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    ‘Harmony,’ Barry Manilow’s Passion Project, to Close on Broadway

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    The musical, which Manilow wrote with Bruce Sussman, is about a German singing ensemble that collided with the rising Nazi regime.“Harmony,” Barry Manilow’s long-in-the-works musical about an early-20th-century German sextet that ran afoul of the Nazi regime, will end an abbreviated Broadway run on Feb. 4.Manilow and his longtime collaborator Bruce Sussman have been working on the show for more than a quarter-century, inspired by a documentary film about the Comedian Harmonists, an ensemble that included some Jewish members, which was unacceptable to the Nazis.The musical, directed by Warren Carlyle, opened on Nov. 13; at the time of its closing it is expected to have played 24 previews and 96 regular performances. It was capitalized for up to $15 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that money has not been recouped.Manilow wrote the music for the show; Sussman wrote the book and the lyrics. Over the years, the show had productions in San Diego, Atlanta and Los Angeles, and then in 2022 there was a successful Off Broadway production at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan’s Battery Park neighborhood.The Broadway production features Chip Zien portraying a surviving member of the group, reflecting back from 1988 to its history in the late 1920s and early ’30s. Ken Davenport, Sandi Moran and Garry Kief are the lead producers; they announced the closing Tuesday evening.The show opened to mixed reviews, and has been running at a time when overall Broadway attendance has not yet rebounded to prepandemic levels. Last week, “Harmony” grossed $534,769, which is not enough to sustain a musical of its size; its houses, at the Barrymore Theater, were just 77 percent occupied, according to data released by the Broadway League.Many shows are struggling, and industry leaders are worried about this spring, when there is a sizable crop of musicals and plays planning to open, while production costs are high and audience numbers remain lower than they once were. Another musical, “Shucked,” closed on Sunday after a 10-month run, and last year’s Tony-winning musical, “Kimberly Akimbo,” has announced that it will end its run in April. More

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      ‘Harmony’ Review: Barry Manilow Writes the (Broadway) Songs

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      The pop star of the 1970s and ’80s crosses over to musical theater with a dark story about pop stars of the 1920s and ’30s.How strange and, in the end, how ironic that a German singing group, founded in the chaotic last years of the Weimar Republic and forcibly disbanded less than 10 years later, should call itself the Comedian Harmonists.Yet on the evidence of the Barry Manilow musical “Harmony” — for which, yes, he wrote the songs (along with his longtime lyricist, Bruce Sussman) — the internationally famous all-male group had the “harmonist” part of their name just right. As rendered by Manilow in an often skillful, surprisingly theatrical score, the men’s tightly spaced six-part singing, sometimes reminiscent of barbershop, sometimes jazz, sometimes operetta on LSD, is so dense as to seem geological, its pitches heaving and twisting toward some new stratum of sound.But comedians? No. Neither the guys nor the grim and eventually bludgeoning show have a gift for levity.You might wonder why the show, at least, should. Though its title makes it sound as if “Harmony” would be calm and golden, its story isn’t an uplifting one. The group, consisting by chance of three Jews (one of whom marries a gentile) and three gentiles (one of whom marries a Jew), inevitably falls victim to the antisemitic restrictions of National Socialism. Soon the brotherhood, symbolized in sound by their questing choral closeness, goes sour — a story that, to be effective, needs vivid contrast so we know what’s been lost.But the version of “Harmony” that opened on Monday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, after a potholed, decades-long trek to Broadway, makes a beeline for the bleakest parts of the tale and then bleakens them further. Sussman’s script, relentlessly focused on historical trauma, takes reasonable dramatic license with the group’s actual history, but only in one direction: darker. And though Warren Carlyle’s production is smart and slick, it traps the tale in a figurative and literal glassy black box (by Beowulf Boritt) from which only pathos escapes.Even the opening scenes, which might have been upbeat, feel booby-trapped by the invention of a narrator looking back from 1988. He is Rabbi (Chip Zien), the last surviving Harmonist, who now lives in