proper, clean, elegant.

[30:36] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: That's right. Yeah.

[30:38] David Loud: We have Mother, very much operating under the standard rules and expectations of a woman in a household in this community. You have Father, who is successful, right? Father would be essentially the American Dream.

[30:56] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Successful businessman.

[30:57] David Loud: Yeah.

[30:58] David Loud: Yeah. He made bunting and flags.

[31:01] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Oh, that's right. Yes. Oh my gosh. That's such a great detail. Not only is he a successful businessman, but he is a successful businessman because he makes patriotic decorations and fireworks and everything Independence Day related. Also living with them is Mother's younger brother, just known as Younger Brother. He's lost, bless his heart, right?

[31:29] David Loud: Right. At the beginning, yes.

[31:30] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Definitely trying to find himself. The only real sense of connection he has is being obsessed with Evelyn Nesbitt, who is one of the real life characters in the show. We also have Mother and Father's son, whose name is Edgar. How would you define Edgar? Because he is an interesting character in the show.

[31:48] David Loud: A little boy.

[31:51] David Loud: He's this little boy who has visions, and they come true. It's an odd little sort of almost, they almost slip it under the table. What I find so interesting about Edgar, and I think that he can be a confusing character for a lot of people, is that he both represents the future. And so he is kind of having these visions that he really doesn't have any understanding of. But also he's a child, so he can, in the same breath, foretell of the world war and also say, do you want a cookie? Right? Kind of this out of the mouth of babes sort of thing. And I mean, if you've ever been around children long enough, this is not a far stretch. I feel like they can sometimes say the most profound thing directly followed by, haha, poopoo pants.

[32:41] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: He's a truth teller.

[32:43] David Loud: Yes.

[32:43] David Loud: He's a truth teller in the story.

[32:45] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: So that's New Rochelle. Then we've got the Harlem group, anchored by Cole House Walker Jr., who is a very accomplished, educated piano player, incredibly talented. He has fallen in love with a girl by the name of Sarah. And just to kind of go a little bit ahead in their story, Sarah becomes pregnant. She doesn't tell Cole House, right?

[33:11] David Loud: Right.

[33:11] David Loud: Because she sings in her song, Daddy Never Knew That You Were On The Way.

[33:14] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: She hasn't committed to him.

[33:15] David Loud: Yeah.

[33:16] David Loud: Right.

[33:16] David Loud: She hasn't committed. He hasn't committed to her.

[33:19] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: And he, exactly. And then he, being kind of the musician, free spirit, leaves and, of course, has other ladies. And that crushes Sarah, who is now expecting this child all on her own. Then we go to our Jewish immigrant friends, yeah, who will ultimately be in the East Side, anchored by a character who's just called Tate, Father.

[33:45] David Loud: Yeah.

[33:46] David Loud: In Yiddish.

[33:47] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yiddish slang, yeah.

[33:49] David Loud: And he has a little girl. He says that his wife, her mother, is dead. Do you think that that's true?

[33:58] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yes.

[33:58] David Loud: Yeah?

[33:59] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Because she says it.

[34:01] David Loud: Because he's, like, he's instructing the little girl on what to say when people, like, ask them about themselves.

[34:07] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: It's an interesting moment, though, because you could interpret that as him telling her to say that.

[34:12] David Loud: Like, this is our story.

[34:14] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah.

[34:16] David Loud: I can't imagine why they would leave her if she weren't.

[34:19] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Right.

[34:20] David Loud: I mean, we don't hear anything about, there are no clues given.

[34:24] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Totally.

[34:25] David Loud: You're right to wonder. Like, she is not supposed to tell her name, you know. She's supposed to tell them that she has no name. I'm not really sure why that is. But, you know, just these interesting things about, like, a father.

[34:38] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: I think immigrants didn't want people to know their names in case you go to the police.

[34:45] David Loud: Sure.

[34:45] David Loud: They didn't want trouble with the police.

[34:47] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Let me just be under the radar. Let me be invisible, have my American dream, and stay out of trouble.

