THE DRABINSKY RAG

By RICHARD ZOGLIN/LOS ANGELES

The author and the theater mogul first met three years ago for lunch at the Russian Tea Room in New York City. E.L. Doctorow was impressed, first of all, that Garth Drabinsky--the Canadian producer who wanted to turn his novel Ragtime into a musical--agreed with him about the 1981 movie version: they both disliked it. He was impressed too that Drabinsky seemed to have read the book closely and thought about it deeply. "He's an interesting amalgam of old-time entrepreneurial showman and genuine theater enthusiast," says Doctorow. "He has real taste. And he's not afraid of ideas."

Drabinsky has had plenty of theatrical ideas in the past few years, some of them good (a lavish revival of Show Boat), some to be regarded warily (Parade, his next planned musical, is about Leo Frank, the Jewish factory worker who was lynched in Atlanta in 1915 after being convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl), but nearly all commanding attention. Ragtime is getting an extraordinary transcontinental buildup. The show is already a big hit in Toronto, and a second company has just opened in Los Angeles. By the time the show marches to Broadway in December, there will doubtless be few left who aren't eagerly anticipating the next Great American Musical.

Which it just might be. In its stunning L.A. version (with some new sets and other minor revisions since Toronto), Ragtime combines big social themes, imaginative staging and emotionally involving storytelling in a way that has all but vanished from the American musical. Terrence McNally's adaptation deftly re-creates Doctorow's tapestry of early 20th century America, with historical figures (Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman) mingling with fictional ones like Coalhouse Walker Jr., the ragtime pianist turned antiracism firebrand. Composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens supply a score alternately catchy (the ragtime numbers) and affecting (a wife's proto-feminist lament, Back to Before). And director Frank Galati and choreographer Graciela Daniele have created stage pictures that are both lovely and thematically apt, from the exquisite opening dance in which three groups--blacks, immigrants and parasol-toting white society--circle one another warily, to J.P. Morgan on a walkway that slowly descends to crush the admiring workers below.

It's a triumph for the stage and for Drabinsky, the brash impresario who has come from the Great White North to show the Great White Way how to do it. Unlike traditional Broadway production organizations, Drabinsky's Toronto-based Livent Inc. not only owns theaters (six of them, open or being renovated, in Toronto, Vancouver, Chicago and on 42nd Street in Manhattan) but also seeks to fill them with homegrown shows that Drabinsky initiates from scratch. Livent uses profits from long-running road companies to finance new works, which may run a year or more in cities like Toronto before going to New York. Broadway thus becomes just one cog in a worldwide theatrical engine. Other theater powers are following suit. Two weeks ago, the Jujamcyn chain of Broadway theaters joined with Pace Theatrical Group, a presenter of national tours, to combine production and distribution operations on the Livent model.

Drabinsky, 47, a stocky man with a thick head of hair and a giant limp (a remnant of childhood polio), grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Toronto, and abandoned a law career to build the Cineplex Odeon movie-theater chain (from which he was ousted in a corporate coup). He is well known, and sometimes disliked, for his outsize ego and strong hand in the creative process. "If you're respected, it's a collaboration," he says. "If there's no respect, it's a war."

He retains a disarming faith that musicals are still a vital art form that can move people and convey serious messages. "Ragtime, Show Boat and Parade are all strong indictments of racism and anti-Semitism," says Drabinsky. "I don't know of any other medium that can make that statement as indelibly powerful as musical theater. Certainly the film studios aren't doing it. They back away all the time." Drabinsky doesn't back away; Ragtime is the latest and best proof of that.