The stretch of 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues that was once known as Tin Pan Alley is today dominated by Korean wholesalers, a few lingering plant stores, and other businesses unrelated to music publishing. But its place in American pop-culture history, as the birthplace of popular songwriting as a mass industry, is secure.

The street’s bustle peaked around 1915, to the year when Mark Saltzman begins his play The Tin Pan Alley Rag, which features the music of Berlin and Joplin. The first musical to play the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre (previews start June 12), it opens in the bustling offices of music publishers Irving Berlin and Ted Snyder. Berlin, at 27, is already America’s preeminent songwriter, having soared from Lower East Side poverty to national prominence with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which, ironically, is several stations removed from actual ragtime. In walks a dignified, old-before-his-time Joplin, peddling his ragtime opera, Treemonisha. In Saltzman’s fictional meeting of the songwriting king and the true ragtime innovator, we learn a great deal about both men’s histories: their tragic first marriages, Joplin’s (not always unhappy) encounters with white musicians and publishers, the surprising black middle-class culture of the post-Civil War, some of Berlin’s private demons, and how ragtime emerged from the best of African-American and other hyphenate-American subcultures. And how two very different geniuses might have discovered commonalities and shared self-revelations at this tumultuous time in the entertainment industry.

Saltzman is a Cornell graduate whose previous work includes not only plays (A, My Name Is Alice) and movies (The Adventures of Milo and Otis) but a generous resume of well-remembered TV projects (Sesame StreetThe Red Sneakers, Mrs. Santa Claus). Prior to rehearsals, Front & Center spoke with Saltzman by telephone.

FRONT & CENTER: Where did you get the idea for The Tin Pan Alley Rag?

MARK SALTZMAN: I was working on another project set in this time period—Mrs. Santa Claus, a TV movie with Angela Lansbury. The songs were by Jerry Herman, and he asked me to do a little musical research. It was the ragtime era, but it also turned out to be the first blossoming of Irving Berlin. Then I just started thinking: Did Berlin and Scott Joplin ever bump up against each other? They were both in New York, and it wouldn’t have been that huge an event—I mean, everybody in the music business usually knows everybody, and the music business was a lot smaller back then.

So do we know if they ever did?

We’ll never know, but we have some clues. Joplin’s biographers say he approached everybody in the music business with Treemonisha. He would have to have a huge reason not to take it to Berlin. I would say it’s very, very likely.

The script they gave me says Draft 4.6. What changed from Draft 1.0 to Draft 4.6?

What we included of the biography has changed. Both of these men had been hit by tragedy in their personal lives—how much we were going to push that forward seemed to be part of the rewrite process. And the balance between this music that is, for the most part, very jovial, buoyant—ragtime music is just woven from sunshine and syncopation.

But when you listen to Joplin, especially when it’s played at the right tempo, there’s a bittersweet quality to it, a certain sadness.

Yes, it’s amazing how many shades of emotion that music contains. And that was one of Joplin’s missions, how ragtime would seem, at first blush, a silly kind of dance music, but how all this bittersweetness and sadness and euphoria can be contained in this one style of music—the first American music, really.

I learned a lot reading your script. Was there really a Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, Mo.?

Yes. I didn’t take liberties with that kind of biographical information. There was a Maple Leaf Club, and it was for the black middle class. It was interesting to find out how quickly that black middle class emerged.

So it wasn’t just a composer’s or musician’s hangout.

No, that’s a romanticization. The fact is, this was a place for the black middle class. It was run by enterprising people who were, what would you say, restaurateurs.

The idea of a black middle class emerging, and not getting kicked out, or overtaxed, being allowed to blossom that way—it feels like it should be the next Ken Burns documentary, something that hasn’t been explored that much.

The black aristocracy is chronicled, and the subjugation. But I don’t think the middle class interests people. What do you say? These people had a chain of funeral homes, and a life, and then they died. This family had a pharmacy and they raised two lovely children and they died. We love the star stories, black or white. But these folks prospering in their lives, making a good living, passing it on, that’s not what gets media attention. It’s the life you’d like to live, but not the one you want to read about.

I also came across some people I wasn’t familiar with. This John Stark, the Missouri music publisher who discovered Joplin, is remarkable—he seems utterly fair. So does Ernst in Act Two. You always think of the white entrepreneurs exploiting the black composers and musicians.

It happened more often than not. But Scott Joplin was under a lucky star, and he happened to cross paths with an honest white music publisher who was charmed by the music and knew how to capitalize on it. We might not have had Scott Joplin today if it had not been for John Stark. It might have been just some music that was stolen from some black composer. Who’s the other person you asked about?

In Act Two, you’ve got the conductor, Alfred Ernst.

Yes, he was also a real character. He did write Joplin a letter; he did see that this was a great composer. And also, Europeans around 1900—coming to the country and coming to the South—were all appalled by the racial conditions. Somebody like Ernst would have seen it as injustice going on in front of him, and in this case he did the little he could do to set it right.

The play’s been done regionally. What’s some of the audience feedback?

One of the most gratifying things is when people say, “Oh, I didn’t know that about Scott Joplin.” They have his music in their heads. People hear “The Entertainer” and they say, “Oh, I thought Marvin Hamlisch wrote that.” Scott Joplin still kind of doesn’t fit in—he’s a classical composer, he’s a pop composer—he’s still a little ahead of us in our efforts to categorize. People also say they didn’t know Scott Joplin was African-American, or that he wrote opera, or that people who wrote ragtime had conservatory training, they didn’t just walk over to the piano one day and start banging out things, because that’s the way it’s portrayed so often. And the funny thing is that with Berlin, it really did kind of happen that way, but with black musicians the image is of instinct. People know Irving Berlin, though generations coming up don’t, so I think it’ll be a good introduction to this person. And even people who know his life don’t know this end of it—I didn’t. I can sit down and play 40 or 50 Irving Berlin songs out of my head, but before I researched this, I didn’t know about the ragtime era, or the first marriage.

Well, you found “Yiddischa Nightingale.” That doesn’t leap off the music stacks these days

I don’t know why that song isn’t known—maybe it will be after the Roundabout production. It’s such a charmer, and it’s not schticky Lower East Side. It’s beautiful, like a Stephen Foster parlor song. That was a major discovery. It has a jokey title, and that might be why it got lost in the later 20th century. But it’s ripe for rediscovering.

Marc Miller is a copy chief at Business Week and writes frequently about the theatre.