[34:54] David Loud: Exactly.

[34:56] David Loud: Then we have the real life characters. We have Evelyn Nesbitt, who was kind of the first Velma Kelly in America. I mean, she was involved in this huge scandal where her husband shot her lover, and then that turned her into a star. She was on the vaudeville circuit. We have Emma Goldman, who was an anarchist. I mean, with the best of intentions. Like, she really was...

[35:24] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: An anarchist with a heart of gold.

[35:26] David Loud: Right, exactly. Looking out for the everyman, but doing it often in a very destructive, violent way. You got Harry Houdini, who was, of course, a legendary escape artist and an immigrant himself. Henry Ford, who was responsible for our obsession with cars in this country.

[35:49] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: And the automated way of making them on an assembly line.

[35:53] David Loud: The assembly line, for sure. We got J.P. Morgan, maybe one of the richest men ever.

[36:01] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Collects treasures and money.

[36:03] David Loud: And Booker T. Washington, an incredible leader, Tuskegee Institute.

[36:08] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: The voice of reason.

[36:10] David Loud: Oh, thank you. That's beautiful. So, magically, in this opening number, we have met all of these people and somehow feel like we know them.

[36:19] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: And you magically put that all together, too. Very well done.

[36:24] David Loud: Well, but see how long it took me? And they do that in a matter of minutes.

[36:29] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: I think we did it faster in the show.

[36:32] David Loud: Absolutely. Absolutely, you did. That's the magic of Ragtime.

[36:37] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: After we meet all of these people, then it becomes, okay, how do their lives intersect and what continues? One of the things I find most interesting is that even though Father is the epitome of American success, he's never home. He's always traveling and journeying elsewhere, which in and of itself, I mean, totally subconscious to him, shows you how unfulfilled he is by what we all consider to be the goal of coming to America, which is just to have plenty of money and success. And as soon as he has it, he's like, all right, I want to go to the North Pole. So, right at the top of the show, he's off to explore the top of the globe.

[37:25] David Loud: And as he's leaving on a ship and Mother is waving him goodbye and wondering, if you are journeying in your way, how can I maybe journey in mine? There is another ship that's coming to America, which is bringing Tata and the immigrants. It's this beautiful triangle of Tata seeing Father leave and wondering, why are you leaving this country? And Father looking at Tata and asking, why are you coming to this country in this horrible ship? And Mother wondering how she fits into all of it as well.

[38:01] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: They're all worried about the future. They're all entering the unknown in some way. They're all going someplace they've never been.

[38:08] David Loud: Well, Mother soon gets the answer because one day as she is gardening, she finds a baby buried in essentially her flowerbed. And it's this beautiful number called What Kind of Woman, right, where it starts out asking what kind of woman would do this, who would bury their own child? And then she realizes that if Father had been there, he probably would have said, let's turn our backs to this. This is drama we don't want to invite into our lives. And she realizes, if I do that, what kind of woman does that make me? So what she ends up doing is inviting the mother of this child, Sarah, whose baby this is her in Coal Houses, to come and live with her. And as I was prepping for this episode, listening to the cast album and reviewing the story, here we have a character who literally tries to kill her baby.

And yet because of the art form, because of this song, my heart absolutely breaks for Sarah. And there is not an ounce of judgment in me for what she has done. And isn't that extraordinary? Because I would not feel that way, I think, in any other medium. The fact that I can hear what's going on in her heart because of your daddy's son. She takes you through that journey in the song of what she was feeling and why it happened. And you know that Lynn and Steve had not originally written that song, and Terrence hadn't put a place for it.

[39:51] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: The character of Houdini is much more explored in the book than it is in the musical, but they find exactly the right moments to bring him in to sort of represent that spark of transformation that an immigrant coming to a new country hopes for and can occasionally achieve.

