ANY show that gleefully trashes critics in what’s virtually its opening number can’t be all that bad.
But “Curtains” – that title is another way to tempt fate – tries very hard to be not good.
The John Kander/Fred Ebb/Rupert Holmes musical that opened at the Hirschfeld last night has two things going for it: the effortless performances of its star, the nervy, impeccable David Hyde Pierce as a stage-struck 1959 Boston detective brought in to solve a backstage murder, and, in a smaller role, Edward Hibbert as that show’s effetely acerbic director.
The backstage musical is an honorable form that found its peak in Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate.” Here it has been mixed up with a bewilderingly silly mystery – had there been a butler, no doubt he would have done it – of “Moose Murders” proportions.
Indeed, it’s not so much a whodunit as a whydoit.
But the real mystery is what “Curtains” might have been like had the curtain risen on the musical Kander, Ebb and Peter Stone began writing. But Stone died, and so, too, did Ebb (with whom Kander wrote the megahits “Cabaret” and “Chicago”). Rupert Holmes (“The Mystery of Edwin Drood”) was brought aboard to provide a new book and devise additional lyrics.
It must have seemed a good idea at the time.
You can’t dump all the blame on Holmes – although, for a showbiz show in which a producer (the unsinkable Debra Monk) declaims, “I put on ‘The Iceman Cometh,’ and no one cameth,” it’s hard to be kind.
And, for that matter, Kander’s music doesn’t find him at his best – at times, he isn’t searching very hard.
One crushing difficulty is that the musical within the musical – a cowboy extravaganza called “Robbin’ Hood!” – is meant to be awe-
inspiringly bad, so bad that we’ll find it campily hilarious.
I just found it awe-inspiringly bad. Unfortunately, it was difficult to discern just where the joke musical ended and the actual one began.
Part of the trouble was director Scott Ellis’ failure to italicize sufficiently the inside comedy, but there probably wasn’t much he could do.
The choreography by Rob Ashford was unnoticeable, the scenery by Anna Louizos uninterestingly ugly, while William Ivey Long unwisely saved his best and funniest costumes for the curtain calls.
Through all this farrago, Hyde Pierce moved (or, in that curtain call, “rode”) with unshatterable aplomb – taking the basically comic concept of a tough plainclothes detective as a musical comedy queen, and running with it just as far, and even a bit beyond, as the material could take it.
That look of gentle, slightly pained surprise at the entire business of living, a look that served his TV alter ego so well on “Frasier,” is one of the musical’s very few delights.
Another is the outrageous Hibbert (also late of “Frasier”), flouncing across the stage like a majestic pouter pigeon, making the stereotypical martinet of a gay director seem like a fresh creation beribboned with spontaneity.
As the composing team, supposedly responsible for the dismal inner musical, Karen Ziemba and Jason Daniely were equally game but, unlike the other two, appeared defeated.
There was a special irony when, in one number, “I Miss the Music,” the composer, after Ziemba’s character temporarily deserted him, was lamenting the absence of his writing partner.
Kander must have known just how he felt.
CURTAINS
Al Hirschfeld Theatre, 302 W. 45th St.; (212) 239-6200.