California, plagued by guilt. The attempt to lighten him by making him talk like a latter-day Tevye, with Yiddish inflections (“A cockamamie name, no?”) and cute codger phrases (“We were hot as horseradish”), feels both distracting and patronizing. As his twinkliness turns to anguish — and despite Zien’s forceful performance — the prominence of the character turns “Harmony” into a passive show about memory at the expense of the actual action.From left: Sierra Boggess, Zal Owen, Julie Benko and Danny Kornfeld in the musical at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe time could be better spent individuating the six-headed protagonist. As it is, each Harmonist gets just one or two traits. The younger version of Rabbi (Danny Kornfeld) is indecisive. Harry (Zal Owen) is a musical genius. Chopin (Blake Roman) is a hothead. Erich (Eric Peters) has secrets and a saying for every occasion. Bobby (Sean Bell) is all about business. And Lesh (Steven Telsey) — well, the authors seem to have run out of traits. He’s just Bulgarian.When working with the music, that’s sufficient; blending, not standing out, is the hallmark of the style. (Manilow’s vocal arrangements, written with John O’Neill, the show’s music director, are marvelous.) But as the story spreads from unison group mechanics to separate life conflicts, the texture thins to the point of flimsiness.Given that Young Rabbi is so prominent in the back story, it’s a problem, for instance, that his courtship of the gentile Mary (Sierra Boggess) is mostly a mixtape of banalities. (“This is our time!”) Only Mary, in choosing a life that may include persecution and exile, carries enough conflict to be meaningfully characterized in song. Manilow, and Boggess, come through, with the gorgeous “And What Do You See?”The other semi-fleshed-out story has an even bigger problem than lopsidedness. Chopin, whose real name was Erwin Bootz, marries Ruth, a Jew (and a firebrand Bolshevik to boot). That we never really understand the strife between them may be the result of conflation: Ruth (Julie Benko) is a composite of three of Bootz’s actual wives. No wonder she’s blurry — and worse, sacrificial. I feel I must spoil a plot point by revealing that, despite the overwhelming atmosphere of tragedy throughout, this invented Ruth is the only character who does not survive the war, a tensioning convenience that is also a red herring.Wherever it can — in the plot, in the characterizations and in the sometimes bombastic orchestrations for a heavily synthed and amped orchestra of nine — “Harmony” wields a truncheon instead of the needle it needs. It might have helped if the supposedly comic numbers were actually funny, but neither Manilow and Sussman nor Carlyle excel at that here. The lighthearted charm song (“Your Son Is Becoming a Singer”), the slapstick centerpiece (“How Can I Serve You, Madame?”) and the second-act opener (“We’re Goin’ Loco!” — which features the Harmonists and Josephine Baker in a “Copacabana”-like samba) are all manic duds.Only when the story offers a song hook that is also a dramatic one does the attempt at humor pay off, in part by offering Sussman opportunities for sharp lyrics. The title number introduces the musical style of the show but also the characters’ ideals. (“In this joint/All encounters with counterpoint/End in harmony.”) And an anti-Nazi satire called “Come to the Fatherland,” perfectly staged by Carlyle as a human marionette show, has the two-sided stickiness of real wit: “The Führer has decreed:/If you’re Anglo-Saxon/And your hair is flaxen/We want you to breed!”The group dressed as human marionettes while performing the anti-Nazi satire “Come to the Fatherland.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, “Harmony” is no “Cabaret.” It doesn’t take the risk of letting you think for yourself; everything is a billboard. The Nazis — including some who scream “Save Germany from the Jews” in the aisles of the theater, an unnecessary touch — are generic slimeballs. The Harmonists are over-animated, smiling for all they’re worth, except when they’re furious or harrowed. (Having missed a chance to alter history in 1935, Rabbi sings the bathetic “Threnody” 53 years later.) The wives are uniformly noble, facing deprivation and worse.None of this is as interesting as what actually occurred. The lives of the Harmonists were mostly full and long. (Roman Cycowski, the real “Rabbi,” made it to 97.) Instead of miring the show in horrified memory, what “Harmony” might have considered with less contortion is the accommodation we make to history as it happens. I wish it had followed through on the question Mary asks while deciding whether to marry Rabbi: “Tell me how do we live/In a world that is crumbling away/And be happy, as we are today?” But we never see that happiness.Instead, like a lot of current theater that hitches a ride on the Holocaust for dramatic propulsion, “Harmony” makes guilt and anguish its through line, unintentionally suggesting that survival and the solace of music are somehow undeserved. Luckily, after a rough ride of an evening, the finale — an intensely chromatic song called “Stars in the Night” — offers exquisite evidence to the contrary.HarmonyAt the Ethel Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; harmonyanewmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      Barry Manilow Finally Gets His Wish: a Broadway Show

