Interview: Robert Kelley of RAGTIME at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley Brings the Great American Musical to Life

Attending to some unfinished business, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley is continuing its 51st season with a new production of the musical masterpiece Ragtime that had originally been scheduled for the spring of 2020 as a sort of capstone to the career of its then-retiring Artistic Director Robert Kelley, who was stepping down after a staggering 50 years at the helm. After two years of COVID-related delays, Kelley is thrilled to be back and directing this most American of musicals, which he had previously directed at TheatreWorks back in 2002 and really wanted to have another go at. It would appear that sometimes you actually can go home again.

Ragtime is a personal favorite of Kelley's, and its themes have only become more relevant in the 25 years since the show was written. Based on E. L. Doctorow's best-selling novel of the same name, it is a sweeping and deeply moving musical that paints a portrait of America at the dawn of the twentieth century, interweaving the lives of three families - an African American family, a Jewish Immigrant family, and a wealthy white family - finding their places and pursuing the American Dream in a rapidly changing world. It features a Tony Award-winning book by Pulitzer Prize finalist Terrence McNally (Master Class, Kiss of the Spider Woman) and a Tony Award-winning score by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens (Once on This Island, Anastasia, Seussical The Musical). The score, in particular, is one of the greatest in the musical theater canon, with a panoply of gorgeous ballads, stirring anthems, charming character songs and even some actual ragtime that combine to form a crazy quilt of American music.

I caught up with Kelley by phone recently when he was about a week into rehearsals. His excitement at finally being up and running with this particular show was palpable. It was at almost this exact point in the rehearsal process two years ago that the production had to be shut down due to the emerging COVID pandemic, and no one at that time could have predicted how long it would take to get the theater back on its feet. I've had the pleasure of speaking with Kelley many times over the past several years, and he always gives me the impression of the proverbial kid in a candy store. After over a half-century making theater, the man clearly knows his craft and his history. But what comes across most strongly in any conversation with him is his deep, deep love for the theater and an almost childlike joy in the fact that he gets to keep creating it. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I can't believe we finally get to talk about your production of Ragtime, which I've been waiting to do for over two years now!

I know! It's been a long wait and it's really a thrill to be doing it once again. We started rehearsals almost exactly two years after we closed, and that was a great first day and a remarkable feeling throughout the TheatreWorks company. And now, in two years' time, this show that I'd already felt was the most relevant and important musical about America that there ever was, was twice as relevant as it had been then. It felt like the show had been written just a few months before rehearsal.

You had originally programmed Ragtime as the last big musical to mark the culmination of your 50-year tenure as Artistic Director of TheatreWorks, so clearly you had chosen this as the show you wanted to go out on.

Yeah, I really had picked it on purpose to be that show. It's certainly one of my top two or three musicals ever, in terms of my own personal preferences, but I also felt that it really summarized the issues and the heart of TheatreWorks that had prevailed over my 50 years there. Everything that it had to say about the country were themes that we had delved into throughout the growth of the company.

What do you specifically see as those themes?

Well, first of all, I love the Ragtime era and we've done a lot of shows in that era over the years. What I love about it is the multicultural energy that came soaring out of that era and the fact that even as the country was really starting to burst forth, it was also confronting these entrenched racial, ethnic, gender, and class-based prejudices that have lingered certainly into our day and become much more starkly seen over the last two years. I mean, the specific issues that we're coming to grips with now are ones that are part of this show - the racial, religious, ethnic hatred, especially in view of the Black Lives Matter movement, of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and many more. And the premise of immigrants being a part of America has come under question, often dramatically and sadly. In Ragtime, the role of immigrants, especially of Jewish immigrants, is a powerful theme as they struggle for a place in America that is clearly a very difficult place to grow in, even then, and certainly now as we look at what's happening at our borders.

The premise of equal rights for women and respect for women is another major theme of Ragtime and certainly is on the front pages right now. Another big part of it is the difference between the scions of industry and the people far below them on the social and income strata as we see them kind of be manipulated from above, and see how the uber-rich are working with the political system to both maintain and advance their own positions.

More and more of America today is directly presented in Ragtime, albeit 120 years ago. It is an extraordinarily moving show, and it also manages to have some of the upside of America. It's funny, it shows the whole spirit of the American character, and it embodies the idea of the American dream. It certainly doesn't show you that everyone succeeds in finding that dream, and it may be more elusive than anyone ever imagined. What you see in this show is that it's not for everyone, and until it is for everyone, we haven't achieved, as a country, the American dream.

You previously directed Ragtime back in 2002. How will this production be different?

