Pursuant to absolutely nothing, we’re going to be looking at Some Rags and a Couple of Drags on this week’s Dress Circle (6/9 7:00 p.m.).
At the end of the 19th and early in the 20th century, the rag as a musical form and dance was incredibly popular. It lost some of its standing as the 20th century wore on, but it never disappeared totally. In 1971, Joshua Rifkin brought it back to stay with his record-breaking and much heralded recording of Scott Joplin’s works, and Joplin’s music, and rags in general, were firmly cemented in the musical world with the release of “The Sting,” the film which used rags as its score.
We didn’t think of any of this when we came up with the theme for this week’s program. Suddenly, Michael was looking through our catalogue to find instances where musicals used rags in their scores. We’ve also included the two instances of “drags” that we have, and a drag is a slow rag as well as the dance that was created to go with it. (Although, one of our drags isn’t very draggy at all!)
We’ve assembled songs from fourteen shows in this week’s playlist beginning with two that came immediately to mind from Ahren’s and Flaherty’s “Ragtime” and the song we feel is one of the finest examples of a musical theatre song, “Rags” from the ill-fated musical of the same name by Charles Strouse and Stephen Schwartz. Judy Kuhn’s performance in this piece is unmatched.
Some of the other “rags” we’ve included are “Wrong Note Rag,” “Roller Skate Rag,” “The Real American Folk Song Is a Rag,” “The Uncle Sam Rag,” “International Rag,” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”
The stage and film musicals we’ve mined include “Wonderful Town,” “Redhead,” “Crazy for You,” “Call Me Madam,” and “Mark Twain: The Musical” with others that we’re sure you’ll recognize.
Our two drags include the un-draggy “Varsity Drag” from the DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson college musical that started the craze, “Good News,” and a more proper drag from “Ain’t Misbehavin’” where Andre DeShields leads the company with “The Viper’s Drag.”
We love musicals because so many of them include many different musical forms in their scores, so we hope you’ll tune in this week to see how at least fourteen of them incorporated the musical form credited to Scott Joplin by many.
