Sunday Showtunes

CURTAINS, FOILED AGAIN

The next show was “Curtains,” Kander and Ebb’s last show (Fred Ebb died this year), unless someone finishes up one of the several shows that they had in development when Ebb passed.   (This one had a rocky road to Broadway but has finally arrived with hopes intact).  It’s the kind of show you would think I would absolutely love – an old-fashioned musical that is also a love letter to Broadway (set in 1959, the same year as “The Producers,” a similar but better show that covers some of the same thematic territory). 

Like “The Producers,” “Curtains” is a backstage story (involving a western-themed Broadway-bound show trying out in Boston) but it’s a murder mystery too.  David Hyde Pierce stars as an Inspector-cum-musical theatre fan who solves the mystery and doctors the show into a hit at the same time.  He just won a Tony for this role but I didn’t think he was all that.  In fact, while I liked the show in general, I didn’t find it to be all that wonderful.  It’s too bad, because I wanted to love it.  I thought there was too much of the “show within a show,” which didn’t go anywhere, and not enough getting to know the characters.  The tone is odd at times (for example, one woman is murdered and the cast sings a comic dirge about how terrible she was – was that supposed to be funny?) and the book just didn’t pack the punch of say, oh I don’t know, “The Producers” or even “42^nd Street.”  

There were tons of “inside jokes” and theatre terms that make the show especially clever for theatre people.   At one point the conductor gets to sing, so I will look forward to doing this show some day at the local level, but on the whole it wasn’t something I could walk out praising to high heaven.   The best show of this trip is still “In the Heights.”

KSHO broadcasts to the Mid-Willamette Valley in Western Oregon.
Among the communities served are Albany, Corvallis, and Lebanon.