Curtains - Original Broadway Cast Recording
Now Available Curtains is an unabashedly retro musical. But if fashions in clothes keep coming back, why not fashions in musical comedy, if expertly executed?
The show had a slow gestation, beginning as a concept in the remarkable Peter Stone's brain, and eventually picked up by the great team of John Kander and Fred Ebb (Chicago, Cabaret, etc.). But Stone died, followed by lyricist Ebb, leaving composer Kander and Rupert Holmes (best known for The Mystery of Edwin Drood) to finish the book and provide additional songs.
Defying the gloomy adage about too many cooks, Curtains is dramatic and musical fun, so seamlessly fitted together that not even the valiant Boston detective hero of the show, the musical-besotted police lieutenant Frank Cioffi, could track down who wrote what.
The death of Fred Ebb and the loneliness of John Kander are indirectly and movingly memorialized by two songs, "Thinking of Him" and "I Miss the Music," in which the fictional songwriting team, recently divorced but still working on the rewrites of Robbin' Hood, the show within the show, express their missing each other.
[IMG:R]We get internecine rivalries among the performers, the troubled marriage of the tough woman producer, the divorced authorial couple still in secret love, the arrogantly dictatorial British director, the censorious leading Boston drama critic and two further murders.
Amid all this, Cioffi, himself an amateur musical-comedy actor, labors not only to solve the murders, but also to guide the failing show to success, involving himself both as actor-director and in a love affair with the show's ingénue.
There are fetching ballads, snazzy novelty numbers, beautifully articulated chorus numbers, tart parodies of western music and two sensational Rob Ashford ballets—one acrobatic, the other a take-off on Fred and Ginger movie dances—which master orchestrator William David Brohn and gifted dance music arranger David Chase manage to make winners sight unseen.
The savvy and very hands-on director Scott Ellis has rounded up a coruscating cast. As Cioffi, David Hyde Pierce (who just garnered a hotly contested Best Actor Tony Award) is both proficient and bemused, hard-nosed and stage-struck, and surprisingly apt at song and dance, talents triumphantly shedding their wraps. As his new lover, Jill Paice successfully combines the skills of the sweet ingénue with those of the emerging star.
Debra Monk, as the woman producer, revels in her ability to put across a ferally comic song; Jason Danieley and Karen Ziemba as the songwriting couple—she having to step into a lead role—can be both melodiously yearning and rousingly electric. Edward Hibbert brings his patented sophisticated bitchiness to the role of the director, and Noah Racey and Megan Sikora are dream dancers whom you will have to imagine with the help of the immensely suggestive music.
Any show in which the vocal arranger and conductor David Loud suddenly becomes a singer in the pit is bound to be packed with tickling surprises. The greatest of them is how sovereignly Curtains translates to disc.