Hello, this is Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast, where every two weeks we journey into worlds light and dark in

America's gilded age, France's Belle-Epoch, and England's late Victorian and Edwardian

eras.

Music The very first sounds that opening night audience heard on January 18th, 1998, were the plaintive notes of a solo piano. A new musical by Stephen Flaherty, Lynn Arons,

and a book by Terrence McNally called Ragtime, based on a novel by EL Doctoro, was about to come to

life. Soon a young boy walks to center stage and begins to tell the tale of his well-off

white family in the New York

suburb of New Rochelle. The year is 1902, but as we hear the music and the voices of the

ensemble grow, we know something is not as it was. America is changing. There is something new.

Not only in the music, but in the very way we once lived

our lives. The musical, as heard in the excerpt here from the original cast recording,

soon explodes into a dizzying, passionate, terrifying, and ultimately inspiring portrait

of an America pulling itself into a new and modern society.

The story takes us from an often prejudiced white world into the Harlem of pianist

Colehouse Walker and his love for Sarah.

To the docks of Ellis Island to meet Tata, an Eastern European immigrant and his daughter,

and by the show's end, we have seen all their

lives intertwine and mingle with some celebrities of the day, from J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford to

activist Emma Goldman and Broadway star Evelyn Nesbit to the illusionist Harry Houdini, all representing

the possibilities of a new America.

The weaving of a new fabric of the American society has begun.

Since the original production in 1998, the show has seen numerous international and national productions, as well as two revivals on Broadway.

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