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      “Harmony,” about a singing group undone by Nazism, has been a decades-in-the-making labor of love for the singer and his longtime collaborator Bruce Sussman.Barry Manilow is superstitious.Such a statement may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the 80-year-old pop legend’s career, with decades of hits, endless Las Vegas residencies and international fame as a still-smooth crooner who wrote the songs that made the whole world sing.Yet, there is one thing that Manilow has always pined for and now inspires some irrational fears: a Broadway show.For nearly 30 years, that goal has proved tantalizingly out of reach despite a labor of love: “Harmony,” a musical he composed with his longtime collaborator Bruce Sussman, the lyricist who also wrote the show’s book.“Harmony,” which follows the unlikely story of a sextet of 1930s singing and vaudevillian stars — the Comedian Harmonists, torn apart by the rise of Nazism and World War II — is now scheduled to open on Monday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. Barring, of course, some cosmic catastrophe that both Manilow and Sussman joke about.Sort of.“We keep thinking the theater is going to get hit by a tornado,” Manilow joked over lunch in Midtown in September after their first day of rehearsal.Sussman, 74, laughed along: “It’s got to be something.”Not to jinx the opening, both men offer a “kinahora” — a Yiddish locution meaning “no evil eye.” It’s a dash of dark humor that is not completely unfounded, considering the tortuous route that “Harmony” has taken from page to the Barrymore’s stage. Sussman first conceived of the show in the early 1990s after seeing Eberhard Fechner’s 1977 documentary about the Harmonists in New York.“I came out of there and went to a phone booth on Lafayette Street, and I called him and I started babbling away,” Sussman recalled. “And he said, ‘I’m in.’”Both men were immediately intrigued by the story of a popular singing group (they had played Carnegie Hall, for instance, in 1933) that was destroyed by — and lost to — history. Half of the group was of Jewish descent, and the Nazi takeover of Germany would eventually silence them.The musical tells the story of the Comedian Harmonists, a singing group torn apart by the rise of Nazism. It is scheduled to open on Nov. 13 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in Manhattan. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut the urge to compose a musical was also deeply seated in Manilow, who says he was never interested in pop music as a child in Brooklyn, when he was already a precocious musician, playing accordion and piano.“It wasn’t interesting enough for me,” Manilow recalled, of pop. “I didn’t know what was on the Top 40. I was into jazz and Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. I was into classical music. And I was into Broadway scores.”He added: “And I memorized every note from every one of those albums. And that started it off.”Manilow played piano in bars, worked in the CBS mailroom and wrote a raft of jingles, something he says that taught him to write a “catchy melody in 15 seconds.” (He and Sussman, both of whom are Jewish, met in New York in the early 1970s.)Still, Manilow says that it was his sudden pop stardom — beginning with ballads like “Mandy” and continuing with later earworm hits like “Copacabana (at the Copa),” which Sussman helped write — that somewhat sidetracked his desire to write for the stage, though Manilow did do a series of Broadway concerts over the years.“You can either write, ‘I love you’ or ‘I miss you,’” Manilow said of his masterful Top 40 songcraft. “You go any further than that, you’re writing a Broadway song.”Despite that superstardom — and yes, probably because of it — “Harmony” did debut at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego in 1997, but got mixed reviews and failed to transfer. Still, interest in the show continued to percolate, including in 2003, when an out-of-town tryout in Philadelphia — before a planned Broadway run — suddenly evaporated when financial backing disintegrated.More iterations followed: In 2013 and 2014, the show had runs in Atlanta and Los Angeles, where the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle recognized the two men for their score. Again, producers expressed interest in Broadway, but deals fell apart, something Sussman seems remarkably measured about.