[41:13] David Loud: Oh, funny you say that because I did. But yes, you're so poetic in the way you're saying things. I'm so glad you're here. All right, let's go to Cole House Walker Jr. He's the piano player. He has realized that Sarah has gone from his life. He doesn't know where she is, but it's time to get her back. It's time to settle down, declare his love. He performs the Gettin' Ready Rag, such a great song. And then he himself goes to buy a car, which becomes the symbol of respectability, maybe? And the striving upward of the lower class and the Harlem, they call them the strivers of Harlem. People who wanted more than the ghetto, than just being separate. They wanted to assimilate. And so he has his car, he's feeling like a million bucks, and now he's ready to go get his woman.

He finds out that she is in New Rochelle and approaches Mother's house. And so now Mother, this white woman whose husband isn't home, has a black woman and her baby living in the attic. And then this man who's coming weekly to try and get Sarah to talk to him, and she keeps refusing. Until Mother finally invites Cole House to stay at the house, maybe for some tea, and invites him to play their piano. And what he plays is ragtime, this new music. And this is really one of the big themes of this show, is that at the turn of the century, ragtime becomes the symbol of something new. And that sequence is such a great example of how the score tells that whole story in one song, so efficiently. And it tells it emotionally.

You've got the chorus, which Grazi and Frank had staged, sort of coming down these stairways at the side of the stage, observing and listening to what was going on. And the series of weeks when he comes to play her the music and the way that affects her, and she starts to come down the stairs and then she runs down. It's the most beautifully told piece of storytelling and music that I've ever seen on stage. It's just so rich. So rich. It was so hard to conduct that, because the cast was spread all over the theater. And they had beautiful voices, and they liked to sing with their big beautiful voices. They wouldn't necessarily listen to somebody else singing. I was like, just follow my lead, please.

It was hard to conduct that number. But it worked. That is a huge number. I mean, any musical would be lucky to have new music as the closer to their first act. And this is in the middle of the first act. Yeah, we had miles to go before we got there. This new chance for Cole House and Sarah is brought to fruition with this song called Wheels of a Dream. Another amazing song. So much happened between the lines in that song. Audra and Stokes were able to tell the whole story of their relationship, just in the way they handed the baby back and forth to each other, the way he helped her down to sit on the blanket. You learned everything that you needed to know about the two of them from their actions and from the little magic moments between the lines. And they sang the shit out of the song at the same time. It was very exciting.

[45:34] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: That's so cool.

[45:36] David Loud: Conducting that number with the two of them, because they were like rays of charismatic hope singing out there at the end, was so nakedly ambitious and joyful. And there was no room in the theater for an unhappy ending from the way they were singing.

[45:53] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Wow, that's great. I love that. There was no room for an unhappy ending.

[45:58] David Loud: Oh my God, the last thing you'd ever think of. Look at those two gorgeous people singing at the top of their lungs about hope in America and the future.

[46:07] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Wow.

[46:08] David Loud: Next up, we hear from Emma Goldman, the voice who's reminding us that despite this desire for hope, the realities are harsh, especially for people like Tate, who are trying to make life work and are living in slums, right? She's in Union Square, and the person who also happens to be there is younger brother. And when he sees and hears what she is saying, for the first time in his life, he realizes what his purpose is. I think it wakes him up from the smallness of his world. And he sees what needs to be done, and he's ready to do it. He wants to join this kind of revolution in making life better for all people in this country.

[47:01] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Right.

[47:02] David Loud: More hope. And yet, every time that this show gives us hope, it just bashes us right down again, because here come Cole House and Sarah back from their marvelous time, and his car gets destroyed by some Irish firemen. The head of this whole thing is a guy by the name of Willie Conklin. And it's really fascinating that later on, he says that, well, I was treated horribly as an Irishman. I was treated horribly when I came into this country. So you see this cyclical stuff where he's like, I just got used to it. They just got to get used to it.

[47:41] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: The passing along of violence. That's the answer.

