'And the Curtain Rises' at Signature Theatre

Musicals love history, particularly when that history offers an evocative sound that can be recycled. Think "Ragtime," which had the syncopation-loving era of Scott Joplin on which to hang its stylistic hat. Or "Chicago," which reveled in Jazz Age idioms to spin its tale of merry murderesses.

But what about the new show "And the Curtain Rises" - opening Thursday at Signature Theatre - which turns back the clock to 1866 for the birth of the modern musical? What popular sound does that historical period offer a 21st-century composer?

The Camptown ladies sing this song, doo-dah, doo-dah. The Camptown racetrack's five miles long, oh, de doo-dah day . . .

Joseph Thalken is standing at a piano in a rehearsal room at Signature to explain the simple harmonies and rhythms of America's post-Civil War musical landscape, exemplified by Stephen Foster's hit "Camptown Races." It's a quiet day at the theater, with the cast on a week-long break while director Kristin Hanggi is out of the country, and Thalken, 48, is taking advantage of the lull to focus on orchestrations for the score he has created to celebrate a pivotal moment in theatrical history.

"And the Curtain Rises," with a book by Michael Slade and lyrics by Mark Campbell, looks at the point on Broadway when fate intervened to make a novice producer's play-in-a-shambles a success when he combined forces with dancers and musicians from a ballet troupe whose nearby theater had gone up in flames.

The 1866 show, "The Black Crook," ran for nearly 500 performances and was popular on tour and in revivals for years. But it was not, alas, the music of the time that drove Thalken's passion for the material. "We did a lot of research on the music," Thalken says, "and I find the music from the original show incredibly mundane. So, there are only a few little things in the show-within-the-show that sort of ape that style."

The finely tuned music-history ear will hear Thalken's references to such forms as the march, the waltz, schottische (a slow polka) and bel canto opera, "but it's not done in way that's meant to make fun of it as much as it is to have fun with it," the composer says. "There's definitely a nod toward the style, but otherwise I'm trying to write with a more contemporary voice."

"There are only a few points in the show where I'm consciously trying to sound like 1866," Thalken adds. "It's more about avoiding particular styles that would sound anachronistic. There's no rhythm and blues in this show, or jazz, or anything of that sort, because that attaches to it a certain time period that would be inappropriate for what we've written here."

The plot, too, Thalken says, isn't beholden to the events of 1866. "If you're a historian, you have to take it with a grain of salt and just know that it's an imagining of what could have happened," he says. "Because nobody knows for sure. . . . There are all these different accounts that contradict each other. We do lay out the basic elements. . . . There was a melodrama rehearsing. There was a ballet company in a theater down the street. That theater burned down, and somehow, somebody had the idea of incorporating this ballet troupe into this melodrama. . . . Those are the basic plot points that are true. After that, we took some some historical detail and used it, and we made up some other things."

The creators did keep some characters from the original, including the black-magic sorcerer of the title.

Thalken - best known for his collaboration with lyricist and book writer Tom Jones (of "The Fantasticks" fame) on a stage version of the film "Harold and Maude" several years ago - took on "And the Curtain Rises" as a $100,000, four-year commission through Signature's American Musical Voices Project, and it's the third full-scale production since the project was launched, following Michael John LaChiusa's "Giant" and Ricky Ian Gordon's "Sycamore Trees."

"This is a totally different vibe from the other two," Thalken says. "It's a nice contrast. The intention is fun. Hopefully people will be into the story and find it funny and find it moving. That's what we're going for."

Naturally, Thalken gives "The Black Crook" props for shaping a genre that has been crucial to his career. "The idea that people would sing and dance and act - that you would have these people who are what we now call a 'triple threat' in a show - was unheard of," he says. But he's also a realist about what can really make audiences line up at the box office.

"One reason it was so successful is that it featured these scantily clad girls wearing pink tights. Under the lighting conditions of the time, it looked like they had nude legs. And that was scandalous."

And the Curtain Rises Thursday through April 10. Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. 703-573-7328. www.signature-theatre.org. $54-$80.