Believe it or not, Barry Manilow originally wanted to just be a songwriter and compose music for Broadway shows—and that’s certainly more than enough. The former dream happened early; the latter finally happened after decades of being a performing superstar.
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Manilow and longtime lyricist Barry Sussman have worked together for 50 years, and after more than 30 of them, their goal of bringing a show to New York has finally become a reality. Just don’t expect musical theater renditions of tunes like “Mandy,” “Copacabana (At the Copa),” or “I Write the Songs”—this is an entirely original production.
The genesis for the new Manilow/Sussman musical, Harmony, on Broadway came about in the early 1990s when the latter saw the 1976 documentary The Comedian Harmonists about the genre-hopping German singing sextet of the same name. It included interviews with surviving members. Sussman immediately told Manilow about it, and they began their long journey toward writing, scoring, and mounting the musical.
[AS OF THIS WRITING: Harmony Tickets Are Available! – Get ‘Em Right Here]
And what a story it is: three Jews and three gentiles create a singing sensation in their homeland by combining their dulcet harmonies with funny stage routines and applying them to popular numbers of the day, drawing increasing international attention between 1928 and 1934. But the rise of the Nazis and the persecution of Jews there and throughout Europe led to their dissolution. The members’ stories continued on different paths after that, but the musical focuses on the period just before through just after that aforementioned timeframe.
Since 1997, four off-Broadway productions of Harmony have been staged—in San Diego, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, along with a failed attempt in Philadelphia—and nearly a decade after the last iteration, it made its way to the Great White Way after a recent off-Broadway NYC run. The twist of this rendition is that the elderly version of one of the members, named Rabbi, relates the tale to the audience and also tries to vainly warn his youthful self of the mistakes he is making. It adds an extra layer to the storytelling and helps audiences relate better to the characters.
The first act of Harmony starts in an exuberant, classic Broadway-style beginning, as we are soon introduced to each of the distinct members of the singing group and how their voices combine together. As their fortunes swell and their act blossoms with comedic flair, we get a strong sense of the international accolades that could lead to great things for them. But by the second act, the reality of the Nazi takeover of Germany threatens the fabric of the group and their personal lives.
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A very effective character in the second act is the Gestapo officer who first sits in the front of the theater to watch their performance, then half-pretends to be an ally to them because they have an influential composer friend in the Nazi Party. But the cold, calculating officer slowly twists the knife, because he knows such protection will gradually diminish. His sinister presence is a reminder that when fascism rises, art and culture inevitably suffer under intense oppression—a lesson that is certainly still relevant in modern times. The show has received criticism for what some critics feel is not quite the right balance between the slapstick musical elements and the depiction of the troubling societal ills rising in Germany at the time. Yet there are certainly memorable moments that will linger after people leave the theater.
Harmony arrives at a precarious time; so many of the issues it deals with could happen again. Manilow and Sussman certainly are aware of that, but what makes the show doubly important is that it is not only reawakening the memory of the group, but exposing them to so many people who never knew of their existence. As the show’s tagline says, Harmony tells “the extraordinary true story of the greatest entertainers the world would ever forget.”
Harmony is currently playing at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. To learn more about the Comedian Harmonists, venture to this site.
Photo by Brad Barket/Getty Images
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