[47:44] David Loud: Yeah, right. That's the answer. But that, you know, as an educated person who believes in America, Cole House tries to go through the proper channels to report this kind of behavior. And every time he tries something else, he gets shut down. They're not technically city employees because they're volunteers, so the city can't help them. He tries to file something somewhere else, but then the paperwork gets lost. It's just all of this red tape, right, that is keeping him from justice. And he becomes obsessed with it to the point where he's kind of forgotten what matters and calls off his wedding. This is sometimes a sticking point for some of my friends. They're like, I don't understand what that has to do with it. Why would he decide that he doesn't want to get married? I mean, what do you think?

[48:32] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: I think people in extraordinary circumstances respond in extraordinary ways. And getting married sort of means working within the system. And he's discovering that the system is broken.

[48:45] David Loud: Oh, I didn't think about that. Why would he want to be part of the system? In the same way that gay friends are like, why would I get married in a country where people don't want me to get married?

[48:56] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Absolutely. All right. Interesting.

[48:59] David Loud: Keep your sucky marriage.

[49:01] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Wow. Yeah, I love that. So all of this search for justice encourages Sarah to seek it out herself, because the sooner that this gets resolved, the sooner that they can have their family and all the wheels of a dream that you'd ever want. So she goes to talk to the president. And by president, we mean vice president, because at this point, the actual president, McKinley, had just been assassinated. So everybody is really on edge about the safety of the president of the United States. So as she approaches and is like waving her hands to talk to this leader and say, hey, can you help us out? This is what's currently happening. Someone thinks that she's a mad woman with a gun and she gets attacked and beaten down and dies.

Are you freaking kidding me? Why would you do this to me? Ragtime musical. So the first act ends with this character who we love so much, her funeral. And the song is Till We Reach That Day, in which everyone is realizing how much work we have to do before this dream is a reality.

[50:10] David Loud: Yeah, it's a devastating ending. It's the last thing you expect when you're watching a show. And the image of Sarah in the coffin while the people are mourning her around and the power of the voices at the end of that act was so strong. It was just a heartbreaking thing to experience every night.

[50:39] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: This is definitely one of those moments where I listen to it now and the relevancy of Sarah being the victim of essentially police brutality. And then she becomes a symbol, you know, say her name to remind us about how far we need to come. We've been talking about it nonstop for the past couple of years. It's so relevant. It blows my mind.

[51:06] David Loud: Yeah. Over and over and over. We see this in the world and in America, and we're still trying to make it better.

[51:15] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Still trying to make it happen. In some ways, it gives me comfort that we're not just screwing it up by ourselves.

[51:23] David Loud: We're not the first ones to screw it up.

[51:25] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah, we're not the first ones to screw it up. Exactly. Hopefully we'll make it there. Well, I'll tell you one thing about that number. You know, Audra takes her work on stage incredibly seriously. And it was the goal of certain cast members to try to get Audra to laugh while she was in that coffin. And they would put little beepers that you could dial and it would start beeping and buzzing. They would put the beepers in the coffin with her and then dial the swings offstage. We dialed the number during that.

[52:01] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Oh, God. So cruel.

[52:03] David Loud: So cruel. And she would never laugh.

[52:07] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Good for her.

[52:08] David Loud: Afterwards, of course, she'd be hysterical and screaming at them and chasing them down the hallway and beating them up.

[52:16] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Oh, God bless theater. I love it.

[52:19] David Loud: All right. Act 2 begins and we're back with Harry Houdini, right? Escaping, which is a really interesting kind of motif to begin Act 2 with because it seems like everybody is trying to escape. Cole House, in many ways, has turned this quest for justice into terror. He has shot three different people and everybody is freaking out. Of course, the white person thing to do is to leave town. And so father sends mother to Atlantic City. What's interesting, though, is that all of his solutions always come to breaking up the family.

[53:03] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Separation.

[53:04] David Loud: Separation. Yeah.

[53:09] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Goes to Atlantic City where Houdini and Evelyn Nesbitt are now filming a movie. I love that this whole sequence is included in the show because escapism is such a huge part of being able to believe that the American dream is even possible. And certainly that's why Hollywood was created. And it just so happens that the director of the film is Tate, because, and we discovered this in the first act, one thing that he would do to calm his little girl is to create a moving book where you flip the pictures and the pictures come alive and, you know, kind of early animation. And it becomes the way that he starts to make money is he sells these movie books. And that has led to him then getting into motion pictures, moving pictures, and is now a well-respected director.

