Ragtime

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."

The indigenous American art form of vintage jazz was recently celebrated at Loews' Powerhouse in Annapolis. The event was hosted by Elana Byrd, who with her husband - bassist Joe Byrd - has promoted a resurgence of jazz in Annapolis. Joe Byrd is the brother of the late jazz legend Charlie Byrd, and the Charlie Byrd Trio for years was a main draw of the King of France Tavern at the Maryland Inn. The June 23--24 weekend closed the Powerhouse jazz season for the summer, with Friday night featuring the newly formed Powerhouse Six led by clarinetist Bob Thulman in a program of Dixieland and ragtime.

Review: Novel THE MARCH E.L. Doctorow Random House / 369 pages THE MOST COMPELLING CHARACTER that E.L. Doctorow creates in his Civil War novel, The March, is the march itself. We remember William Tecumseh Sherman's march to the sea from our high school history books as a morality play - but Doctorow is far too subtle a writer and thinker for that, of course. He gives us Sherman's march more as a force of nature that leaves nothing it touches unchanged and no one unmoved. It's not the fog of war that counts here.

Over the next six months, the musicals of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty will be so well represented on Baltimore stages, they practically constitute an unofficial Ahrens and Flaherty festival. The celebration has begun, with an enjoyable, rare revival of their 1988 musical Lucky Stiff at Cockpit in Court. Next month, the Maryland Arts Festival will stage the pair's 1998 Broadway musical Ragtime, and in December, Center Stage will produce their 1990 show Once on This Island. Although musicals can be made from almost any subject, Lucky Stiff stems from a highly bizarre source - a comic crime novel called The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, by Michael Butterworth, which includes a corpse among its main characters.

The weather is warm and school is out, but one group of young people is spending three weeks at Reservoir High School exploring racial tensions, social inequality and the struggle to realize the American dream. Those members of the Teen Professional Theatre camp also have to learn dance steps, blocking, dialogue and lots of big Broadway songs in three weeks as they tackle the musical Ragtime. Program founder and director Toby Orenstein said her 55-member cast, chosen from more than 200 who auditioned from throughout Central Maryland, is up to the challenge.

Two Howard County productions won two Helen Hayes Awards apiece this week at an annual ceremony honoring theater in the metropolitan Washington area. Awards went to lead actor Tom McKenzie and choreographer Ilona Kessell for their work in Ragtime: The Musical at Toby's Dinner Theatre in Columbia. Director Kasi Campbell and lead actor Bruce Nelson won for their work in The Dazzle at Rep Stage, a professional company housed at Howard Community College. The theaters were nominated for a combined 16 awards, making a strong showing against about 60 professional theaters, including ones with large budgets and well-known reputations such as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Arena Stage.