Single word titles beginning with "c" were good to composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb: Cabaret and Chicago became two of Broadway's greatest hits. If Curtains, their third named in this style, hoped to invoke good omens, it failed because Ebb died suddenly during the writing. So, subsequently, did the author of the spoken dialogue, Peter Stone.
In a joke their ghosts may have come to enjoy, the subject of the show is sudden death during the production of a musical comedy. Rupert Holmes, who won awards for a Broadway song and dance version of Dickens' unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, has joined Kander to complete this piece.
Riskily, Curtains begins with the curtain-call for a bad, old-fashioned musical: a western called Robbin' Hood, being tried out in Boston in 1959 with little hope of reaching New York. As she takes her bow, the disliked leading lady falls flat. The pathologist informs the cops and Lieutenant Frank Cioffi arrives to confine the cast for questioning, but - in a conceit played with high comic gusto by David Hyde Pierce - is more interested in fixing the show than finding the killer.
The programme declines to disclose which of the songs have "additional lyrics by Rupert Holmes and John Kander", but The Woman's Dead, a savage tango for the murdered actress, sounds like vintage Ebb rhyming ("They've closed her mouth and sent her south"). And it has been revealed, as most might have guessed, that Kander, unusually, produced both words and tune for I Miss The Music, in which the co-author of the musical within the musical explains what it's like to be without his long-time collaborator.
That song is a neat wreath from Kander to Ebb, but the whole show makes clear that a great Broadway partnership was far from finished when the curtain fell. Tourists chasing the cheap dollar this summer will find nothing else as enjoyable on Broadway.
