Sleuths and Truths

“Curtains” and “Jack Goes Boating”

Karen Ziemba, David Hyde Pierce, and Debra Monk in Kander and Ebb’s finale.Credit ROBERT RISKO

“Why must the show go on?” Noël Coward asked, twitting the legendary stoicism of show-biz folk in his 1954 song, and adding, “Why kick up your legs / When draining the dregs / Of sorrow’s bitter cup? / Because you have read / Some idiot has said, / ‘The curtain must go up!’ ” At the beginning of “Curtains” (cleverly directed by Scott Ellis, at the Al Hirschfeld), the same question is posed, albeit without the same tart brilliance, by one of the mutinous cast members of a lame “Oklahoma!” retread called “Robbin’ Hood of the Old West,” after its disastrous opening-night tryout in Boston. The show-must-go-on canard is mouthed by the producer, Carmen Bernstein (the formidable Debra Monk), a termagant with timing. The Boston critics have murdered her show—“Does ‘debacle’ have two meanings?” Carmen asks. As it turns out, while taking a curtain call, the inept and unliked leading lady, Jessica Cranshaw (the amusing Patty Goble), has also been murdered. “Our star is dead!” the cast sings. “She had no voice / She had no wits.” To which Carmen chimes in, “She had no brains, she just had tits.” In the course of the evening, the death toll rises. We have the makings of both a whodunit and a why-do-it.

“Curtains” deftly and unabashedly addresses both questions. The answer to the latter is to make a buck, a credo spelled out with bracing authority by Carmen. “Gorky / Shmorky,” Monk sings in “It’s a Business,” pooh-poohing nonprofit theatre. “Money misspent / You won’t survive Yom Kippur / You’ll never get through Lent.” The task of sorting out the murderer from the MacGuffins falls to the beady, stagestruck Boston police detective Lieutenant Frank Cioffi (the droll, pitch-perfect David Hyde Pierce), who, as the evening wears on, also sorts out the gnarly production problems of the show’s flat eleven-o’clock number. Since none of the cast and crew can leave the theatre until the murderer is found, the theatricals do what they always do on Broadway when they have hours to kill—they keep singing and dancing.

Broadway musicals do better telling about the folderol of their play world than about the fiasco of the real one. Originally conceived by the Broadway pros Peter Stone, John Kander, and Fred Ebb (the book and additional lyrics are by Rupert Holmes), “Curtains” is ingeniously put together and smart about show business; with witty contributions from the set designer Anna Louizos and the costume designer William Ivey Long, it expertly spoofs everything to do with the clichés of the Broadway musical. At once a musical within a musical, a thriller, a backstage drama, and a romance, it is the narrative equivalent of a Dagwood sandwich, stuffed with relish and a lot of ham. The Swift Premium Award goes to Edward Hibbert, as the bitchy, twitchy director Christopher Belling. When Cioffi fingers him as one of “my first official murder suspects,” Hibbert crisply replies, “Well, it’s an honor just to be nominated.”

Scott Ellis’s playful storytelling matches the novelty of the plot. The stage perspectives shift as sensationally as the murder suspects: we watch the finale of “Robbin’ Hood” from the points of view of both the audience and the actors; Act II opens from the orchestra pit, where the conductor sings a song; and one scene is played on a flybridge high above the stage. Rob Ashford’s humorous choreography gives a terrific boost to Ellis’s stage pictures. He turns the hearty barroom sendup “Thataway!” into something altogether more suggestive, and when Hyde Pierce finds himself being taught a time step by Niki (Jill Paice), his favorite chorine, he goes into a Ginger Rogers–Fred Astaire fantasy. Ashford has great fun teasing the aplomb of the iconic pair, maneuvering the tangled actors up a white staircase with a chandelier above, satin curtains all around, and a smoke machine working like fury from offstage.