What's really great though, is that when he and mother meet up and, you know, we did skip this, but she had met him when he was a lowly immigrant, what he talks about in terms of his success is all about his daughter. And what an interesting parallel, once again, between him and father. When father gets his success, he leaves. And when Tate gets his success, he stays and makes life for his daughter everything that he wished it could be. And I think that that touches mother in a very profound way.

[54:44] David Loud: I never thought of it that way. It was a beautiful point of view.

[54:46] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Oh, thank you. Looking at that. Very nice. So Tate introduces, you know, kind of his success this way, but then they sing "Our Children," which is one of the few songs, I don't know if I want to say that as a cruel way, but it's one of the few songs that is a song, but doesn't have like a big, loud, long note at the end. And it's honestly one of my favorites.

[55:10] David Loud: It's not one of the anthems.

[55:11] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yes. Thank you. Thank you. When I went and saw Ragtime, I bought the bear that is also a music box and it plays "Our Children" and I still have it. One of the few possessions that I truly treasure having bought at a merchandise booth at a theater.

[55:30] David Loud: Well, Garth likes to sell his little tchotchkes. Keep the money coming in.

[55:35] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Oh, right. We got to pay for this orchestra somehow, right?

[55:39] David Loud: And you got to pay for that harp.

[55:42] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Exactly. Cole House continues in his madness. Not only does he want justice from, you know, Willie Conklin and what was done to his car, but now he's taken the entire J.P. Morgan Library hostage and is threatening to blow it up.

[55:58] David Loud: Well, it's such a symbol of American greed and wealth and sort of cultural, what's that word, appropriation. You know, Morgan collected all these treasures from around the world and brought them into his library. And, you know, he's got the first edition folio of Shakespeare and he's got the Gutenberg Bible and he's got everything he could buy sort of hoarded into his own. I don't know if you've ever seen the actual library. It's gorgeous.

[56:29] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: I've never been there.

[56:30] David Loud: Gorgeous. It's a museum now. It's quite beautiful. You can see it. But that's the room that Cole House takes over to demand justice.

[56:39] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: I mean, that is true, right? Because they're like, it's just a car. It's like, all right, well, all of these things are just things too, right? It's just the Gutenberg Bible.

[56:49] David Loud: Right. Wow. Booker T. Washington, who we mentioned, he has always been someone who Cole House looks up to and he is also the person to speak out against what Cole House is doing. But Cole House being in this library begins to remember Sarah and you see how much he's hurting. He has the beautiful duet with her called "Sarah Brown Eyes" in which they dance with each other, but never touch.

[57:21] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: This was a song that was added late into the show as well, right?

[57:26] David Loud: Yeah. It wasn't one of the original moments that they thought of, but it became essential that we see Sarah in the second act in some way. And so she comes back as this vision for Cole House and it really keeps her story alive.

[57:42] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Well, and it helps us see him in the way, I mean, because she is the symbol of him always trying to be a better man. That's why the "Getting Ready Rag" happened, right? That's why he got in the car. That's why he wanted justice. And so we need to keep checking back in with the two of them to realize who he really is way deep down. His vision is interrupted by Younger Brother who has come to join Cole House's team. And it's this great scene where Younger Brother wants to say all of these profound things and he says them all musically. And then at the end of the song, we're told that all he actually said though was, I know how to blow things up. And so now we have this team together that is a real threat to the library and to quote unquote civilized living.

Mother comes back from Atlantic City. She has "Back to Before," which my gosh, what an anthem in which she finally mourns the fact that her marriage to father will never be the same. And she doesn't want it to go back to the way that it was. Her arc through this show has really come to a full and robust place by the end of the song. She's made the journey that she wondered if she could make in "Journey On." And once you see the future, you can't go back.

