Please join PCS and Multnomah County Library on Tuesday, June 30 at 6 p.m. for a special evening with Vailey Oehlke, the newly appointed Library Director for the Multnomah County Library system.

Vailey Oehlke (pronounced VAY-lee EL-key) is forward-looking and energetic and brings a deep understanding of the library’s operations, challenges and opportunities and its prospects as a key animator of civic renewal. A strong participant in national and international library leadership, Vailey is known as a consensus builder and strategic thinker with experience in three library systems as well as a fantastic 12-year tenure  with the Multnomah County Library.

Following a brief reception, Vailey will talk about her vision for the Library and the vibrant role that libraries play, alongside arts, cultural and civic institutions, in convening and engaging vital conversation, catalyzing change, and harnessing a community’s creative and civic energies. Since its founding in 1864, Multnomah County Library has played a dynamic role in the evolution of the Portland metropolitan area.  Vailey will explore how today, amidst a turbulent economy, evolving technology and increased pressures on our educational system, the public library can become an evermore essential and integral part of the city’s community-building fabric.

Moderated by Tim DuRoche, Community Programs Manager at Portland Center Stage.

A Place for Books, A Space for People:
A conversation about libraries with Vailey Oehlke
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Gerding Theatre at the Armory, Mezzanine
6 p.m.  no host bar, light hors d’oeuvres
7 p.m.  program

What a year it’s been! In the midst of financial catastrophe and “Snowpocolypse 2008″, Portland Center Stage had the second highest attended season  in our history. From Nathan Detroit, to Richard Nixon to Storm Large, amazing characters and stories lit up both of  our stages. We are so proud of the work we’ve done this season!

And we couldn’t have done it without you! Whether you came to the Armory to see a play, take a tour of our historic facility, attend a wedding or just have a cup of coffee at the Armory Cafe, thank you for making us a part of your lives this year. Thank you for the support and encouragement you have given us, and for being part of our much-beloved audience.  Great theater happens because of people like you.

As we reach the end of our year, we are asking if you can make just one more gift this season. The art community has been hit hard by the economy and only with support from you, our incredible theater family, can we keep bringing the great work you have come to expect from us to the stage.

There is an added incentive to make your donation at this time! Through the generosity of some of your fellow theatergoers, we are thrilled to tell you that any gift you make before June 30 will be matched dollar for dollar, allowing your contribution to make more of an impact! Click HERE if you would like to make twice the impact with a gift to Portland Center Stage and type in the promotion code MATCH.

You can also mail in a contribution, just make sure the word “match” is somewhere in your note to us

Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, the lyricist and composer for Ragtime, have been working together for 25 years- an unusually stable collaboration for modern musical theater. Gone are the days where “Rogers and Hammerstein” were spoken of in one breath for their entire careers.

But Ahrens and Flaherty have developed a stable and wonderfully productive partnership (which also spawned hits like Once On This Island and Suessical the Musical).

Here are two intriguing quotes I found from them talking about the role that a lyricist and a composer can play not just in setting mood or creating memorable tunes, but in actually deepening the audience (and sometimes the author’s) understanding of the character. First, Lynn Ahrens talks about the role a woman can play in the collaborative process:

Women bring a certain sensibility to a collaboration. In “Ragtime”, I wrote for Mother ‘Each day the maids trudge up the hill/the hired help arrives/ I never stopped to think they might have lives beyond our lives’. That’s not in Doctorow. I created ‘She was nothing to them, she was a woman, nothing and no one to them, so they beat her and beat her and beat her.’ Sections like that aren’t in the novel….I don’t think a man would have written those lyrics. - (Lynn Ahrens, Backstage Magazine, March 2000)

Now Stephen, describing the process of building music to support a pivotal moment in the growth of a character:

With Ragtime, I tried to use period vocal ranges. For the character of Evelyn Nesbit, I wrote in keys that were showgirl keys of that period, keys that chorus girls would not sing in today. My orchestrator, Bill Brohn would ask, ‘Why is she singing in that high key? This should be in the meaty part of her voice’ and I’d think, ‘But it wouldn’t have the quality that the character needed.’ As the character of Mother, who is the quintessential mother of that age, developed through the story and became a modern woman, the vocal range kept lowering and lowering. By the end of the show, she was belting, which is totally anachronistic for that period, but it was emotionally correct. -(Stephen Flaherty, The Dramatist, September/October 2000)

As a non-musician, I have to say it had never occurred to me how much research and rigor went in to ensuring that the music acheived on a metaphorical level what the book was acheiving on a literal or narrative level.

Fascinating….

While researching the novelist E.L. Doctorow in preparation for our upcoming production of the musical adaptation of his novel Ragtime, I ran across this delicious story about the first thing Doctorow ever wrote:

[Doctorow] attended the Bronx High School of Science. While there, an English teacher gave him an assignment to write about a colorful person. The young Doctorow turned in such a vivid description of a doorman at Carnegie Hall whom the famed classical musicians playing there admired, his teacher wanted to photograph the man and run the story and photo in the high school newspaper. Doctorow had to admit he had invented the man. His teacher gave him an F. “The outlines of Doctorow’s future as a novelist were scrawled like body chalk around this failure as a reporter,” wrote Segal in the Washington Post. “The impish disregard for the wall between fact and fiction, the cross-thatching of real celebrities and invented characters, a slight sentimental streak.”

You can read the rest of his literary biography here.

Such an apt story for a writer who mixed real life characters like industrialist J.P. Morgan, magician Harry Houdini and vaudeville performer Evelyn Nesbit with equally memorable but entirely fictitious characters like Coalhouse Walker, don’t you think?

Looking ahead to next season, Here’s proof that anything (and I mean anything) can be made into Ragtime….

How AMAZING is this guy that he figured out how to transpose all this??