That was a different time for TheatreWorks. We were still sort of building our chops as a professional company then. I think we had a cast of 36, not quite as big as the Broadway cast, but we had a massive cast, a ridiculous number of costumes, huge sets that came from every direction. It felt more like an opera, really. And of course a Model T Ford is a key element in the show, and we found one in a cornfield in Iowa, had it shipped to TheatreWorks and spent a summer restoring it to its original glory so that we could legally drive it onto the stage.

It was such a big show, really based on the size and scale of the Broadway original, which I'd seen in previews down in Los Angeles and was one of the great theater experiences of my life. When we got to intermission, I actually couldn't move. I kind of collapsed in my seat and it was a big mess. I was in the middle of the row and nobody could get out, and people were just like "What's the matter with this guy?" [laughs] But I was just physically so stunned and deeply moved by this show. That's when I really felt that that we had to do it at TheatreWorks, even though we had to build the entire season that year around the size and scale of Ragtime.

We've revived some of our big hits from the past over the years, lots of Sondheims and various things, but Ragtime just seemed too large to even imagine on a fully professional basis. But I'd discovered a couple of productions around the country that were done with small casts. A wonderful director from Minneapolis, Peter Rothstein, had produced it first at Theater Latté Da and then he directed it again at Fifth Avenue in Seattle, which is a huge place, and at Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, and all of them were done with a chamber-sized cast and with apparent success. I didn't actually see any of them, but that got me thinking "OK, what if...?" What if you tried to do this show where the focus was really on the lead actors, and they also would play other roles in the show? It would be an ensemble cast, and everybody would play everything, and you'd get to not only know these lead characters, but also see their remarkable chops as actors in other roles. I talked it over with Bill Liberatore, our musical director, and his feeling was we could do it with a chamber orchestra.

So that's the way we put it together and how it wound up on the 50th season. And then after 7 days of rehearsals started - boom! - everything closed, everywhere. It was a real blow for everybody, and people were in tears. I remember that day so well, and the only thing I think that allowed everybody to get through it was the fact that we knew every theater artist in America was experiencing exactly what we were experiencing at exactly the same time. As I announced what was going to happen to the cast, I could just imagine directors all over the country saying exactly the same words I was saying. It was a remarkable feeling.

So now, two years later, how much of that original cast were you able to hold onto?

About half of them are back. On the day we closed, we told them we hoped that we'd be able to bring the show back and that their roles would be available for them. Some people wound up going into other lines of work, actually, over the two years. Others wound up in Broadway or pre-Broadway shows that they really couldn't say "no" to and that were at the same time as our production of Ragtime. It was really tough for the actors because we basically rescheduled the show a couple of times, as did all theaters, trying to figure out how to survive the COVID epidemic. The dates kept fluctuating, and there was a lot of uncertainty.

But we were very, very lucky that a good number of the cast were able to come back, and we found some wonderful new performers to fill in all the gaps. And a remarkable thing happened right at the last minute. We thought we were going to have to replace Sarah, who is the key Black female character in the show, and in many ways her journey has been thrust into a brighter spotlight in our current moment in time. Iris Beaumier was all ready to go back in the fall, and then in early winter she was cast in her first Broadway show, The Little Prince. With great reluctance and a lot of sad interchange between us, she said, "It's my first chance for Broadway, I just have to do it." And then while we were still scouring for Sarah, the show closed early, and Iris called and said, "I'll be free two days after your rehearsals begin. Is there any chance...?" As it turned out, we had struggled to fill the role and - bingo! - Iris closed on Broadway on Sunday, got on a plane and was in rehearsal on Tuesday after we'd started just the Friday before. Everybody was thrilled, to say the least.

The saddest part of the day we announced we were forced to close, and then as we approached our start date for rehearsals, was the knowledge that there are roles for children in the show, and it was pretty clear to everyone that depending on how long it took for us to get the show going again, our kids might not be young kids anymore. Several of them we couldn't still use. They'd grown taller and gotten older and in some cases moved from boy soprano to baritone. [laughs] But one of the original kids is still in the show, and we found a wonderful group of new ones that are blending in beautifully. It's so much fun to work on this show. You feel like you've got major parts of the world of America happening before your eyes at all times, including youth and age and every possible part of the social spectrum of America.

We've added Gerry McIntyre to the team as our choreographer and associate director. He was our choreographer and associate director for Once on This Island not too many years ago and won a bunch of awards in the Bay Area for his brilliant work there. We really have a remarkable team. All of our designers are back. B. Modern is doing the costumes. Wilson Chin is our set designer, and he's come up with a really amazing set that has pieces that move and come in, but it's not trying to be an opera, it's trying to be an intimate piece of theater. That's not an easy challenge with a 50-foot proscenium. Actually, Wilson, who's got a big career going in New York and all around the country, is originally from Redwood City and his family is still there. One of his starting points in the theater world was at TheatreWorks. Pamila Gray is our lighting designer and has been working at TheatreWorks for decades.

