Er was nog geen topic over de musical Curtains, die gisteravond in premiere ging. Hier de eerste recensie van TheaterMania.com:

Los Angeles
Curtains
Reviewed By: Jonas Schwartz

If you’re going to perform a song about the villainy of theater critics, cackling that they are “low down bums,” you’d better have a critic-proof show. Luckily, Curtains, by the legendary team of composer John Kander and the late lyricist Fred Ebb, is so delightful that this critic didn’t even mind being called scum. Here’s a return to old-fashioned musical comedy, complete with rousing production numbers, a cast of veteran Broadway stars at the top of their game, and a book meant only to tickle the funny bone. The show has audiences cheering long before the curtain comes down.
Kander immediately sets the tone for the proceedings with an overture that would have sounded contemporary during the heyday of Jule Styne and Burton Lane. Curtains begins in Boston on the brink of the 1960s, as a pre-Broadway cast performs a musical called Robbin’ Hood. The star, a movie actress with no talent, dies during the curtain call, prompting no tears from the cast and crew. The producer (Debra Monk) hopes to re-cast her role with a star who can actually act, sing, and dance. Composer Aaron and lyricist Georgia (Jason Danieley and Karen Ziemba), an estranged couple, attempt to retool the songs, and Georgia gets roped into replacing the late star. The rest of the cast just wants to go home, but Boston police lieutenant Frank Cioffi (David Hyde Pierce) has quarantined the theater, keeping everyone trapped inside—including the murderer. For the star’s death was no accident.

Curtains is an inventive new work by masters of the craft—the book is by Rupert Holmes and was started by the late, great Peter Stone—but it contains many references to shows of the past. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear vamps from other composers in Kander and Ebb’s score: “Thataway!” has the Oktoberfest sound of “We’ll Take A Glass Together” from Grand Hotel, and the chorus of “Show People” borrows from “Join The Circus” from Cy Coleman’s Barnum. Meanwhile, the backstage setting will remind some of Kiss Me, Kate and the “Kansasland” number clearly has its origins in Annie Get Your Gun. Even what plot can be gathered of Robbin’ Hood—it concerns a mild-mannered sheriff and a saloon matron—can be traced to the musical Destry Rides Again. But all these references hardly make Curtains a hack job. Instead, the show reminds us of what we’re currently missing on the Great White Way.

Plenty of originality can be seen on stage, and so can plenty of extraordinary performances. The character of Frank, a detective more obsessed with fixing the show than finding his killer, is a hilarious conceit maximized by Pierce’s dead-on humor. The spoof of torch songs performed by Monk spotlights her wit, Ziemba shines in several musical numbers, and Danieley delivers two songs that show off his beautiful voice. Jill Paice is darling as the ingénue who may just be a killer. And, in a star-making performance, Megan Sikora compels a standing ovation from the audience with her sexy, spirited dancing and Joan Blondell-type gumption.

Designer Anna Louizos has fashioned an old-time show with modern sets, including a brick-walled backstage area, Ziegfeld Follies-esque curtains for a Gower and Marge Champion takeoff, and a Western look for the show within the show. Director Scott Ellis sets the perfect tone, never making the show seem like a string of jokes connecting songs; on the contrary, Curtains comes across a character-driven musical comedy. The show, which will reportedly land on Broadway this season, breathes life into the musical theater even as it serves as a most fitting memorial for Ebb and Stone.

En de New York Times:

By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: March 23, 2007
As befits a musical about a musical, “Curtains” — the talent-packed, thrill-starved production that opened last night at the Al Hirschfeld Theater — features an assortment of upbeat anthems to this business we call show. But the number that best captures the essence of the latest (and, sad to say, one of the last) of the collaborations from the songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb is a low-key ballad called “Coffee Shop Nights.”

The song is performed, most engagingly, by David Hyde Pierce, who (this is the good news) steps into full-fledged Broadway stardom with his performance here. Mr. Hyde Pierce, playing Frank Cioffi, a Boston police detective investigating a murder within a doom-shadowed musical-comedy company in 1959, is describing the limited pleasures of being an unmarried cop.

“It’s a perfectly fine life,” he sings, with feeble conviction. “I’d give it” — and here he pauses, for a moment of honest self-assessment — “two cheers.” That’s more or less the feeling inspired by “Curtains.” I sincerely wish I could say otherwise.

The long road to Broadway for “Curtains” has been nearly as fraught as that of “Robbin’ Hood,” the show-within-the-show that keeps losing cast and crew members to untimely ends during an out-of-town tryout in Boston. Its original book writer, Peter Stone, died in 2003, and Mr. Ebb, the lyricist, died in 2004. Enter Rupert Holmes, the writer and composer of the Tony-winning “Mystery of Edwin Drood,” who is now credited with the script and (along with Mr. Kander) additional lyrics for “Curtains.”

