Previews begin tonight for the seven-week run of Harmony, a musical by Barry Manilow and his longtime collaborator Bruce Sussman at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (36 Battery Place, near First Place).
The production recalls the story of the Comedian Harmonists, “a singing group that was hugely popular in the 1920s and 30s,” Mr. Manilow recalls. “They were very inventive—a combination of the Manhattan Transfer and the Marx Brothers. They made 13 movies, along with dozens and dozens of records. But nobody remembers them today.”
Mr. Sussman reflects that, “when Barry and I write a big project, I need to be able to know what the spine sentence is—the guiding sentence for what this piece is about. I knew immediately this was about the quest for harmony in the broadest sense of the word, during what turned out to be the most discordant period of human history.”
“Their success was meteoric,” Mr. Manilow adds. “They sang with Marlene Dietrich and Josephine Baker, and sold millions of records, while playing the greatest concert halls in the world.”
“But they were three Jews and three gentiles,” Mr. Sussman continues. “And once Hitler came to power in 1933, they were on a collision course with history. The first act of the show is about a golden age, which we deconstruct in the second act.”
Recalling their collaboration process, Mr. Sussman notes, “when I came to a point where I thought there should be a song, I would insert a paragraph with a title idea or phrase, then send it to Barry to see if he could make any sense of it. He sent me back 17 melodies, 14 or 15 of which are now in the show.”
Mr. Manilow acknowledges, “it took me a while to dive into this world, but eventually I was living it—steeping myself in 1930s music and literature.”
About the production by National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF) now being staged at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Mr. Sussman muses, “we know this building was built to encourage remembering. So we have the right place. And now, with what’s happening in Ukraine, we have the right time.”
“There are things that I wrote several years ago that now might be construed as writing to the headlines,” he adds. “But it’s the other way around—this was written earlier, and now the headlines are mirroring it.”
Both Mr. Manilow and Mr. Sussman cite as an inflection point that rings with contemporary, topical resonance a scene in second act when the Comedian Harmonists return to Germany from Copenhagen, and their passports are confiscated at the border. The three Jewish members of the group are warned that, “you are forbidden to leave Germany again without special permission,” but then offered an alternative. “The German border guard gives them the choice of going back to Poland, where they had been born,” Mr. Sussman recalls, “and asks them, ‘why don’t you go back to where you came from?’”
