Ragtime

Today: Wire Me Collect, winner of the Northern Wolf Stakes in his last start, is the overnight favorite in the $50,000 added Hoover Stakes for older horses. The Bob Camac-trained entry beat Wise Dusty in that race, but will have to contend with some new shooters this time in Manage A Buck - no worse than second in his last six - and hard-charging Greenspring Willy, who won nearly $250,000 in 1998.Tomorrow: The $35,000 added Singing Beauty Stakes will be contested in two divisions as the sixth and ninth races on the program.

A SONIC revolution started 100 years ago, ignited by a joyous, herky-jerky, syncopated beat. Everywhere, it seemed, people could not get enough of this new music. They wrote songs about it, danced to it.The music was ragtime, and its signature song, Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag," was published in 1899. "Maple Leaf" is the biggest-selling piece of instrumental ragtime music. Perhaps 1 million copies ended up in American homes before phonographs and piano rolls killed the market for sheet music.

Today:Hickory Plains Farm's Red Star Rose, the lone added-money winner in a field of seven, is the choice to capture the Deputed Testamony Stakes for 3-year-old Maryland-breds. The 13th running of the $75,000 event will be contested over 1 1/8 miles. Trained by Hamilton Smith, Red Star Rose won the Maryland Juvenile Championship after a near miss in the Rollicking Stakes, also for state-breds. In his most recent outing, the son of Proud Truth faced open company in the Miracle Wood and finished a respectable third.

Editor's note: The story of the musician and composer who helped shape the future of jazzDuke's name fit him rightly. He was a smooth-talkin', slick-steppin', piano-playin' kid. But his piano playing wasn't always as breezy as his stride. When Duke's mother, Daisy, and his father, J.E., enrolled him in piano lessons, Duke didn't want to go. Baseball was Duke's idea of fun. But his parents had other notions for their child.Duke had to start with the piano basics, his fingers playing the same tired tune -- one-and-two-and-one-and-two.

"IF I'D KNOWN I was gonna live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself," Eubie Blake remarked while celebrating his 100th birthday.Sadly, if he hadn't lived until he was 100, James Herbert "Eubie" Blake wouldn't be the household name he is. What a shame if younger people had missed the pleasure that his music brings."Love Will Find a Way." "Memories of You." "I'm Just Wild About Harry" (Harry Truman's presidential campaign song in 1948). Those were among the 300 songs he wrote.The revival of ragtime in the late 1960s and 1970s, with its syncopat- ed rhythms and feel-good quality, brought Blake out of retirement.

Broadway's two new blockbuster musicals, "Ragtime" and "The Lion King," racked up the largest number of Tony Award nominations in New York yesterday. The lion's share, however, went to "Ragtime," which garnered 13 nominations, compared with 11 for "The Lion King."In most categories, "The Lion King," the stage adaptation of Disney's 1994 animated feature, will go head-to-head with "Ragtime," based on E.L. Doctorow's novel about three turn-of-the-century families (a touring production opened at Washington's National Theatre last week)

The last line of an article on the Tony Awards was inadvertently omitted in yesterday's Arts & Society section. The final paragraph should have read:Twenty years from now, when your neighborhood dinner theater, community theater or high school stages "Ragtime," it will still be a great musical. But when -- or if -- they stage "The Lion King," it will still be a cartoon.The Sun regrets the errors.Pub Date: 6/08/98

The last line of an article on the Tony Awards was inadvertently omitted in yesterday's Arts & Society section. The final paragraph should have read:Twenty years from now, when your neighborhood dinner theater, community theater or high school stages "Ragtime," it will still be a great musical. But when -- or if -- they stage "The Lion King," it will still be a cartoon.The Sun regrets the errors.NEW YORK - "The Lion King" vs. "Ragtime." Tonight's Tony Award competition for best musical boils down to a spirited race between two shows that, on the surface, have several things in common.

WASHINGTON -- In "Ragtime," now showing at the National Theatre here, the doomed Coalhouse Walker Jr. -- doomed because he's a black man who expected a fair shake, doomed because it's the dawning of the 20th century and he should have known better, and doomed because it's America and they're still figuring things out by blowing things up -- sings to his compatriots:"Go out and tell our storyLet it echo far and wide.Make them hear you.Make them hear you."But Americans are a people sometimes too busy to hear, or too preoccupied to remember for very long what's shouted in our faces, or so breathless to keep up with the present that we neglect the past, until it strikes us what the past resembles: This precise hour of today, when we're still inventing ourselves, still fighting among ourselves, still blaming each other because we think the country's going to hell and then pausing at odd moments to celebrate the country beyond all sane measure.

