CURTAINS    

Curtains is a nice Broadway musical.  Nice is better than poor or fair, not quite as good as good.  About 2 ½ stars nice.

It is a murder mystery, nominally, but murder mysteries typically have clues and red herrings.  This one is all red herrings—to me anyway—with no legitimate clues at all.  Not important.  This is a musical to entertain, not tax your brain.

David Hyde Pierce of “Frazier” fame won the play’s only Tony award of six nominations.  While I did not see all the nominated plays, this particular role did not seem Tony material to me.  Pierce was good and he sang and moved well, but there was not that pizzazz that one often sees on Broadway and defines, for me, a Tony worthy performance.

Pierce plays Detective Lieutenant Frank Cioffi who is a theatre aficionado himself and keeps switching from detective trying to solve the murder—and then subsequent murders—to theatre guy offering directing and writing suggestions to the cast and crew—to a man who is falling in love with the ingénue lead.

Rupert Holmes, a Scarsdale resident, was nominated for the book and for additional lyrics he wrote with John Kander.  This was the storied Kander and Ebb’s last musical together as Fred Ebb died in 2004 (9/11) while writing this musical.  Kander and Ebb first met 45 years ago in 1962 and wrote such hits as Cabaret, Chicago, Kiss of the Spider Woman, New York, New York and Zorba.

It was a fun enough play.  Debra monk is great as Carmen Bernstein (Tony nominee) and Edward Hibbert (not nominated) stole the show as director Christopher Belling.

Nothing to nitpick about the play;  worth seeing if you like musicals;  Some fine dancing and choreography (Rob Ashford was nominated).