The History of Curtains, or How an 80s Retrospective Musical Turned into an Homage to the Golden Age of Broadway
The history of how Curtains came to Broadway is quite a bizarre story and almost never was fully realized as a show after facing the death of lyricist Fred Ebb and book writer Peter Stone. John Kander made it a point, though, to finish what was started between himself, Ebb, and Stone. In addition to Curtains, Kander and Ebb were working on three other shows: All About Us, The Visit, and Minstrel Show. Kander managed to finish each of these shows after Ebb’s passing, “rebound(ing) with the verve and resilience of a young composer eager to get his first musical on Broadway.”1 Curtains debuted on Broadway in 2006, but the original seed of the musical murder mystery was planted way back in the mid-eighties.
Peter Stone approached Kander and Ebb in 1985 with a brilliant idea of a backstage musical and murder-mystery spoof entitled Who Killed David Merrick?. “The plot, set in the late 1980s, satirizes the theater world, its main targets being the critic John Simon, A Chorus Line, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and playwrights like Edward Albee and Landford Wilson.”2 The play-within-a-play, which Kander and Ebb love to use, originally was a show called Sand, a large departure from the western parody musical Robbin’ Hood that is seen in Curtains today. The parallels between Merrick and Curtains are very apparent from the get-to, though, with the original draft featuring a Boston police lieutenant Salvatore Cioffi, actress Nikki, and songwriting team Georgia and Aaron.
The plot is almost identical, even taking place in Boston, except for the ending: “There is one more surprise to come: as the final curtain is about to descend, David Merrick is heard approaching from offstage. It turns out that the entire musical was a rehearsal of a play-within-a-play-within-a-play.”3 The original draft was completed in October 1986 and renamed Curtains, with Stone preferring the pun rather than an insider’s joke. The name of the never-seen producer was changed to David Mishkin, then later Sidney Bernstein in the 2002 rewrite. It is important to note that the song “Thinking of Her (Him),” which was taken from Tango Mogador, was one of the few songs that survived every draft and rewrite throughout Curtains’ lifetime. Kander and Ebb transformed this piece by turning it into a duet by adding a countermelody and additional lyrics.
In 1987, Curtains was set to be staged, with Mike Nichols as director, but this never happened, due to unknown reasons. The musical then sat dormant for almost fifteen years, despite the New York Times announcing productions in 1991 and 1998 with director Tommy Tune (these productions never got off the ground). Scott Ellis eventually directed a semi-staged production in 2002, which is when interest in the project began to take off again. Stone rewrote the play-within-a-play to feature elements of Pirandello and renamed it Harlequinade, setting the preview in Detroit instead of Boston. The main story was also changed, with Stone giving more weight to Cioffi’s dramaturgical interventions. The unfortunate timing of the manner saw Stone pass away in 2003 before this rewrite was fully realized, to which Ellis suggested Rupert Holmes, a specialist in mystery and detective fiction, to finish the book.
Holmes changed the time period from 1980 to 1959, the end of the Rodgers and Hammerstein era, aiming for a more “good-hearted” tone. He also changed the setting back to Boston. “He streamlined the plot, eliminated some of the characters and consolidated others, reconceived the motives of the murder suspects, and reconfigured the murders.”4 In terms of characters, Nikki was changed to Niki, and Salvatore Cioffi was changed to Frank Cioffi, as it sounded less Italian. The inner musical was changed again, this time to Song of the Legion. The colonialist backdrop of this show was potentially seen as offensive, though, which prompted the final show-within-a-show change, this time landing on Robbin’ Hood, as parody on western musical comedies like Oklahoma!. Kander and Ebb also added one of their trunk songs, “In the Same Boat,” to the show. They originally wrote this three-part song in the sixties for a Ford Motor Company trade show, later interpolated into Carroll O’Connor’s TV special in 1973 (a la “When the Foeman Bares His Steel” from The Pirates of Penzance and “The Tea Party” from Jerry Herman’s Dear World).
This new rewrite seemed to be the right combination to get the show off the ground after the decades of uncertainty and doubt. The musical featured an homage to the Golden Age of Broadway, from the music to the choreography. This included “picturesque romance relying on “appropriate distance” between lovers, large tableaux harkening back to the days of Ziegfeld, and gendered movement that focuses on technical virtuosity and compositional elements of modern dance.”5 The dream sequence in “Tough Act to Follow” even features a stair routine, tap number, and ballroom styles of dance. The long-awaited Curtains made its first professional debut in Los Angeles in 2006, which saw its six-week run completely sold out. Audiences were thoroughly entertained, even if critics were mixed about the new show.
William David Brohn provided the orchestration with a fifteen-piece orchestra, sacrificing strings in favor of a full brass and woodwind section to truly capture the sounds of fifties musical comedies. Before heading to Broadway, Kander expanded Aaron’s balled “I Miss the Music,” adding a subtle message to Fred Ebb, who passed away in 2004. Kander added the lyric, “She says something / You say something / She writes a line / You play a vamp,” mirroring his relationship with Ebb and how easy it was to create music with him. After this line a vamp is played by the piano in the pit which only Kander could have written. He made it a point to finish what he and Ebb started, a show twenty years in the making that almost never saw the light of day.
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1 – James Leve, “Chapter 9: “A Tough Act to Follow” Curtains and Three New Shows” Kander and Ebb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 259.
2 – Leve, “A Tough Act,” 260.
3 – Leve, “A Tough Act,” 262.
4 – Leve, “A Tough Act,” 268.
5 – Gary M. Grant, Nancy Grant, and Dustyn Martincich, “Chapter 13: Freeing the Narrative: Interdisciplinary Methods for Exploring American Identity in Lachiusa’s The Wild Party (2000) and Kander and Ebb’s Curtains (2006),” Old Stories, New Readings: The Transforming Power of American Drama (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 204.