Curvy Widow has taken an express train to off-Broadway, first performed in Asheville, North Carolina ten months ago then moved to New Jersey’s George Street Playhouse before quickly getting booked here at the Westside Theater. The autobiographical book is by Bobby Goldman, the widow of Broadway playwright and Academy award winning screenwriter James Goldman (The Lion in Winter and Follies). By the end of the first song, the husband is dead and Bobby is no longer “Under Control.”
Curvy Widow is the match.com name used by Bobby when she finally decided to move on with her life and “The Rules for Whittling Down” was a very funny, well-staged song on how to take her 172 “matches” down to a more actionable quantity of suitors. Think Rue McClanahan in Golden Girls but without the constraints of television language restrictions. A little racy and funny. Unfortunately, the entire show is stuck in bad sitcom land and many jokes and musical numbers are flat.
Broadway veteran Nancy Opel (Urinetown, Honeymoon in Vegas) plays Bobby and is accompanied by three men (Ken Land, Alan Muraoka and Christopher Shyer) who play assorted male characters such as her “shrink,” doctor and assortment of dates. This part of the show works best and all of them are very good and fun to watch, even when the material is cliché or ridiculous. Bobby’s three women friends also have various roles, primarily as her best friends, but have nothing significant to do or say, which is a missed opportunity. There is definitely an audience here for this type of musical comedy. Even the inane “Gynecologist Tango” number generated a few guffaws. But the laughs are not frequent enough and the thoughtful ending, while effective, comes without the benefit of enough depth along the journey to get us to the same place as Bobby. This production of Curvy Widow is probably as good as it can be.