“The gantlet that a new musical goes through, every step can be the end,” he said. “You do a reading, it’s over. You survive the reading, you do a workshop, it’s over. You survive the reading and you go to a regional and it’s over. And we all know shows that I’ve done that have died at one of those steps. We never did.”Bruce Sussman with Manilow and the director Warren Carlyle during a rehearsal.George Etheredge for The New York TimesManilow was a little less sanguine about the process. “I put it in the drawer many times,” he recalled. “It was so heartbreaking every time it didn’t make it.”During the coronavirus pandemic, however, Sussman and Manilow started to “kick the tires” on the show again with Warren Carlyle, the British director and choreographer who won a Tony Award in 2014 for his work on “After Midnight” and was nominated for Tonys for his work on the revivals of “Hello, Dolly!” (2017) and “The Music Man” (2022).One possible turning point in the show’s luck, Carlyle said, was the addition of a narrator character — an older rabbi played by Chip Zien — who walks the audience through the various eras of the show.“It was massive,” he said. “For me as director, it unlocks the whole show because previously it was kind of a six-headed dragon. You know there were these six guys: They all have wonderful stories. They all have rich lives. And I just didn’t know who to follow and I didn’t know how to focus the show.” To solve the problem, Sussman suggested splitting the existing role of one of the Harmonists in two. In addition to his younger self the show would also include his older self, a rabbi, serving as a narrator. “And suddenly for me, it was like, now the story has a point of view,” Carlyle said.Following that work, the show was staged in 2022 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, where audiences — and critics — seemed to respond in ways that they hadn’t before. Writing in The New York Times, Elisabeth Vincentelli praised the songs “crafted in a defiantly classic mold,” which steer the show back to “solid emotional ground.”She also noted the creative team’s ability in “balancing the shifting moods, which is no easy feat because they must shuffle broad humor and, well, Nazis.”Zalmen Mlotek, the artistic director of the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene, which presented “Harmony” at the museum, said that he had heard about “Harmony” after a recommendation from the developer Bruce Ratner, the chairman of the museum.“When I heard that Manilow and Sussman had written a piece about the Holocaust, I looked at it, the idea of the Comedians, this singing group, had had their careers destroyed, it was just very compelling to me,” he said.Sussman and Manilow also said they were aware of a different relevance to their decades-old show when watching it last year at the museum, amid a rising number of antisemitic incidents in the country. That disturbing trend has only been amplified in recent weeks as war broke out in Israel and the Gaza Strip.“I hope the show is strong enough to stand on its own,” Manilow said.Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesDuring the Folksbiene run, Sussman said, “I would sit in the back of the house and there’d be audible responses from the audience and certain lines, and I started getting nervous that people would think I was writing into the headlines. But some of those lines are 15, 20 years old.”Most of the major cast members from the Folksbiene production have transferred to Broadway, though most are lesser-known performers, something that may make marketing the show difficult. And while Manilow knows he’s a draw — see all those years in Vegas — he’s also not performing, of course.“I hope the show is strong enough to stand on its own,” he said.Still rail thin and apparently indefatigable, he has been commuting from the West Coast, where he is still doing three shows a week at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino. (He just passed Elvis for the most shows ever at that resort.)A onetime heavy smoker, Manilow is now a vaper, who — unlike his booming singing voice — is a quiet speaker. (Sussman still recalls seeing burn marks on Manilow’s piano keys where his Pall Malls would burn down as he composed.)Sometimes standing to vape, he also conveys a nervous energy about watching a show from the audience for a change. “It’s a terrible, terrible thing: I see all the flaws and faults,” he said with a chuckle.Still, he and Sussman said they hope to avoid any bad luck — theatrical, critical or otherwise — this time around.“People say, you know, ‘Oh, you must be so excited?’” Manilow said. “I don’t know what I am, really. We’ve been just waiting for this moment for so many years.” More