There are so many moving parts to any production of Ragtime due to the large number of characters and variety of cultures represented. As a director, how do you keep all those elements in balance?

Part of it, as a director, is just being prepared and knowing what each scene is supposed to look like and how you make it work. I work with a model all the time and prepare everything in advance. We don't have a huge amount of rehearsal time in a professional company, so you go in with the knowledge that it has been done before - and in my case I've directed it before. The different parts of society are introduced in three groups at the beginning - the people of Harlem, the white well-off people of New Rochelle, and the immigrants actually from all over the world, but the focus is on a Jewish immigrant and his daughter. I just have to keep reminding myself that that's our story. It's like a collection of short stories that are interwoven with one another in this beautiful way until by the time you've reached the conclusion you have a full tapestry of America. It starts out with these groups very isolated in their communities and at the end you see this glimmer of hope that they can eventually unite.

I've seen a lot of productions of Ragtime and I feel like the very ending of the show can be tricky because it's really easy for it to read as a sort of "white savior" moment -

Yeah.

- so, without giving away any spoilers, how do you plan to stage the ending?

Well, it's done as written and I'm not changing it too dramatically, but in our production, everybody is there [onstage]. They talk about different characters that they play and the history of what eventually happened to them. But we will see our entire cast as a group as it goes along, and at the end. That's something we establish in this production at the beginning - this panoply of Americans of all kinds, they're all there from the beginning, all mixed up, by race, by ethnicity, by age, and that's what you'll see at the end of the show as well.

So - I do think that's a question these days. The show has a hopeful ending where families of different backgrounds come together in what is intended to represent the whole of America, everybody. But, yeah, it can also feel like it's the people who have succeeded, rather than the people who are still desperately struggling to succeed. And I think that will be something people can talk about on the way home. I think it also gives you some perspective on what's happened in America since the ragtime era, but also since the era when the book was written [1975], and definitely in the era since the musical was written in 1997.

I really do think people will talk about it and go, "Wow, that's 25 years ago, and what's happened since then?" Has America moved forward, or is it the same as it was in 1908? I think the message is that we've got a long way to go. If 25 years from now, Ragtime is still as relevant as it is today, I think we will have failed to make the changes that will make us better and ultimately bring us together.

And of course, Ragtime has such an amazing score.

Oh, gosh, you can't believe it! That's where it's hard to be the director and think about, you know, where's this actor going to move or what's the action of the scene? When what your entire mind is telling you to do is listen to this incredible music sung by the most brilliant performers you can imagine! [laughs] I have to just keep punching myself and say, "C'mon, you've gotta direct this thing, not just sit back and love it!"

Is there any particular song that seems to be going through your head right now?

Well, "Wheels of a Dream" always gets me, I always cry. And I'm always deeply, deeply moved by Sarah's solo, "Your Daddy's Son." We were working on it last night, and that's another one of those experiences where I'm going [to myself], "OK, it's a musical, I think she's gonna need to cross to the center of the stage there. But on the other hand, maybe she just sings it and I just sit back and go, 'Oh, my God, my heart is breaking.'" So - those two songs. One is so sad and the other one is so incredibly hopeful, but since you know where the play is heading, it's also sad. It's a mix of joy and sadness, and I think that's what the show ultimately is, the full range of good and bad, hope and fear, and all the possibilities of life in our America.

I keep thinking of some of Shakespeare's plays in his later years, like The Tempest, that have some of those same qualities - romance, politics, desperation, abuse of people who are different, humor, drama. That's why I think of Ragtime as really the great American musical. Not the greatest musical written in America, but the great American musical. It's one of the things we talked about as a cast on the very first day. Of course, there's all kinds of challenges doing the show, dealing with the content, which is sometimes very difficult for the actors to do or be part of. But the larger challenge is this feeling that all of us have an obligation to tell this story, and to tell it right. We have an obligation to move people at the deepest levels, to bring America into focus for everyone who comes to see it. That's the task at hand.

You seem to be one of these people who doesn't really understand the concept of retirement. After Ragtime opens, do you have anything else on your plate?

I don't have anything planned. If you hear about any openings, let me know. [laughs] I certainly hope I'll be able to continue directing, and we'll see. I still certainly love it. It just turned out by chance that the two shows I've directed this winter and spring were so close together. They were both originally planned before my retirement, so in some ways these productions are finishing up my original stint at TheatreWorks. But certainly, I look forward to additional projects in the future.

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Ragtime performs live June 1-26, 2022 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View, CA.

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