[59:16] David Loud: That's so true. Now we're just at the very end. A very happy ending. Booker T. Washington comes. Father is actually the one who recommends it because he knows that Cole House respects him. He comes to talk and be the mediator with Cole House. And in just a really riveting musical scene, he tells him, I understand what you are trying to do. You are trying to stand up to white men and teach society what you believe are truths. And yet, what about your son? And honestly, this is like the first time in the show that I've remembered this little child of Cole House's. But Booker T. Washington says, you are letting white people raise your son because you're here doing all of this. He hears the ooh from Sarah and it really wakes him up to how far he's gone from himself.

He sings "Make Them Hear You" in which he changes his tune, literally, and encourages all of his men to go out and make a difference in a way that is not violent and agrees to leave the library. He has promised a fair trial. He has promised that none of the men will be hurt. And the minute that he walks out of the library, he's shot and killed. Boom. That's rough.

[1:00:58] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: After that, we get the epilogue in which we find out everything that's happened to everybody else. Father, once again, can't help himself and keeps journeying away from home and happens to be on the Lusitania when it is attacked, so he loses his life. Mother mourns for a year and then is actually proposed to by Tata, and they are married. So now this family is her, Tata, Edgar, the little girl, no name, and then Cole House Jr. And this inspires in Tata the idea of maybe creating a film in which children of all backgrounds, poor, rich, white, black, can work together and maybe that will be the promise and hope of America. Well, the musical goes from a place of extreme tragedy to finding the glimmers of hope at the end that will allow us to keep going.

You see Cole House's future in this little boy and you realize at least something of him still exists and will carry on. But it's hard to feel great at the end of Ragtime about the human race because it exposes so much hatred and prejudice and injustice.

[1:02:17] David Loud: Absolutely. The epilogue reminds us that we're going right into the World War, that even if we may have learned something from this particular situation, humans are still humans and we're still falling into those same patterns and cycles over and over again. This is one moment, this moment of Ragtime is one moment in our country, but it isn't the last moment. What kept you excited about coming back to the theater? If we are exposing so much and being so, I don't want to say callous, but unflinching in the mirror that we're holding up to ourselves, what keeps you coming to the theater night after night to do this show?

[1:03:18] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: This was a story that needed to be told and was told beautifully by theater artists of great skill and to be a part of that collaboration was an honor for me. I've worked on some bad shows and I've worked on some great shows and Ragtime was truly one of the greatest in terms of the scope of what it had to say emotionally and historically and also the skill with which it was executed. I couldn't quite believe that I was doing it each night. It was a great privilege to be in that building.

[1:04:02] David Loud: Well, it was my privilege to see it. It's our privilege to continue to reflect on it because it will continue to be relevant, unfortunately, and also fortunately, because once again, we are not alone in this struggle. We've always had it and it'll be something that we pass on to the next generation. I don't know. I think by talking about these shows, we keep that conversation open.

[1:04:19] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Absolutely. You did such a beautiful job of taking us through that plot. It's a lot of plot.

[1:04:29] David Loud: It's a lot of plot. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Thank you for spending some time with us today. It's a masterpiece of a show.

[1:05:05] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Hey there, David. We have the great honor of hearing more of your stories and more of your words because you are coming out with a book, correct? Tell us about it.

[1:05:27] David Loud: Yes. It's called "Facing the Music" and it's a memoir of my 34 years on Broadway.

[1:05:35] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: I am currently pre-ordering it as you're talking.

[1:05:38] David Loud: Oh, excellent. Yes, it's available on Amazon and other places to pre-order. It comes out March 22nd.

[1:05:45] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Fantastic. Everybody, please order the book by Mr. David Loud called "Facing the Music."

[1:05:51] David Loud: "Facing the Music."

[1:05:53] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: And David, thank you again for this and for a wonderful career of incredible theater.

[1:06:00] David Loud: Thank you. Thank you so much. What a pleasure to talk to you. And everybody out there, remember, don't be afraid of new music.