He's been up, and he's been down. And though now might seem like one of those down times, that's not the way Garth Drabinsky sees it. For nearly a decade, the 48-year-old Toronto theatrical producer has been chairman and chief executive officer of Livent Inc., the only publicly owned theater-producing company in North America, and one whose prestigious Broadway productions include "Ragtime," which opens its national tour at Washington's National Theatre on...

The 8-ton steel set that fills the stage for the Kennedy Center's new production of Ragtime, with its four levels of scaffolding adorned with lacy, Gothic arches, becomes a visual metaphor for the relentless forward thrust of history. Each level is crowded with actors portraying the different social groups and celebrity figures in the U.S. in 1906 - a Jewish immigrant and his daughter; an upper-middle-class Victorian family; an African-American jazz pianist, his sweetheart and their child.

CHAUTAUQUA, N.Y. - I suppose a week's worth of lectures on writing might be considered a busman's holiday for someone like me, but when the lecturers are Billy Collins, E.L. Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates, Amy Tan and Garry Trudeau, it's a bus you want to be on. To hear these masters in the "institutional sublimity" of Chautauqua is to be at least twice blessed. For me it was thrice. I hear all these stars and I begin, as I do every summer, thinking about how to start doing the things that really matter.

The Cappies of Baltimore Awards Gala was held at the Hippodrome Theatre at the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center in Baltimore on Sunday. Here are the winners: Critic Team: Glenelg Country Senior Critic: Maya Munoz, Glenelg Country Junior Critic: Liz Savopoulos, Reservoir Rising Critic: Chris Donaldson, River Hill Sound: Zach Brown, Wilde Lake, Moby Dick! The Musical Lighting: Dustin Doloff, Glenelg Country, Aesop's Foibles Sets: Scott Myers, Loren Scolaro, Atholton, The Diary of Anne Frank (revised)

Two-act play The lowdown -- William Mastrosimone's play The Woolgatherer is the tale of two strange people who fall in love. The two-act play takes place entirely within an apartment, as Rose and Cliff navigate their conflicts and loneliness. The play is at the Fell's Point Corner Theatre starting tomorrow. If you go -- Performances are 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays, tomorrow through May 4. No show April 26. Tickets $15-$17. The Fell's Point Corner Theatre is at 251 S. Ann St. Call 410-276-7837 or go to fpct.

Anne Arundel Community College's Moonlight Troupers brought to life the musical drama Ragtime, which adds a syncopated score to E.L. Doctorow's 1975 novel chronicling the impact people of color and immigrants had on the upper-middle class in early 20th-century America. This sweeping historical drama looks back to 1906 and can be a challenging show to produce. But it proved within the grasp of Moonlight Troupers director Barbara Marder. Describing the show as involving "more notes than we have tackled before, the plot more stories and many characters," Marder focused on the strengths of her 44-member cast of students and seasoned actors.

Musical -- Anne Arundel Community College's Moonlight Troupers drama club will present Ragtime at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through Nov. 18 in the Pascal Center for Performing Arts, 101 College Parkway, Arnold. The cost is $15 for adults and $12 for seniors, AACC employees and non-AACC students; and $8 for AACC students. 410-777-2457 or www.aacc.edu/performingarts.

This ragtime legend died 24 years ago, but thanks to a cast of raconteurs, he and his story will live on. On Wednesday, Olney Theatre Center starts celebrating the career of James Hubert "Eubie" Blake, a ragtime composer and performer. Broadway veteran Tony Parise directs and choreographs Eubie! - an adaptation of the 1978 musical revue. His intentions were to re-create the production with a modern twist for today's audiences. "It deserves to be heard by a new audience and a new generation," he said.

Howard E. Rollins Jr., a Baltimore-born actor whose achievements included a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for 1981's Ragtime, will be joining the lineup at the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum next week. Rollins' early credits included the soap opera All My Children and a pair of influential TV miniseries: Roots: The Next Generation (playing George Haley, the brother of Roots author Alex Haley) and King, a dramatization of the life of Martin Luther King Jr., in which he played Andrew Young.

Toby Orenstein has made teenage actors delve into the experiences of African-Americans at the turn of the century with Ragtime and the drama of war with Aida, but she says for a real challenge try being a dancing candelabrum. Or a spoon, or a teapot, or one of the other colorful Disney characters in Beauty and the Beast, which is being staged this year by the Teen Professional Theatre program. "This is probably harder than Ragtime or Aida," she said, "to do comedy and to do Disney and finding the root of realism and then exaggerate it."

Period concert -- Musica Antiqua of Maryland will perform its annual concert at 2 p.m. today at Liriodendron Mansion, 502 W. Gordon St., Bel Air. The concert will feature performers in period costumes using period instruments to play light classics, show tunes, ragtime, Irving Berlin, traditional Irish and Scottish music, and a Yo-Yo Ma piece, Gabriel's Oboe. Free. 410-529-0791.