Perhaps this switching of creative horses accounts for the enervation that seems to underlie the lavish expenditure of energy by a top-of-the line cast that includes Debra Monk, Karen Ziemba and Jason Danieley. Brightly packaged, with “Kiss Me, Kate”-style sets by Anna Louizos and costumes to match by the industrious William Ivey Long, “Curtains” lies on the stage like a promisingly gaudy string of firecrackers, waiting in vain for that vital, necessary spark to set it off.

A musical that doesn’t make sardonic reference to the history of musicals is a rarity in the age of “The Producers,” “Spamalot” and “The Drowsy Chaperone.” In relating the troubled backstage back story of “a new musical of the old West,” “Curtains” includes plenty of jokey visual and aural allusions to hits like “Oklahoma!,” “Annie Get Your Gun” and “42nd Street,” as well as to lesser-known curiosities like the singing version of “Destry Rides Again.”

But unlike “The Producers,” which ends its long New York run next month, “Curtains,” directed with a soft hand by Scott Ellis, fails to convey a passionate and bone-deep understanding of the shows it satirizes. (Rob Ashford’s lewd, crotch-centered choreography for the “Robbin’ Hood” sequences would have repulsed audiences of 1959.) What it really brings to mind is less vintage Broadway than vintage prime time.

As Lieutenant Cioffi lines up and quarantines the usual showbiz suspects after the production’s untalented leading lady is murdered on opening night, “Curtains” starts to feel like a theater-themed episode of “Murder She Wrote” or “Columbo,” caught in reruns on a sleepless night.

Like such television fare, “Curtains” features a charmingly homey detective, an improbable and convoluted plot and the mossy but glamorous archetypes you expect of an in-the-wings story: whip-cracking producer, demanding diva, effete director, suspiciously sweet understudy and the stage manager who knows too much. These elements are all presented with, at most, a quarter-turn of the screw of the conventional.

There’s something soothing, even soporific, about such unaggressive predictability. But I’m assuming — and maybe I’m wrong — that you don’t go to Broadway for lullabies.

It’s not as if the creative team doesn’t try hard to perk things up. The script fires out a tireless fusillade of jokes, in the apparent hope that a few of them are bound to hit their targets. Many fall to the ever-professional Ms. Monk, as Carmen Bernstein, a tough, battle-scarred producer.

“Sidney, I guess the reason you’re such a lowlife is because they built you so close to the ground,” Carmen says to her husband and business partner (Ernie Sabella). And there is much milking of the double entendres afforded by a murder in the plot: “Normally, I’d say over my dead body, but I don’t want to give anybody ideas.” Or: “Sweetie, the only thing you could arouse is suspicion.”

Mr. Kander, the composer of the immortal “Cabaret” and “Chicago,” is a master of the musical vamp that insinuates its way into your memory. But here his melodies, especially in the would-be showstoppers, are often repetitious without being rousing.

His best numbers for “Curtains” are in a quieter vein. They include a lovely ballad, “I Miss the Music,” in which the show-within-the-show’s composer (Mr. Danieley) sings of how hard it is to write without his longtime lyricist and ex-wife, played by Ms. Ziemba. Given the death of Mr. Ebb, the number acquires a hushed poignancy. And Mr. Danieley, who has the most exquisite tenor on Broadway, gives the song its full emotional due.

Ms. Ziemba, like Ms. Monk, is an appealing and polished veteran who never makes a technical misstep. But the original, star-defining wit that both actresses have shown on previous occasions never manifests itself here.

Edward Hibbert, a specialist in droll poseurs with affected accents, does his usual shtick with his usual panache. And Jill Paice, as the classically winsome ingénue who captures Cioffi’s heart, subtly and deliciously sends up classical winsomeness.

She is well paired with Mr. Hyde Pierce, who fans the audience-wooing spark he demonstrated as the most cowardly of the knights in “Spamalot” into a steady flame. As the theater-smitten Cioffi, who winds up solving the show’s artistic problems as well as the murders, this elegantly understated comic makes captivating use of a Boston accent, a diffident air and the instinctive, razor-edge timing he honed on the sitcom “Frasier.”

He’s a welcome oddity, a soft-sell star in a hard-sell world. He uses this incongruity to make Cioffi a surrogate for everyone in the audience who has fantasies of appearing in a big Broadway musical. In the second act Mr. Hyde Pierce and Ms. Paice are allowed, for one song, to turn into Fred and Ginger in an RKO dream world.

Choreographed as a dexterous blend of sendup and valentine by Mr. Ashford, the number expresses the sheer, lightheaded love of that silly and sublime form, the musical, that is what “Curtains” is meant to be about. The song is called “A Tough Act to Follow,” and nothing that precedes or follows it is on its level. But it is a worthy tribute to the long and rich partnership of Mr. Kander and Mr. Ebb, one of the toughest acts to follow on Broadway.

Nog meer moois op Broadway. Zucht. Ik mag wel 2 weken binnenkort op deze manier….

En er is dit weekend besloten dat ik toch in de meivakantie de oversteek weer ga maken! 

😛 Ik kan dit keer 8 shows zien… Curtains zit er sowieso bij!