No one likes to be lectured to, not even my students. (Especially not my students.) The key to successful education lies in engaging and inspiring your students to do their own thinking and make their own decisions. The same thing goes for musical theater. Even shows with a lot of information to relate need to do so in an entertaining fashion.
The Tin Pan Alley Rag doesn't. This new musical, compiled by one Mark Saltzman, and being presented by the Roundabout Theater Company at the Laura Pels Theater, represents a static and uninspired history lesson about parallels in the careers and life experiences of composers Scott Joplin and Irving Berlin. Along the way, we're subjected to a lot of plodding exposition and hoary humor, but very little that actually brings the music and stories of these important men to life.
Saltzman apparently took his inspiration from the notion that both Joplin and Berlin had wives who died very shortly after their respective weddings. Saltzman attempts to show how this provided some sort of professional impetus to both of the men, but he never really goes beyond facile observations about love and loss, nor does he show who these people are or why they fell in love. We're witnessing the facts but we're not understanding the feelings.
Even worse, Saltzman uses the fictive meeting that frames the show's story to embark on some banal proselytizing about art versus commerce. Apparently, Scott Joplin spent much of the last years of his life trying to marshal interest in his "ragtime opera" Treemonisha. In this show, Joplin shows up at Berlin's music-publishing business on Tin Pan Alley to try to get Berlin to publish this work. Berlin spouts some bromides about what makes for a hit song, Joplin bristles, then proceeds to admonish Berlin for not pursuing loftier artistic ambitions. The show then follows a series of flashbacks in the How-Did-You-Get-to-Be-Here-Mr.-Shepard mode, parading a collection of cardboard characters through a series of dull, didactic scenes.
Saltzman's only other recognizable theater credit is the revue A...My Name is Alice, to which he -- and dozens of others -- contributed material. His primary work experience seems to be the years he spent writing for "Sesame Street," and although that certainly explains his apparent need to educate, you'd think he would have picked up a bit more about the successful merger of pedagogy and entertainment. Instead, he relies on static devices, such as using Berlin's contrapuntal "Won't You Play a Simple Melody" as an unconvincing excuse to get the two composers to play together. He also employs primitive stage techniques, like the scene in which a symphony conductor in St. Louis clunkily asks "Tell me, Mr. Joplin, what is this 'syncopation' of which you speak?" Forget the fact that syncopation existed long before ragtime, that kind of sloppy exposition is a Drama 101 Don't.
Perhaps the most egregious of Saltzman's transgressions is the false conceit of Joplin urging Berlin on to greater artistic ambition. "What do you play for yourself in the dark?," Joplin asks Berlin. Well, there's no question that Irving Berlin wrote great songs -- truly great songs -- and went on to create at least one decent score, that of Annie Get Your Gun. But most of his other shows are pretty much forgotten, because he never really caught on to the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution. Don't get me wrong: Berlin was a genius, and wrote some of the greatest songs in musical-theater history, including the gorgeous and powerful "Supper Time" from As Thousands Cheer. But he never quite made it into the pantheon of great musical-theater composers, those who, like R&H, created bold, cohesive, integrated scores.
But Saltzman needed something tangible to emerge from Joplin's insistence, so he shows Berlin becoming inspired to create an "American Symphony" telling his life story in musical form. But Berlin never wrote any such work, which gives the lie to Saltzman's entire premise. For such a device to be dramatically feasible, we probably would have needed to witness some sort of regret from Berlin that he never followed in Gershwin's, or Joplin's, footsteps.
How fitting that the Roundabout would end its 2008-2009 season with The Tin Pan Alley Rag, which is really the rest of its disastrous season (cf. Pal Joey, Hedda Gabler, The Philanthropist, A Man for All Seasons) in musical miniature.
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