A ‘beautiful arc’: Dormont native is headed home to accept honor from Pittsburgh CLO, where it all began

By SHARON EBERSON

Coming home to accept the Richard Rodgers Award is “a big, beautiful arc,” composer Stephen Flaherty was saying just the other day. “This whole year for me has been about the big, beautiful arc.”

Catching up with award-winning Dormont native Flaherty was no easy task. He apologized for having a short window to chat, as he and his songwriting partner, lyricist Lynn Ahrens, have been on a seemingly endless endless red-carpet ride with the acclaimed revival of Ragtime, ahead of the 2026 Tony Awards on June 7. Ragtime has received 11 nominations, including for Best Musical Revival and six acting nominees.

Flaherty will then be on hand for the Pittsburgh CLO Gala on June 12, when he will be honored with the Richard Rodgers Award, which has been bestowed on an impressive list of musical theater luminaries, starting with Mary Martin in 1988.

RICHARD RODGERS AWARD HONOREES
Pittsburgh CLO, in conjunction with the families of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, established The Richard Rodgers Award for Excellence in Musical Theater in 1988. Pittsburgh CLO has presented the Richard Rodgers Award to such luminaries as Mary Martin (1988), Dame Julie Andrews (1989), Harold Prince (1991), Sir Cameron Mackintosh (1992), Stephen Sondheim (1993), Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber (1996), Gwen Verdon (2000), Bernadette Peters (2002), Shirley Jones (2007), Kathleen Marshall (2008), Rob Marshall (2008) and Stephen Schwartz (2009), and Stephen Flaherty (2026).

The “arc” the composer of Ragtime, Once on This Island, Anastasia, Seussical, High School Musical, My Favorite Year and more was referring to began when, at age 17, he interned at Pittsburgh CLO, under then Producing Director William Gardner. 

“It felt like being handed the keys to the kingdom,” he recalled.

Flaherty has told the story of his year with his hometown company before, but it bears repeating, as Pittsburgh CLO faces its 80th and final season.

“There was enough money for you to get Downtown on a trolley, and you still had a dollar and a half left so you could get something to eat at Arthur Treacher’s, which I did every day,” he said. “It was like, whatever you wanted to make out of it, as big or small, you could. And I did everything. I was working with the music director. I was in orchestra rehearsals taking notes. I took out dry cleaning, I learned to make coffee that summer — all the important things. I actually painted the posters in front of Heinz Hall.”

At the end of the summer, he was awarded a scholarship to attend the College Conservatory of Music (CCM) at the University of Cincinnati.

“That was the beginning of the rest,” Flaherty said of everything that followed. “So, that summer [as a Pittsburgh CLO intern] was crucial to me.”

Nearly 50 years later, it has been one party after another during theater awards season. 

Flaherty chatted about the past, present, and a future that includes a collaboration on a new Like Water for Chocolate musical, working with a Mexican-American band, writer Laura Esquivel, director Sergio Trujillo (a Tony-winning choreographer for Ain’t Too Proud), and music director Marco Paguia (The Buena Vista Social Club). 

Worlds away, there also is a revival of the Flaherty-Ahrens musical My Favorite Year in the works.

PIANO MAN FROM DORMONT

While the Ragtime production at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater is currently the toast of Broadway, the previous time a Flaherty-Ahrens musical was at the performing arts hub was two decades ago.

The Glorious Ones, after premiering at Pittsburgh Public Theater, moved to Lincoln Center’s off-Broadway Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, running October 11, 2007 through January 6, 2008, when it was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical.

Before that experience, “Part of my upbringing was at the Public,” said Flaherty.

When he returns to Pittsburgh next month, it will be to the house where he started playing piano, at age 7. His mother, Mildred Flaherty, passed away a little more than two years ago, and his sister now occupies the house that the Flaherty’s moved into when Stephen was 4.

“I remember we had a party, and my mother said, ‘Oh, this will be for your birthday, and you’re going to get to meet all your new friends.’ And I kept thinking, ‘I don’t know who these people are. … I’m not sure about any of this,’” Flaherty recalled. “But all of the major stuff really in my life happened in that house, and happened in that dining room, which is where my piano was.

“So,” he continued, “when I go next month to Pittsburgh for the awards, I’m going to be hanging out in that house. I just love it there, we all do, and it’s really good for our family that we have that kind of center of the universe in Dormont still with us.”

It was on another piano, one that was his companion of 40 years, that Flaherty composed Ragtime and Once on This Island, among musical hits. When it no longer fit into this home life, it was gifted to his friend’s mother, a former opera singer, arriving on her 90th birthday.

“So that was not too sad,” Flaherty said. “I did a little inscription on the back and said, ‘This is a lucky piano and I hope it brings you luck.’ And so it’s having its next chapter.”

There was a keyboard behind him as he spoke on a Zoom call, but a sign of the times was in another room, where he has a digital piano.

