Hanging "Curtains," Hello "Blackbird"

I'm on a theatrical roll, and boy is it exciting. Nothing excites me more than live theatre, good, bad, or mediocre. I'm here to report that, of the last two shows I've seen, one fell in the "good" category (Blackbird at Manhattan Theatre Club) and one in the "mediocre" (Curtains on Broadway at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre).

In an effort to see three famous movie actors on three consecutive nights (after Philip Seymour Hoffman in Jack Goes Boating on Thursday and Kevin Spacey in A Moon for the Misbegotten on Friday), I did student rush on Saturday night with Austin for Blackbird starring Jeff Daniels and up-and-coming actress Alison Pill.

All I knew about the play was that it was about pederasty and that it won the Olivier Award for Best New Play last year. Swayed by the latter and by the two actors, both of whom I've admired in past projects, I took a leap, and boy was it worth it.

The play centers around Ray, played by Jeff Daniels, a 50-something-year-old office worker who gets an unexpected break room visit from Una, with whom he carried out an illicit affair when she was only 12 years old. As played by Daniels, Ray, a character who would be easy to flat-out villanize, is, thanks to the astute direction of Joe Mantello, humanized and given an inner life. We can at least identify his motivations, even if we don't condone them. As Una, Pill, whom I loved last season in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, gave a wonderful performance as a broken girl of a woman left to pick up the pieces of her life in the aftermath of this relationship that, though she needs so badly to turn away from, she ultimately finds herself still entranced with.

What was ultimately so great about the play was that it was ambiguous enough that my roommate and I were able to have a really heated debate about the ethics of the situation at hand and the characters' motivations. In that regard, it reminded me of Doubt by John Patrick Shanley, another show that I lauded for its ability to spark a social conversation.

The audience at the preview performance I attended seemed to be mostly older subscribers, and I think it's a shame this show won't reach a wider audience. It's a show that belongs Broadway, I think, particularly since it has something so different to say. No matter, the student rush policy allows those with an ID to buy tickets for $25. I recommend people check it out.

On the Broadway message board All That Chat, one poster recently posed the question, "What's David Hyde Pierce doing these days?" Another poster's response was, "A new musical called Drapes," which was followed up with, "Miss it and your life hangs in the valence."

Drapes could be the alternate title of Curtains, the new Kander & Ebb musical that recently opened on Broadway starring David Hyde Pierce of Frasier fame and Broadway vet Debra Monk. Though the sets are lovely, the costumes fine, and the cast superb, something is missing behind the pretty packaging.

Mostly: the music. Kander & Ebb, the pair that brought us such Broadway staples as Cabaret and Chicago have written a score that recalls other scores, some theirs and some not, and ultimately ends up falling flat. Though there are toe-tapping moments, they never pay off. Where are those classic Kander & Ebb vamps we're used to? In Curtains, they're nowhere to be found. One has to admire that there's artistry in the attention to the lyrics here, but the cleverness in the rhymes never translates to genuine storytelling and sentiment. To quote a Damn Yankees lyric, first and foremost, "you gotta have heart."

The cast, especially the bold and brassy Debra Monk, keeps the show going at a reasonable pace in this murder mystery musical. We're meant to care about the suspence ratcheted up surrounding the murders of several key players in an out-of-town tryout of a musical in Boston, investigated by musical theatre-loving Detective Cioffi (Pierce) but the plot lacks in suspence and too many of the book's jokes fall flat and rely too heavily on tired cliches.

The closest Curtains comes to achieving the genuine thrill of musical theatre is in the fantastical dance and romance dream sequence, "A Tough Act to Follow," which features David Hyde Pierce and Jill Paice in an earnest and artful duet that came closest to whetting my appetite for some good old fashioned musical theatre magic. Don't get me wrong, I love plenty of different forms of musical theatre. This season, I was entralled most with unconventional musicals like Grey Gardens and Spring Awakening, but with this team assembled for this particular show, my expectations were high and specific -- for some classy, brassy Broadway fun -- and they were most certainly left unfulfilled. This is by no means a bad show, but there's something missing behind the curtains -- maybe a heart.