![]() ![]() He reads Hebrew fluently and proudly says that he can chant the service from memory without a prayer book. He says he was a monopoly champ, “unbelievably aggressive.” After bar mitzvah, Garth was a regular Torah reader at Toronto’s Beth Sholom synagogue. He found solace in listening to music and playing board games. Garth was a victim of polio at the age of three. He is the son of a Jewish family that immigrated from Russia to Toronto. He said he loved the character of Tateh, a Jewish immigrant who rises from poverty to become a motion picture director and producer.ĭrabinsky, age 44 at the time of that meeting, has a life something like Tateh’s. Scott with Canadian accent - Drabinsky explained that Ragtime’s story had personal meaning to him. Speaking with a gravelly voice - he sounds like George C. Making a point about how he spared no expense, perhaps? Drabinsky at that time had produced three Broadway hits: Phantom of the Opera, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Show Boat. Doctorow said he could do without, but Garth was treating and he insisted. Drabinsky called a waiter and ordered caviar for the two of them. He said he’d make a Broadway musical out of Ragtime and he’d spare no expense. ![]() Allowing one person’s story to take precedence undercut that point and the American allegory I placed in the work, and they didn’t lean to one story line over another.”ĭrabinsky told Doctorow that he could do a better job. ”But one of the points of the book was how all these lives intertwined, how all these people became inextricable from one another. “If you are not careful, the piece will begin to lean to one story over another,” Doctorow said. Rollins) seemed to dominate the other story lines and take over the tale. In the film, the story of Coalhouse Walker (as played by Howard E. Doctorow was not happy with the motion picture version of his epic 1975 novel because it concentrated on only one of the many stories in the book, while minimizing the others. Doctorow and Garth Drabinsky talked about Ragtime. Over bowls of borscht at the Russian Tea Room, next door to Carnegie Hall, E. ![]() In honor of the new production of Ragtime by Arden Theatre (with excellent cast, innovative staging and superb musical direction) we are reprinting this story about the making of Ragtime, from 1998: ![]()
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