“It’s good for New York,” Flaherty said. “If you get an idea in the middle of the night, you can go there with your headphones, and you can bang away at it and hear your idea, and your neighbors aren’t banging on your door like, ‘What’s going on in there?’ ” 

‘RAGTIME’ BACK IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Flaherty has a Tony Award for Best Musical Score from the first production of Ragtime, starring Brian Stokes Mitchell, Audra McDonald, and Marin Mazzie, in 1998. Although a revival’s score is not eligible for a Tony unless it is completely overhauled, Flaherty has worked with the revival’s luminous star, Joshua Henry, to accommodate his version of protagonist Coalhouse Walker, following Mitchell’s hailed original.

“He’s one of those people that he’s very self-possessed and self-sufficient,” Flaherty said of working with Henry to tweak the score to its new star. “So there were certain things that he was going towards that I sort of sussed out as my detective self.”

When Henry would confirm a train of musical thought or emotional peak, “Then I would say, “Oh, well, absolutely we’re going to support that idea.’ ”

When Carnegie Mellon performed Ragtime in 2017, Flaherty came to Pittsburgh to work with Gary Kline and his students, including Broadway-bound John Clay III as Coalhouse. 

“Well, guess what? John Clay has kept rising and rising,” Flaherty said. 

Clay currently covers the lead role for Henry on Sundays, and he is otherwise in the show as Booker T. Washington.

“He’s spectacular. He’s great. I mean, he was great as a 21-year-old. And you give him a decade, and he’s just going and going,” Flaherty said.

HOW I LEARNED WHAT I LEARNED

Flaherty said he often thinks if he had not been a composer, he’d have wanted to be a casting director, matching artists to roles. Or, perhaps, a teacher, although that is a role he practices regularly. His trips to Pittsburgh have included sessions and cabarets with students including in 2015, at the old Playhouse for Point Park University.

During his teenage days as a Pittsburgh CLO intern, one of his jobs was accompanying and coaching the singers. 

“They had brunches or luncheons for the patrons. I played those. I sort of did everything. I did copywork for the first time.”

Working with the singer Carol Bruce, “I had to lower everything down a major sixth because her voice was so low, and I learned how to do that. And I learned how to deal with conflict.”

Among the many life lessons learned by working in the performing arts, conflict resolution isn’t one you hear talked about much. “Messy, difficult, depressing, inspiring, and joyous — that’s collaborative theatre-making for you,” wrote Richard Cuming on the “pains and pleasures” of collaborating.

“[Conflict] was something I never knew how to do. You don’t learn that in school, and my parents, God bless  them, they never fought in front of us. … And musical theater is the most collaborative of all of the fields, and it’s all about people, and it’s all about conflict and personalities,” said the composer who has sent 11 shows to Broadway.

Flaherty did have the survival instincts and stamina for the exhausting pace that was set by Pittsburgh CLO during its busiest summer seasons, when “you’d be rehearsing Carousel by day and How to Succeed would be done by night.”

The prize at the end of the summer, for one standout intern, was the scholarship that took Flaherty away from Pittsburgh, before finding the ideal partnership with Ahrens, and heading off to a career on Broadway and Hollywood, and honors including the Theater Hall of Fame, three Grammy nominations and an Oscar nomination for the animated musical Anastasia.

The Flaherty-Ahrens musical A Man of No Importance, which returned to off-Broadway last year (perhaps you saw Front Porch Theatricals‘ terrific 2022 production?), was nominated for Best Musical Revival of the season by the Drama Desk, Drama League, Outer Critics Circle and Lortel Awards.

Flaherty’s additional credits include composing the score for the dance musical In Your Arms (Old Globe), the musical Loving Repeating (Jefferson Award, Best New Musical) and incidental music for Neil Simon’s Proposals (Broadway.)

And sometimes, lightning strikes twice, as it did with Once on This Island, Best Revival Tony-winner of 2018, and now, with Ragtime.

“The surprise, and the joy, and the pleasure is that if you’re lucky, you’re able to experience a show that you created in a different time, done by a different group of artists in front of new audiences, many of whom have not even heard of the show or they’re coming in totally blank slate, which is really exciting,” he said. 

He acknowledged that there are theater nerds, like himself, who “have studied each nook and cranny of every production, they’re in the audience, too. But there are younger audience members who have no point of view on what they’re about to experience. And I find that really exciting, because it’s like, get ready folks, this is going to knock your socks off. And that’s the goal.That is the goal.”

SNEAK PEEK INTO THE FUTURE

As he works on Like Water for Chocolate, Flaherty, who with husband Trevor Hardwick shares a home in Mexico, said his favorite show in recent memory is Brian Quijada (Where Did We Sit on the Bus? and Somewhere Over the Border at City Theatre) and Nygel D. Robison’s Mexodus, which ran off-Broadway and won three Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Musical.

