\n<\/p>\n
Barry Manilow is superstitious.<\/p>\n
Such a statement may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the 80-year-old pop legend\u2019s career, with decades of hits,<\/a> endless Las Vegas residencies<\/a> and international fame as a still-smooth crooner who wrote the songs<\/a> that made the whole world sing.<\/p>\n Yet, there is one thing that Manilow has always pined for and now inspires some irrational fears: a Broadway show.<\/p>\n For nearly 30 years, that goal has proved tantalizingly out of reach despite a labor of love: \u201cHarmony,\u201d a musical he composed with his longtime collaborator Bruce Sussman, the lyricist who also wrote the show\u2019s book.<\/p>\n \u201cHarmony,\u201d which follows the unlikely story of a sextet of 1930s singing and vaudevillian stars \u2014 the Comedian Harmonists, torn apart by the rise of Nazism and World War II \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Sort of.<\/p>\n \u201cWe keep thinking the theater is going to get hit by a tornado,\u201d Manilow joked over lunch in Midtown in September after their first day of rehearsal.<\/p>\n Sussman, 74, laughed along: \u201cIt\u2019s got to be something.\u201d<\/p>\n Not to jinx the opening, both men offer a \u201ckinahora\u201d \u2014 a Yiddish locution meaning \u201cno evil eye.\u201d It\u2019s a dash of dark humor that is not completely unfounded, considering the tortuous route that \u201cHarmony\u201d has taken from page to the Barrymore\u2019s stage. Sussman first conceived of the show in the early 1990s after seeing Eberhard Fechner\u2019s 1977 documentary about the Harmonists<\/a> in New York.<\/p>\n \u201cI came out of there and went to a phone booth on Lafayette Street, and I called him and I started babbling away,\u201d Sussman recalled. \u201cAnd he said, \u2018I\u2019m in.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 and lost to \u2014 history. Half of the group was of Jewish descent, and the Nazi takeover of Germany would eventually silence them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt wasn\u2019t interesting enough for me,\u201d Manilow recalled, of pop. \u201cI didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n He added: \u201cAnd I memorized every note from every one of those albums. And that started it off.\u201d<\/p>\n Manilow played piano in bars, worked in the CBS mailroom and wrote a raft of jingles<\/a>, something he says that taught him to write a \u201ccatchy melody in 15 seconds.\u201d (He and Sussman, both of whom are Jewish, met in New York in the early 1970s.)<\/p>\n Still, Manilow says that it was his sudden pop stardom \u2014 beginning with ballads like \u201cMandy\u201d and continuing with later earworm hits like \u201cCopacabana (at the Copa),\u201d which Sussman helped write \u2014 that somewhat sidetracked his desire to write for the stage, though Manilow did do a series of Broadway concerts over the years.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can either write, \u2018I love you\u2019 or \u2018I miss you,\u2019\u201d Manilow said of his masterful Top 40 songcraft. \u201cYou go any further than that, you\u2019re writing a Broadway song.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Despite that superstardom \u2014 and yes, probably because of it \u2014 \u201cHarmony\u201d did debut at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego in 1997<\/a>, 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<\/a> \u2014 before a planned Broadway run \u2014 suddenly evaporated when financial backing disintegrated.<\/p>\n More iterations followed: In 2013 and 2014, the show had runs in Atlanta<\/a> and Los Angeles<\/a>, where the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle recognized<\/a> the two men for their score<\/a>. Again, producers expressed interest in Broadway, but deals fell apart, something Sussman seems remarkably measured about.<\/p>\n \u201c<\/strong>The gantlet that a new musical goes through, every step can be the end,\u201d he said. \u201cYou do a reading, it\u2019s over. You survive the reading, you do a workshop, it\u2019s over. You survive the reading and you go to a regional and it\u2019s over. And we all know shows that I\u2019ve done that have died at one of those steps. We never did.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Manilow was a little less sanguine about the process. \u201cI put it in the drawer many times,\u201d he recalled. \u201cIt was so heartbreaking every time it didn\u2019t make it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n During the coronavirus pandemic, however, Sussman and Manilow started to \u201ckick the tires\u201d on the show again with Warren Carlyle, the British director and choreographer who won a Tony Award in 2014<\/a> for his work on \u201cAfter Midnight\u201d and was nominated for Tonys for his work on the revivals of \u201cKiss Me, Kate\u201d<\/a> (2019) and \u201cThe Music Man\u201d<\/a> (2022).<\/p>\n One possible turning point in the show\u2019s luck, Carlyle said, was the addition of a narrator character \u2014 an older rabbi played by Chip Zien \u2014 who walks the audience through the various eras of the show.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was massive,\u201d he said. \u201cFor 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\u2019t know who to follow and I didn\u2019t know how to focus the show.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. \u201cAnd suddenly for me, it was like, now the story has a point of view,\u201d Carlyle said.<\/p>\n Following that work, the show was staged in 2022 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage \u2014 A Living Memorial to the Holocaust<\/a>, where audiences \u2014 and critics \u2014 seemed to respond in ways that they hadn\u2019t before. Writing in The New York Times,<\/a> Elisabeth Vincentelli praised the songs \u201ccrafted in a defiantly classic mold,\u201d which steer the show back to \u201csolid emotional ground.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She also noted the creative team\u2019s ability in \u201cbalancing the shifting moods, which is no easy feat because they must shuffle broad humor and, well, Nazis.\u201d<\/p>\n Zalmen Mlotek, the artistic director of the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene<\/a>, which presented \u201cHarmony\u201d at the museum, said that he had heard about \u201cHarmony\u201d after a recommendation from the developer Bruce Ratner, the chairman of the museum<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. That disturbing trend has only been amplified in recent weeks as war broke out in Israel and the Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n During the Folksbiene run, Sussman said, \u201cI would sit in the back of the house and there\u2019d 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s a draw \u2014 see all those years in Vegas \u2014 he\u2019s also not performing, of course.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope the show is strong enough to stand on its own,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> at that resort.)<\/p>\n A onetime heavy smoker, Manilow is now a vaper, who \u2014 unlike his booming singing voice \u2014 is a quiet speaker. (Sussman still recalls seeing burn marks on Manilow\u2019s piano keys where his Pall Malls would burn down as he composed.)<\/p>\n Sometimes standing to vape, he also conveys a nervous energy about watching a show from the audience for a change. \u201cIt\u2019s a terrible, terrible thing: I see all the flaws and faults,\u201d he said with a chuckle.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Still, he and Sussman said they hope to avoid any bad luck \u2014 theatrical, critical or otherwise \u2014 this time around.<\/p>\n \u201c<\/strong>People say, you know, \u2018Oh, you must be so excited?\u2019\u201d Manilow said. \u201cI don\u2019t know what I am, really. We\u2019ve been just waiting for this moment for so many years.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n