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      ‘Harmony,’ a Manilow Musical Set Under Nazis, Is Broadway-Bound

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      The show about the Comedian Harmonists, a real-life sextet that ran afoul of the Nazi regime, was first staged in 1997.“Harmony,” a musical about a German singing group upended by the rise of Nazism, will finally open on Broadway this fall with songs by Barry Manilow and his longtime collaborator, Bruce Sussman.The show, which Manilow and Sussman have been developing for more than 25 years, tells the true story of a sextet that ran afoul of the Nazi regime because the group featured both Jewish and non-Jewish members. The ensemble was called the Comedian Harmonists.“They represent everything I love — they’re a combination of The Manhattan Transfer and the Marx Brothers, with complicated harmonies — and funny as hell,” said Manilow, who wrote the show’s music. “When we dug into it, it just killed me: Why don’t we know about them?”Sussman, who wrote the book and lyrics, said the show was “about the quest for harmony in what turned out to be the most discordant chapter in human history.”Musicals often take a long time to reach Broadway, but “Harmony” has had a particularly protracted journey. The show was first staged in 1997, at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, and since then has had productions, with varying creative teams and casts: in 2013 at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, in 2014 at the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, and last year at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York. There have been previous efforts to bring the show to Broadway, including a planned 2004 production that fell apart over a lack of funds.“We’re not letting go of this,” Manilow said. “We knew we had something that was special, even though we kept hitting brick walls.”The show is arriving at a time when antisemitism has become, once again, a growing concern in the United States and beyond; the issue is currently explored on Broadway in the play “Leopoldstadt” and the musical “Parade.” “It is sadly more resonant,” Sussman said, “with the rise of not only antisemitism but of autocrats around the world.”The Comedian Harmonists have been explored by other storytellers in the past: There was a 1997 movie, “The Harmonists,” and an unsuccessful 1999 musical, “Band in Berlin.” This latest musical is based in part on a historical archive compiled by Peter Czada.The Broadway production will be directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, who won a Tony Award for choreographing “After Midnight,” and who also helmed last year’s “Harmony” production with the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. The Broadway cast has not yet been announced.The production is scheduled to start previews on Oct. 18 and to open on Nov. 13 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. The lead producers are Ken Davenport, Sandi Moran and Garry Kief. More

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      Review: In ‘Harmony,’ a Band’s Success Collides With History

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      Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s musical chronicles the story of the Comedian Harmonists, a sextet of Jews and gentiles in Weimar-era Germany.For many people, especially those of a certain generation, the name Barry Manilow immediately summons innocuous marshmallow-soft rock. Regardless of whether you interpret that description as comforting or saccharine, it is not necessarily a style you would associate with a show about a Weimar-era vocal group split apart by the rise of Nazism.And yet here is “Harmony: A New Musical,” a project Manilow and his longtime collaborator Bruce Sussman have been nursing for over 25 years. It opened on Wednesday at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, a location bearing the weight of history that adds an extra layer of poignancy to an imperfect but very affecting show.Those skeptical of the fact that the men behind “Copacabana” could tackle serious matters should perhaps listen closely to “Tryin’ to Get the Feeling Again” or “Even Now,” just two examples of Manilow’s flair. Those 1970s songs are very much of their time yet also ageless, and they embrace dramatic storytelling seasoned with a touch of unabashed sentiment that some may dismiss as sentimental. They are the aural equivalent of 1950s melodramas by Douglas Sirk like “All That Heaven Allows,” and, as such, not so different from the best numbers in “Harmony,” which are crafted in a defiantly classic mold. Every time the production becomes a little