“Curtains,” a musical with a book by Rupert Holmes and music written by famed songwriting team John Kander and Fred Ebb (who also wrote the music for “Cabaret” and “Chicago”), will open in the Elsie C. Brackett Theatre this weekend. A musical whodunit comedy, "Curtains" parodies popular dinner theater murder mysteries of the 1950s and 1960s.
The musical, which originally opened on Broadway in 2007, is a show within a show, said Lyn Cramer, director of the production. It is set in 1959 at the Boston tryouts of a musical entitled “Robbin’ Hood,” Cramer said.
The leading lady of “Robbin’ Hood” gets murdered at the top of the show, and detective Lt. Frank Cioffi is called in to investigate. As the show progresses, members of the company and crew keep dying off, and Cioffi must work to stop the murders.
Meanwhile, a myriad of interesting subplots take place as the cast and crew navigate their relationships with each other, said Tanner Dillon, musical theater sophomore who plays Lt. Cioffi.
“You can kind of pick your favorite storyline,” said Madison Pugh, musical theater senior who plays Carmen Bernstein, the co-producer of “Robbin’ Hood.”
“Curtains” contains many of the time-honored elements found in traditional musicals prior to the 1960s. For example, stock characters, or recurring character types, are a defining feature of classic musicals like “Hello, Dolly!” and “Brigadoon,” Cramer said.
“Curtains” has “every kind of stock character under the sun,” including “loud broads,” a singer-songwriter team, an ingenue (leading lady) and her “gum-smacking sidekick,” a choreographer or “song and dance man,” and the director of the show within the show, who is a British fop, Cramer said. But it also contains an “out-of-the-box” character, Lt. Cioffi, who shakes up the array of stock characters, Cramer said.
The show was the last musical written with a full overture and an entr’acte, the piece of music between acts, for Act II, making it unique among modern musicals, Cramer said.
“People can sit and listen to an entr’acte with the lights low before the show starts, and sit and listen to an entr'acte before the second act starts,” she said. “(That) never happens anymore.”
But, since the music was written by Kander and Ebb, the musical is also “cutting edge” as well as traditional, Cramer said.
“All of their shows have lots of murder, mayhem and sex,” Cramer said. “That’s a big part of what they do when they write.”
The show is also much faster paced than a traditional three-hour musical.
“Energy does not drop during the whole show,” Dillon said.
Musical theater buffs will enjoy the show’s humor, which is at times very musical-theater oriented, Pugh said.
“The show is unique because there’s so much theater terminology, so it’s really funny for us up on the stage,” Pugh said. “Someone will tell a joke — like one of the lines is ‘she’s taking 10 till God knows when.’ ... Taking 10 is taking a 10-minute break from rehearsal, so there’s a lot of stuff like that where the cast thinks it’s really, really funny.”
However, you don’t have to know about musical theater to find the show amusing, Dillon said. Even though Pugh and Dillon have rehearsed the show a lot at this point, some jokes never get old.
“There are so many jokes that just still make me laugh that aren’t even the ones that are meant for theater people, just all the jokes are just so funny,” Dillon said. “And it is incredibly cheesy, but the show owns that and says this is something that we love and are passionate about, and it’s just so sweet at the same time.”
Besides the comedic aspect, Pugh and Dillon each have favorite parts of being in the show.
Pugh loves the costumes she gets to wear because they are real vintage and “look fabulous,” she said.
Dillon enjoys that his character has a passion for musical theater, he said.
“I love watching all the numbers because I’m not doing them — I just watch everyone have a good time,” Dillon said.
Cramer has wanted to direct a production of “Curtains” since she saw it on Broadway and fell in love with it, she said. She has put in a lot of work to make the show happen, she said.
“I ran around and got my scenic designer, my lighting designer, my sound designer, my costumer; I went around, took everybody for a drink, and I said, ‘Let’s do this musical,’ and I had to talk everybody into it,” Cramer said.
While Broadway has a big enough budget to successfully resurrect old musicals, “Curtains” is a perfect musical to bring to a college campus, she said.
“The great thing about this show is that it was written after the millennium, and it’s still a traditional musical, so it has bite,” Cramer said.