On Broadway, stasis is the name of the musical’s good-time game; by the finale of “Curtains,” we are literally back where we started. If the show indicates anything, it’s that if you don’t know where you’re going you can’t get lost. The happy world of “Curtains” is lived entirely between quotation marks; meanings and feelings aren’t really in order. The exception is the song “I Miss the Music,” in which the nature of collaboration is explained to the jejune detective, and genuine longing finds its way into the manic fun. (Fred Ebb died in 2004, ending a musical partnership with Kander that began in 1962.) The score is bright without being distinguished, but the song achieves a special—almost jarring—eloquence:

But when you’re writing a song

Without a partner

That’s a completely different matter.

No one tells you

That’s not funny.

No one says, “Let’s cut that bar.”

No one makes you better than you are.

At the end of “Curtains,” the cast sings, “Sometimes we’re not too certain / What’s false and what’s real / But we’re seldom in doubt about what we feel.” In Bob Glaudini’s “Jack Goes Boating” (a LAByrinth production at the Public, directed by Peter DuBois), the cast members are always in doubt about what they feel. The play, which is a modern-day “Marty,” is uneven but affecting. It addresses the compelling psychological problems of how the psyche gets stuck and how it gets moving. Jack (the riveting Philip Seymour Hoffman), a limousine driver, exists at first in an almost autistic solitude, cut off by a fearfulness that he can’t articulate but by which he is transparently punished. His best and only friends—Clyde (John Ortiz) and his wife, Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega)—set him up with the shy, fragile Connie (the poignant Beth Cole), who is figuratively and literally beaten up by the caprice of life. (She gets mugged in the subway.) Jack and Connie slowly reach out to each other. Jack must learn to swim by spring in order to keep his promise to take Connie rowing in Central Park, so flow is the actual as well as the metaphorical issue of the play.

Jack is emotionally frozen. He is first seen huddled on a sofa in Clyde’s comfortable apartment in cap, muffler, and overcoat. He is a stolid, ungainly, monosyllabic lump, whose rigidity is magnified by the married couple’s surface sexual ease and bonhomie. He can’t assert himself; instead, he lets the reggae song “Rivers of Babylon,” which he constantly plays on his tape recorder, speak his inchoate estrangement and longing. While the play unpersuasively tracks the distrust in Clyde and Lucy’s fraught relationship, it is successful in exploring Jack’s and Connie’s tentative progress toward trust. They kiss. (“Nothing overwhelming,” Jack says, leaning in for the first time.) They explore each other. (“I like how you touch me. How you barely touch my skin,” Connie tells him.) They make plans. “Maybe, I don’t know, dinner when you’re better,” he says when he visits her in the hospital, after the mugging. “Make it a big feast.” “No one has ever cooked for me before,” she says, misunderstanding him. Jake must now learn to cook as well as swim. He takes the risk.

Jack’s attempt to master his fear provides the play’s most memorable moments. The cunning use of blue neon and tiles conjures the pool in which Clyde coaches Jack from the sidelines. “Let everything flow,” Clyde yells at one point late in the show. “Good, see, you’re swimming. There is no deep end. You’re at the deep end but there is no deep end.” In the slow acquisition of poise, Hoffman makes a thrilling spectacle of the battle between trepidation and validation. As Jack does a run-through of the meal for Connie, he goes over the hand motions of preparing the main course: “Sift flour. Pinch of season salt. Crumbs.” The moment is radiant—Hoffman’s stiff fingers and hint of smile somehow catch the soul’s struggle to turn will into command. Connie doesn’t quite get her home cooking, but she does find a home in Jack. In a rowboat at the finale, they glide on the water. “I’m a good swimmer,” Jack says. “I knew you would be,” Connie tells him. “I am for you,” he replies. Jack, who has tried to fathom the meaning of the lyrics of “Rivers of Babylon”—“So let the words of our mouths / and the meditations of our hearts / be acceptable in thy sight”—now lives them. He is finally acceptable in the eyes of another. The song is a prayer; the production’s accomplishment is to leave the audience with a sense of blessing. ♦

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