Since 1997, composer-singer Barry Manilow and lyricist-librettist Bruce Sussman — the team behind iconic ’70s pop classics such as “Copacabana” — have been looking to get their wi…
It’s an appropriate venue for the show, a true-life tale of “the three Jews and three Gentiles” behind The Comedian Harmonists. This pre-Nazi-era, tightknit singing-and-slapstick act — an ensemble “hotter than horseradish” — was so popular in Germany , then around the world, that “Harmony” starts not at home, but at the height of its powers on Dec. 16, 1933, at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
But as the Third Reich spread anti-Semitic fear, it soon banned the sextet from singing pieces by Jewish composers, then burned their existing films and recordings, and ultimately prohibited the group from performing in public until its Jewish members were summarily dismissed. Sussman, meanwhile, provides a crackling, cracking-wise script. While the true story, embellished and dramatized with several composite characters, touches on humorous Yiddish ideals specific to the Harmonists’ time , there is also a vibrant, frenetic feel for present-day language in Sussman’s texts. Dictators never change, even when their rants do — or, to put it in Sussman’s words, “It’s the same hate, just different uniforms.
Each of the performers embodying the Comedian Harmonists — Kornfeld, Sean Bell, Zal Owen, Eric Peters, Blake Roman and Steven Telsey — look and sound the part while still coming across as contemporary. The individual quirks, humor and stubbornness of their characters show through as deliciously as do their in-tandem musical talents for interwoven, close harmony.
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