The Music Is Real Star in Imagined 'Tin Pan Alley Rag'

The Pasadena Playhouse has a thing for fictional encounters between real-life Americans. Last year Henry Ford and Thomas Edison sat in the woods with Warren G. Harding in the lumbering "Camping With Henry and Tom." In January, Joe Louis, Paul Robeson, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Jackie Robinson got together for "Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting." Now, Scott Joplin and Irving Berlin commune in Mark Saltzman's "The Tin Pan Alley Rag." "Rag" has a decided advantage over its predecessors--its characters made glorious music that needs no interpolation.

For sophistication of story, "The Tin Pan Alley Rag" is cousin to those hokey film bios in which the composer sits down at the piano and says: "And then I wrote . . . " Saltzman laces the book with earnest talk of art, and the dialogue remains laughably unnatural, particularly for poor Scott Joplin (Harrison Page), who is as stiff as his starched collar. He drops by the music publishing offices of Berlin and Snyder in 1915, trying to get his opera "Treemonisha" published. In actual fact he was still hawking the opera when he died in 1917.

In Saltzman's imagined meeting, Irving Berlin (David Norona) is thrilled to encounter the trained composer Joplin--the King of Ragtime, a title also assigned to the untrained, musically illiterate Berlin. What follows is an improbable conversation in which the two men relate scenes from their life stories (which are enacted onstage) and offer each other encouragement. Berlin, the ultimate commercial pragmatist, offers to publish the one catchy song he hears in Joplin's opera. For his part, Joplin, 20 years Berlin's senior, tries to get Berlin to move beyond writing popular songs. "Surely you must be aware that a gift like yours comes by once in a generation," he says, sounding programmed. "You have spark. A genius spirit. Do the little song, but do the great songs as well."

In the final analysis "The Tin Pan Alley Rag" asks us to concede that Irving Berlin--whom Cole Porter called the greatest songwriter of all time--did not live up to his potential because he did not write the serious music, the "American Rhapsody" that Saltzman's Joplin urges him to write (Joplin, apparently, should have been pestering another Jewish songwriter by the name of Gershwin). That is a bit of a stretch, to say the least, and as a dramatic premise it's perilously close to desperate. But it's still hard to dislike "The Tin Pan Alley Rag" when it drops its pretensions and the singing starts.