Normally, says producer Grete Egan, a Diablo Light Opera Company musical casts no more than 30 people.

With the massive, brawling "Ragtime," however, DLOC has enlisted a cast of 40 to play hundreds of early-20th-century Americans. They will move at a precision pace, enlisting principal performers to do double duty as dressers in the wings. And they will have to steer clear of the 20 sets on hand that are needed to tell this turn-of-the-last-century tale.

It's a sizable challenge and risk for which there is almost no track record to learn from. That's because DLOC is one of the first community theater groups in the country to produce "Ragtime." While scoring first rights to produce a new musical is nothing new to the company, the technological and artistic demands of the show go well beyond those of traditional musical comedies.

The $250,000 production becomes a big challenge to the company, which regularly spends in the low six figures to produce a musical, because the sets demanded to tell the story are more complex than most, and the story is much more complicated, requiring performers who are not only skilled singers and dancers, but accomplished actors as well.

"The huge challenge was figuring out who plays what and when," says director Sue Ellen Nelson. "There were 68 in the Broadway cast, and we have 40, so there is a lot more doubling. And then, this show never stops, even with 22 set changes, so you have to be totally organized to make it happen."

But the reward of putting together the jigsaw puzzle of "Ragtime," a landmark blend of old and new musical comedy styles, becomes worth it because of the complexity of the story.

"What I like about this show is that where characters in musicals are typically flat, these are so real and believable," she says. "People can identify with them, and they represent different factions in the country that still exist today."

The musical is based on E.L. Doctorow's 1975 novel, looking at the United States in the early 20th century. But instead of viewing the country's conflict in terms of black and white or rich and poor, Doctorow's America includes a series of classes, from the wealthy descendants of the Mayflower to the children of slaves and the immigrants flooding the country.

Blending his fictional characters with real historical figures, Doctorow spins several different yarns that slowly move closer together until the lives of all the characters become entwined.

It is a hugely visual story, but it took six years for it to become an Oscar-nominated movie, and another decade and a half to bring it to the stage. The musical was created in Canada by the ill-fated Livent Inc., which went out of business when company officials were charged with mishandling its finances.

It finally opened in Toronto in November 1996, where it was developed for six or seven months before immigrating to Los Angeles for another six-month run and more tinkering. The musical opened on Broadway in 1998 to positive reviews and Tony awards.

It works so well because it not only is a sweeping saga of America's exploding industrial age, but also is a very tender story of love and human emotion.

From the groups of immigrants, descendants of slaves and the Brahmins, the principals emerge, along with such real-life historical figures as Admiral Peary, J.P. Morgan, Booker T. Washington, Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit, Emma Goldman, and their lives intertwine for moments or forever with ordinary people: Mother, Father, Coalhouse, Sarah, Younger Brother, Tateh.

Central to the story is a romance that blossoms between Coalhouse (James Monroe Iglehart) and Sarah (Andrea Daniel), who has abandoned and partially buried her infant son in Mother's garden. Mother (Joni DeGabriele) finds the baby, brings Sarah into the house, and serves as a midwife for the courtship between Coalhouse, the ragtime musician and baby's father, and the frightened black girl, so horribly out of place in New Rochelle.

Time after time, Coalhouse is rebuffed by the mother of his child; time after time, he returns, and finally wins her affection.

"In the beginning, Sarah is meek and sweet, but her life is destroyed, drained out of her because of what she has done. She is ashamed," says Daniel. "But then, Mother takes her in, and Coalhouse keeps coming back, so she sees there may be a ray of hope. And she finally realizes she can be the woman she was meant to be."

Father (Michael McCarty) has left town for a year, and Mother is making decisions on her own, for the first time, including the decision to bring a black woman into a very white home and care for her.

Once Coalhouse wins Sarah back, he sees his future polished bright. He hops into his Model T, made affordable to him by Henry Ford and his remarkable assembly line, and heads out with his family on the wheels of a dream -- and into a nightmare in the form of a group of brutal, racist Irish firemen. Suddenly, the shining promise of a new century is as distant as the ragtime music Coalhouse once loved so much.

The Model T is an example of how the story's complexity leads to expensive, technical challenges for anyone staging "Ragtime." The auto, as symbol and plot device, is a big part of the story, and as such cannot be relegated to a cheesy stage prop. In the case of DLOC's production, a full-size replica of the auto, operated hydraulically, cost more than $10,000 to build. (DLOC is renting the car from Theatreworks, a professional theater company in San Jose that recently staged the musical.)

As Coalhouse battles his own enemies, others find that emerging into the new century and finding the freedom and dreams that brought them to the United States is an uphill ordeal.

Mike Dederian, who plays Tateh, the Eastern European immigrant, sees his character as "sort of an immigrant Everyman."

"He isn't any one person, but a lot of ideas of immigrants we have seen in plays and movies and read about in books," he says. "All those stories boil down to that one guy, who has all those things happen to him. The thing I like about Tateh is he has a core being -- he is a father; that's where he centers everything, and it comes up several times as he tries to identify himself."

"Ragtime" is rich with such personal stories -- dreams dashed as bitter, angry reality smashes the pastoral Victorian innocence with the metallic birth pangs and shrill screams of a new age emerging. And no one -- not Father, not Mother, not Younger Brother, not Coalhouse, not even Tateh -- is untouched by it.