Curtains

One has to appreciate the degree to which, by today’s standards, the 50’s were complacent and unsophisticated. If that period expressed anything upbeat, it was most likely heard in Nelson Riddle’s jingles which had us skipping down supermarket aisles and whose echoes were heard in the Broadway musicals of that golden era.

CURTAINS, the new musical and the final one from the team of Kandor and Ebb, is such a 50’s musical. And while it is utterly banal at first, it swings into the final curtain offering some robust pleasures. There’s John Kander’s score for one, presenting the kind of memorable melodies that made the 50’s musicals so popular. I especially love “I Miss the Music”, a song of lost romance. When Jason Daniely, portraying the jilted husband, belts it out late in the 1st Act with the bravura of a true matinee idol, it brings us to the show’s first surprising moment.

And then there’s something so indescribably delicious about Fred Ebb’s lyric, “lunch counter mornings and coffee shop nights”. A duet about loneliness, it reveals the rising connection between a police officer and the show’s ingénue. Cioffi, the police officer, has arrived to solve the murder of the show’s leading lady, and in the course of things, will also cure the ailing production, as if the critics haven’t already. Opening at Boston’s Colonial theatre before the anticipated Broadway run, ROBBIN HOOD, the show within the show, was panned by the Globe’s critic. “If you loved OKLAHOMA, stay there as long as ROBBIN HOOD is running in Boston.”

While the story itself seems rehashed, it does have some “terrific talent behind it” to lift yet another phrase from that pithy critic. In this case, it’s Karen Ziemba most importantly who’s robbing the “hood” on Broadway. From the moment she takes over the role of the leading lady, the entire production is transformed and what was awful begins to sparkle.

Of course, the star of the show is Lieutenant Cioffi played by David Hyde Pierce with a distinctly Kennedy Bostonian accent.  Convincingly turning the role into himself, Pierce is everything preppy and comic that can happen to a musical. Unfortunately he never quite pulls off the role of the romantic lead.

Still, CURTAINS, has plenty of stage legends to play off. Not the least of which is Debra Monk who sustains her role as the show’s indomitable producer in scene after scene of clichéd dialogue and too obvious a story line.

That’s This Week on Broadway. I’m Isa Goldberg.