Theater Review by Carol Rocamora . . . .
He writes the songs that make the whole world sing.
And now he’s written a musical that will make the world remember.
Decades ago, singer/composer Barry Manilow got an urgent phone call from a close friend and collaborator, the writer/lyricist Bruce Sussman. The latter had just seen a four-hour documentary on a forgotten chapter of recent history. “I’ve found the show we’re going to do!” Sussman exclaimed. Then followed more than thirty intense years of readings, workshops, tryouts, rewrites, failed backing and discouraging delays. And now, ironically, the show has finally and triumphantly arrived on Broadway at exactly the moment when it is urgently needed.
Harmony, the enthralling Manilow/Sussman musical, tells the moving story of Comedian Harmonists, a group of six young singer/vaudevillians in the Weimar Republic era—three of whom were Jewish. Berlin-based, they rose to international fame in the early 1930s, only to meet their grim fate (individually and collectively) after the Nazis took power.
After years of script development, the show has finally found its ideal form: as a memory play. It’s narrated by an 87-year-old character called The Rabbi (played by the remarkable Chip Zien). He’s looking back on the group’s origins (of which he was a founding member) as one by one the young singers audition for the group in 1927. “A Bulgarian singing waiter, a doctor, a bass from the Comic Opera, a musical prodigy, a whorehouse pianist . . . and a Polish Rabbi . . . walked into a bar,” quips the Rabbi, beginning the narration of their extraordinary, moving story. The exhilarating first act charts their meteoric rise, from singing waiters In a Berlin dive to European tours and a triumphant appearance at Carnegie Hall in December 1933. By then, they were international stars, performing with Josephine Baker in the Ziegfield Follies, known to luminaries like Fiorello La Guardia, Fanny Brice, Will Rogers, Gypsy Rose Lee, and the composer Richard Strauss himself.
But as they were rising, so were Nazism and anti-Semitism in their German homeland. At the end of 1933, they faced a crucible (and a brilliant first-act ending)—to stay in New York or return “home” to Germany. They returned.
Act Two descends into darkness. In 1934 the group performed at the Berlin Philharmonic, where it was booed by Nazi rabble-rousers. A uniformed official newly assigned to follow the group (ominously called the Standartenfuhrer) apologetically offers praise for their performance. At the same time, however, he puts forth a warning—one that within a year would end in the dissolution of the group. It was ultimately decreed that November 5, 1935, would be the Harmonists’ last public performance with any Jewish participation whatsoever—be it singer, composer, or lyricist. Thereafter, the Rabbi narrates how the group broke apart and scattered, leaving him in 1979 as its sole survivor.
The current production on Broadway is the result of a passionate journey on the part of the collaborators—Manilow and Sussman—from its first iteration at the La Jolla Playhouse in 1997 to a dead-end tryout in Philadelphia (2003) to the Alliance in Atlanta (2013) to the Ahmanson in Los Angeles (2014). A dormant period followed. Then during the pandemic, director Warren Carlyle joined the creative team and they added the crucial character of the older Rabbi as narrator to give the play a central focus. Under Carlyle’s direction, the show was staged in 2022 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan, produced by the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene. After a journey of more than 30 years since the original idea was born, it finally opened on Broadway last night.
Now at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Harmony is what’s known as a BIG Broadway Show, polished to shining perfection on Beowolf Boritt’s sleek set, gorgeously lit by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer. Director/choreographer Carlyle sweeps us up in its breathless pace, directing an exuberant sixteen-member cast plus an ensemble (mostly from the downtown show last year). The talented, youthful Harmonists include Harry (Zal Owen), a promising orchestrator who placed an ad in the Berliner Daily in 1927 that brought the young singers together; Ari Leshnikoff (Steven Telsey), nicknamed Lesh, “a chain smoking Bulgarian tenor with a high E above C”; Erwin Bootz (Blake Roman), called “Chopin” for his piano playing; Erich (Eric Peters), a medical student; Bobby (Sean Bell), a deep-voiced bass; and a rabbinical student nicknamed “Rabbi” (Danny Kornfeld, as Chip Zien’s younger self). The group consisted of three Gentiles and, as it turns out, three Jews—Harry, the Rabbi, and Erich (the latter hid his identity till the Standartenfuhrer, played by Andrew O’Shanick, revealed it).
Together they sing the tuneful, versatile score by Manilow and Sussman, with memorable songs ranging from playful (“Your Son is Becoming a Singer,” “How Can We Serve You, Madame?”) to tender (“Every Single Day,” the young Rabbi’s love song to Mary, played by Sierra Boggess, who converts to Judaism and marries him). There’s the triumphant “This Is Our Time,” led by the courageous Ruth (Julie Benko) a young Jewish Bolshevik who marries Chopin (and tragically disappears at the end of the story while trying to leave Germany). There’s a spirited double wedding number, and a heartrending “Where You Go,” as Mary and Ruth (both in mixed marriages) face the inevitable. There’s a chilling show-stopping number (performed in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Park in 1934) entitled “Come to The Fatherland (unless you’re a Jew)” with the singers dressed as cartoonish marionettes (reminiscent of the threatening “Tomorrow Belongs to Me“ in Kander & Ebb’s Cabaret).
In the center of it all stands Chip Zien, the heartbeat of Harmony, in the crowning role of his long, illustrious career. To the audience’s surprise and delight, he plays many roles—the 87-year-old survivor/narrator, a young club owner in 1920s Berlin, a reporter, the composer Richard Strauss . . . and even Albert Einstein. Full disclosure in a historically accurate show: Erich, one of the Harmonists, actually knew Einstein—although at the end of Act One, Manilow and Sussman take a liberty with this fact. They offer a fictionalized scene wherein Einstein appears backstage at Carnegie Hall in 1933. As he congratulates the Harmonists, Einstein (played by Chip Zien) issues a gentle warning: “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil—but by those who do nothing.”
That warning crescendos to a crisis in Act Two—in a scene that actually happened, astonishingly. Touring in Germany during 1935, the Harmonists found that they were on the same train with Adolf Hitler himself. In this frightening, penultimate scene, the older Rabbi remembers facing the ultimate test, as his song morphs into an anguished cry:
“You can do it,
You this is your chance!…
You grab a gun…
This is your time!…
It will change the world…
But no!!… Nothing! Nothing!!
You did nothing!
And your punishment is
To remember everything!!
Like the thousands who followed, nothing!
Like the millions who stood by
And watched and denied…
You stepped aside…
Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Elohenuh
Adonai Echad…”
I left the theatre with that prayer ringing in my ears:
“Every single day
You’ll remember!
Every endless night
You’ll remember!
Til the day you die!”
In this terrible time of the worst rise in anti-Semitism since the Holocaust, this urgent, courageous, heartbreaking show—honoring the Harmonists—asks us to remember. And more.
Harmony. Open run at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre (243 West 47th Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue). Two hours and fifteen minutes with one intermission. www.HarmonyANewMusical.com
Photos: Julieta Cervantes
Cover photo caption: Steven Telsey, Blake Roman, Danny Kornfeld, Chip Zien, Eric Peters Sean Bell, Zal Owen
