`RAGTIME' OFFERS A SENSE OF HISTORY; DOCTOROW NOVEL ON SHUBERT STAGE.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Theater Writer

``History is more or less bunk,'' Henry Ford once memorably said.

It's doubtful, however, that even the visionary auto magnate could have foreseen a day when history would assign him the role of a singing, dancing bit player in a multimillion-dollar Broadway blockbuster.

But history works in strange ways. Sometimes, like Ford's Model T assembly line, it rolls relentlessly forward, like a massive conveyor belt of change. Other times it stutters and stalls, backs up and repeats itself, in endless cycles of human folly.

History, or rather America's cantankerous historical past, will be a key stage presence Sunday night when the highly anticipated, exhaustively promoted ``Ragtime'' opens at the Shubert Theatre in Century City.

After making its debut in Toronto last December to mostly euphoric reviews, ``Ragtime'' is gearing up for a major North American assault. Assembled with Ford-like efficiency by Canada's Livent Inc., the same crew behind the recent ``Show Boat'' revival, ``Ragtime'' is receiving a separate Los Angeles production before it moves on to Broadway in January.

Budgeted at a cool $10 million, Livent's adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's tightly written 1975 novel is history-telling on a grand scale, with sprawling themes, high-concept sets, lavish costumes and a cast of nearly 60. Today's audiences seem to expect nothing less from musicals with top ticket prices of $70, and the show's creative team, from producer Garth H. Drabinsky on down, pledge that your dollars will be well-spent.

``This is a big story, an American story, and I think it heals our hearts, which have been wounded and broken,'' says Frank Galati, the show's director and a practiced hand at turning big, rangy novels into fluid, literate stage dramas. (His adaptation of John Steinbeck's ``The Grapes of Wrath'' won the 1989 Tony Award for Best Play.)

The story of ``Ragtime,'' both the novel and the musical, takes place roughly between 1902, when the narrator's father builds a three-story home in suburban New York City, and the end of World War I in 1918.

In that 16-year span, ``Ragtime'' transports us from an era of middle-class comfort, ethnic privilege and moral smugness to a period of violence, upheaval and ambiguity. We witness the dismantling of three families - one middle-class WASP, one underclass African-American, and the third a pair of Latvian immigrants - and the regrouping of the survivors into a new, multiethnic unit.

As the show speeds toward its tragic yet oddly hopeful climax, it moves from a prim Victorian society to a nation of restless foreigners, teeming cities and booming factories. ``An era exploding, a century spinning,'' as the opening chorus puts it. Not surprisingly, the show's creators are quick to draw parallels between ``Ragtime's'' tumultuous age and our own ornery times.

``Things are getting better, but we still have war ... we still have racial tensions. We parade around all this wonderful progress, but we still have the same problems,'' says Jason Graae, the actor who plays escape artist Harry Houdini, one of several historical figures inhabiting the show.

``It (the musical) deals with so many issues that are relevant today,'' says producer Drabinsky. ``The problems that afflict the society, racism, union rights, workers' rights, are still being defined and redefined. Is the attainment of the American dream just materialism, or is it a way of fulfilling the concept of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? It's all there: That's the story of `Ragtime.' ''

Actually, as conceived by Doctorow and adapted for the stage by Terence McNally, ``Ragtime'' is many overlapping stories. Besides the three central family sagas, the narrative also interweaves the exploits of several turn-of-the-century icons, including Ford, Houdini, financial baron J.P. Morgan, anarchist Emma Goldman, educator Booker T. Washington and the eminent New York City architect Stanford White.

Also entwined in the story's patchwork fabric are the characters of Evelyn Nesbit, a chorus girl who became White's lover at age 16; and Nesbit's deranged millionaire husband Harry K. Thaw, who in a fit of jealousy shot White to death in 1906. That event was known as ``the crime of the century'' until a certain white Ford Bronco went rumbling through popular consciousness.

For the actors, one way of bringing these icons to life was to search for their contemporary counterparts. Graae describes Houdini as ``a cross between Evel Knievel and Penn & Teller.'' Actress Judy Kaye likens the fiery, charismatic Goldman to Angela Davis.

And actress Susan Wood calls beautiful, pampered Evelyn Nesbit, ``the Kato Kaelin of the turn of the century.''

``It had to be truly incredible,'' Kaye says, reflecting on the faraway age that ``Ragtime'' depicts. ``It had to be like when man went to the moon ... like the '60s, when people were breaking rules all the time, sexually and scientifically.''

What sets this half-real, half-imagined world in motion is ragtime, the distinctly American musical form created by Scott Joplin in the late 1890s. Combining a four-quarter beat in the left hand and a syncopated melody in the right, ragtime can sound joyous, folksy, patriotic and vaguely mechanical all at once. As assimilated into the score by composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens, the show's jaunty rhythms evoke not only the African-American saloons where ragtime originated, but the bump and grind of assembly lines and the bustle of big-city streets.

One obvious question remains. Why go to all this trouble when we already had Doctorow's novel and Milos Forman's 1981 film version of ``Ragtime,'' highlighted by James Cagney's last screen performance and a clever Randy Newman score?

Doctorow, for one, believes the musical succeeds where the movie didn't.

``The movie's big mistake was in thinking that it could land on one (of the three main stories) and scat all the others,'' Doctorow says. ``In some way that I haven't figured out, the musical ends in the same place that the book does.''

``Ragtime'' the musical opens as a swirling montage of silhouetted figures on parade, an effect that mimics the revolutionary new art form of motion pictures. In the course of the show, movies will end up transforming the lives of several characters.

Yet ``Ragtime'' also asserts the superiority of live theater over movies as a mode of storytelling, a means of communicating the past. In a sense, ``Ragtime'' is Broadway's belated answer to ``Birth of a Nation'' (1915), the landmark D.W. Griffith film that used an infant technology to enshrine a mythic view of American life.

Director Galati thinks that, in the search for historical truth, theater may have an advantage over film precisely because it is less ``real,'' because it favors metaphor over literal-mindedness and make-believe over cinematic ``objectivity.''

``I think that theater, maybe because it creates a different kind of reality, can get an audience in touch with historical truth in ways that film can't do, even though it tries very hard,'' he says. ``A film is implicitly a photograph of a reality. No matter how fanciful a film may be, you feel that you are witnessing through the camera something that really happened. And that gives the film a kind of phony authority.''

As ``Ragtime'' sets up shop in the world's dream factory for the next few months, Galati and company will have a chance to prove their point. History may be bunk, just as Ford said. But ``Ragtime'' is out to do history one better.

The facts

What: ``Ragtime,'' a musical based on E.L. Doctorow's novel.

Where: Shubert Theatre, 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Century City.

When: Opens Sunday. Performances are 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays.

Tickets: $30-$70. Available at the Shubert box office or by calling Tele-Charge at [phone].

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4 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) `Ragtime:' Lavish musical tells American history on a grand scale

(2) Brian Stokes Mitchell as Coalhouse Walker Jr. in the Canadian production of ``Ragtime.'' The $10 million musical, based on E.L. Doctorow's novel, opens Sunday at the Shubert Theatre in Century City before heading to Broadway in January.

(3) Judy Kaye, who plays Emma Goldman, likens her character to the fiery Angela Davis.

(4) ``Ragtime'' tells history on a grand scale, with sprawling themes, high-concept sets, lavish costumes and a cast of nearly 60.