wobbly, those songs steer it back to solid emotional ground.The Broadway veteran Chip Zien acts as narrator but also pops up as a rabbi and in other minor roles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPresented by the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene, the show is essentially a biomusical — though not a jukebox — in which Manilow (music) and Sussman (book and lyrics) retrace the saga of the Comedian Harmonists, a sextet made up of Jews and gentiles and whose popularity in the late 1920s and early 1930s spread well beyond their Berlin base.It is at Carnegie Hall in December 1933 that we first meet the band members, performing the lengthy title number, in which the singers emulate jazz instruments before whisking us back to the group’s formation in 1927.This is when Harry Frommermann (Zal Owen), a supremely gifted arranger and orchestrator, not unlike Manilow himself, places a newspaper ad looking for singers. A crew as motley as it is talented answers the call, as if this were in an episode of “Making the (Boy) Band.” It includes Erwin Bootz (Blake Roman), nicknamed Chopin because of his virtuoso piano playing; the “chain-smoking Bulgarian tenor” Ari Leschnikoff (Steven Telsey), who goes by the nickname Lesh; the wealthy, monocle-wearing medical student Erich Collin (Eric Peters); and the rapscallion bass Bobby Biberti (a very funny Sean Bell, with Danny Kaye vibes).Rounding out the ensemble is Roman Cycowski (Danny Kornfeld), nicknamed Rabbi because he had been studying in Poland to become one. Rabbi plays a key role, or rather two: His older self, portrayed by the Broadway veteran Chip Zien (the original Baker of “Into the Woods,” “Falsettos”), acts as narrator, both reflecting back on his band’s history and commenting on the various goings-on.This extra Rabbi is new to the NYTF’s iteration of the musical — “Harmony” premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in 1997, then re-emerged in 2014 for runs in Atlanta and Los Angeles — and, at first, he does not feel entirely necessary, especially since Zien also pops up, in a somewhat distracting manner, in a few minor roles.From left: Telsey, Bell, Roman, Kornfeld, Owen and Peters in the show, directed with a steady pace by Warren Carlyle.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs we go on, though, Zien’s Rabbi comes into his melancholy own: He is, after all, the one character who knows where this is going, and Zien eventually leaves it all out on the stage in his heartbreaking last song. In case you were wondering what it feels like to cry under a mask, there is a good chance you will find out then.But before getting to that point, “Harmony” barrels through a lot as it tries to capture the band members’ individual lives and their joint accomplishments: the Comedian Harmonists’ original lineup may have been together only for a relatively brief time, but they were a terrific act and their run was action-packed. (No wonder they have continued to fascinate over the decades, as the subject of a documentary, a book, a feature film, and numerous tributes, including the short-lived 1999 Broadway show “Band in Berlin.”)The show is in good hands with the director and choreographer Warren Carlyle (“The Music Man,” “Hello, Dolly”). Not only does he maintain a steady pace but he somehow manages to fit ambitious numbers — including the pocket Ziegfeld extravaganza “We’re Goin’ Loco!” and the Kander and Ebbesque “Come to the Fatherland,” in which the Comedian Harmonists become human marionettes — on the Museum of Jewish Heritage’s small stage.From left: Sierra Boggess, Kornfeld, Zien, Jessie Davidson and Roman in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesManilow, Sussman and Carlyle mostly succeed in balancing the shifting moods, which is no easy feat because they must shuffle broad humor and, well, Nazis. The “comedian” in the band’s name was to be taken literally, for example, and the singers were as famous for their stage antics and novelty songs as for their tight singing.The downside is that there is a thin line between speedy and rushed, and the men are drawn in brushstrokes. A pair of love interests, Mary (Sierra Boggess) and Ruth (Jessie Davidson), are even less than that — one is loving, the other feisty, and that’s pretty much it.At least those two women get the epic “Where You Go,” which has the heart-on-sleeve grandeur of the finest Michel Legrand ballads. Such “Harmony” songs as that one, “This Is Our Time” and “Every Single Day” create a sense of out-of-time inevitability, yet they also remain grounded in the story: It is impossible to forget why we are watching the show.HarmonyThrough May 8 at the Edmond J. Safra Hall at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Manhattan; nytf.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More