Flaherty was invited to join Like Water for Chocolate, which leans into the magic realism of Esquivel’s novel, while others in the creative team were already at work on the project. He recalled on the first day of a 29-hour reading (a stripped-down presentation of a new play or musical), a blizzard coupled with the outbreak of Mexican cartel violence in February, pushed the reading to Zoom.

“I love Mexico. I have a home in Mexico, and the piece I think is absolutely beautiful,” Flaherty said. “And so we’re going forward, and the reading went very well despite a blizzard and Mexican cartel violence, and our guitarist who lives in Mexico couldn’t get out because of the blizzard and the violence. So we were running around in the snow in New York trying to find people that understood that style of music that could help us. It was a crazy birth for the first leg of the journey, but it was super successful.”

Flaherty has composed in many genres, working with musicians from other cultures, such as the Caribbean-stylings for Once on This Island. He clearly is enjoying the process, including the conflict resolution, of finding harmony with the musicians working on Like Water for Chocolate.

“It’s a very beautiful and meaty project, and it’s a tricky project, too,” he said. “It’s deceptively simple, but there’s a lot going on in the piece.”

UPCOMING LOCAL PRODUCTIONS OF FLAHERTY-AHRENS SHOWS
🎵 LUCKY STIFF, at South Park Theatre, June 18-July 5, 2026 — A musical farce about a shoe salesman, forced to take the embalmed body of his recently murdered uncle on a vacation. Should he succeed in passing his uncle off as alive, he stands to inherit $6 million. If not, the money goes to the Universal Dog Home of Brooklyn. https://sites.google.com/a/southparktheatre.com/south-park-theatre
🎵 ONCE ON THIS ISLAND, Alumni Theatre Company at the O’Reilly Theater, July 31-August 2, 2026 — The award-winning Caribbean-inspired musical is rooted in folklore that is passed down through generations, inviting audiences into a world that is joyful, poetic, and deeply human. https://www.alumnitheatercompany.org/tickets

AN UNEXPECTED AWARDS SEASON STORY

When people say to him, “Oh geez, it’s another red-carpet event,” Flaherty tells them he has no complaints. Among this favorite things is the opportunity to connect with folks he admires from other shows and say, “I love what you did!,” and “How did you do that?”

And there’s the added prospect of name-dropping. 

“So yesterday,” Flaherty was saying, “I got to meet Daniel Radcliffe,” the Tony-nominee for Every Brilliant Thing. “He was very, very nice, and he offered, ‘Guess who your secret fan is, who loves Ragtime, and plays the score all the time?’ And I’m like, ‘I have no idea.’ And he says, ‘Gary Oldman … Every road trip, Gary Oldman, he’s blasting Ragtime.’ … So that was kind of odd and great and surprising to know.”

THE BIG, BEAUTIFUL PITTSBURGH ARC 

When he was a kid back in Dormont, Flaherty’s grandparents would get The New York Times, and he would be “sprawled out on my chest on the rug,” pouring over the Arts & Leisure section, imagining what he would see if he lived in New York.

Among his many tasks these days, he is a Tonys voter. Amid all the awards-season events, he had to reschedule seeing Schmigadoon!, because one of the nominated actors was out when he first went to see the musical.

Then there’s the trip back home to look forward to, and receive an award that puts him in the company of fellow composers Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephen Sondheim and Stephen Schwartz. 

When noting that The Glorious Ones was his previous show at Lincoln Center, Flaherty noted that, for Ragtime, current artistic director Lear deBessonet is directing her first musical at the Beaumont Theater. “And we were there for Andre Bishop’s first musical (My Favorite Year, in 1992) and first show in the Beaumont. I mean, when you connect the dots, it’s like a very large arc. And I feel the same way about coming back to Civic Light Opera and receiving the award, and knowing that when I was 17, that’s where, for me, it all started.”

PITTSBURGH CLO 80th ANNIVERSARY GALA

Stephen Flaherty will receive the Richard Rodgers Award at the Pittsburgh CLO 80th Anniversary Gala, honoring Carol Hefren Tillotson, is June 12, 2026, at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, 980 Liberty Ave., Downtown.
“For 80 years, Pittsburgh CLO has brought generations of audiences together through the magic of live musical theater, and this gala is both a celebration of that extraordinary legacy and an investment in its future,” said Mark Fleischer, Executive Producer of Pittsburgh CLO. “We are thrilled to honor Carol Hefren Tillotson for her remarkable leadership and lifelong dedication to the arts, while also recognizing hometown talent Stephen Flaherty, whose journey from Pittsburgh CLO music intern to Tony Award-winning composer perfectly reflects the impact and spirit of our organization.”
The event includes a cocktail reception, a one-night-only performance with “CLO favorites,” seated dinner with live entertainment and show tunes. Proceeds benedit CLO’s education and community programs. https://www.pittsburghclo.org/shows#

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Tags: 2026, gala, Lynn Ahrens, Musicals, Once on this Island, Pittsburgh CLO, Ragtime, Richard Rodgers Award, Seussical, Stephen Flaherty, Theater Hall of Fame, Tony Awards