Manoel Felciano: New Music

A lot has changed in America since Ahrens, Flaherty and McNally's Ragtime enjoyed a major revival--most notably, perhaps, the election of the country's first African-American President. But some things have remained the same. Immigration is still a divisive issue. Equality is still a far way off.The definition of "family" continues to be considered and reexamined. The lines between communities seem to be growing stronger, keeping people apart instead of bringing them together.

In this turbulent, uncertain time, the award-winning musical's decidedly un-nostalgic look back at the turbulent, uncertain turn-of-the-last-century seems especially apropos. And there is no better place for the show than in America's capital itself. Currently playing the role of the hopeful and determined Jewish immigrant Tateh in the Kennedy Center's revival is Broadway's own Manoel Felciano.

“I was up in Boston doing Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll at the Huntington when I got the call from my agents,” Felciano recalls. “They sent me the material, and I found a pianist in Boston, rehearsed ‘Gliding’ and ‘Buffalo Nickel’ and then went down for the audition and callback on my days off. I just remember rehearsing ‘Buffalo Nickel’ on the Bolt Bus with headphones on and figuring out some physicality for the character. I definitely got some strange looks!”

For all the attention Ragtime has earned since its Broadway bow a decade ago, Felciano managed to avoid the hype, and chose to join the production based solely on the pedigree and the script. “I thought the material was really strong on the page, and that's usually enough,” he says. “I didn't actually listen to the CD (I try to avoid that), so the first time I heard the full show was in our first sing through, and I was blown away by the score.”

To create the archetypal character and make him human, Felciano had several methods available to him.  Since he had never seen a production before, he was able to create the character from scratch. “I did meet Peter Friedman, who was extraordinarily gracious, and actually encouraged me not to pay attention to what he had done,” he acknowledges. “That was very generous.”

“Of course, Tateh is literally ‘father,’” he continues, “and so I thought a lot about my godchildren (I have three; two quite young) and how protective I would be about of them, the lengths to which I would go to give them a better life. That Darwinian drive is the most powerful one we have, and it can lead ordinary people to do extraordinary things.” Vocally, he was able to use his experience in Rock 'n’ Roll as an aid. “I’d been speaking in a Czech accent for months, so I just kind of massaged that accent to get to an approximation of Tateh's Latvian inflected English.”

Director Marcia Milgrom Dodge provided what Felciano calls an “extraordinary amount” of research material to the actors. “Mostly I wanted to wrap my head around the kind of poverty that the people coming off these ragships with nothing had to endure,” he says. “There are incredibly moving photographs of the tenement slums of the Lower East Side, with sometimes 12 people living to a room, often six families to a floor, five floors, and two ‘outhouses’ for the entire place. And of course, no insulation, ventilation, and very little light. It certainly put my own cramped New York apartment in perspective!”

In addition to acting, Felciano has made a name for himself in New York City's music scene,
performing numerous gigs at Ars Nova and Joe's Pub. "When I was younger I always wanted to be a singer songwriter, but had total writer's block," he recalls. "But the fans were so supportive of me tentatively trotting out some of my own songs when I did my first gigs at Ars Nova in '06 that it really encouraged me to keep writing, which led to a solo CD, Moonshot, and the songwriting project SundaySongs, an effort to write, record, and post online one new song a week for 2008. Ultimately my acting career got too overwhelming for me to keep up, but I did end up with 30 new songs. The goal was to just generate a lot of material, since you have to write about 10 songs to get one really good one. I debuted some of those songs at a pair of shows at Joe's Pub, just before coming here to do Ragtime, and it was really gratifying to do an entire set of new material, 13 world premieres before a sold-out, immensely supportive crowd. We recorded the show, and are working on the tracks now, so hopefully I'll be either posting the live tracks online or releasing a low-priced EP of the best stuff."

And for the future, Felciano has lofty ambitions. "I want to play meaty parts in pieces that will be around years and years from now, the classics and the pieces that will become classics," he says. "Next up, I'm going to my hometown of San Francisco to play Jerry in Edward Albee's At Home at the Zoo. Zoo Story has always been a favorite of mine, and Jerry has one of the great arias ever written for the American stage, so when those parts come along, you have to jump at them. And eventually I'm going to start moving into directing, which I'm very excited about."

But for now, Manoel Felciano is enjoying being part of Ragtime at this moment in American history, especially in the American capital. “It's a story whose time has really come," he says. "The issues of diversity, of inclusion, of America being a melting pot, of striving towards 'a more perfect union' were all central to Obama's campaign and election as president. Conversely, the current economic crisis has showed us what the dark side of being the 'land of opportunity' and 'freedom' can be, when opportunity becomes greed and freedom becomes an abdication of communal responsibility. If there was ever a time for Ragtime, that time is right now, [in] 2009, in Washington, D.C.”