Harmony, a sort-of new Broadway musical from Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman, opens with a German singing group called the Comedian Harmonists performing at Carnegie Hall in 1933. This is framed to the audience by former group member Josef Cycowski (Chip Zien), who goes by the nickname “Rabbi”. Now an elderly man, Rabbi introduces himself, then introduces an audition scene where the younger group members are first introduced to each other. It’s a lot of introductions for the opening 10 minutes of a musical, and it won’t be the last time that Harmony mistakes throat-clearing for ceremony. Perhaps the confusion is understandable; the musical has been on its way to Broadway for a quarter-century at this point, with Manilow and Sussman running versions of the show in San Diego, Atlanta and Los Angeles. (An earlier Broadway bid was canceled 20 years ago, and an off-Broadway production ran for a month in 2022 after several Covid delays.) The production that’s finally arrived feels like it’s had plenty of time to marinate in its own importance.
The story of the Comedian Harmonists is a potentially interesting one, though Sussman’s book doesn’t necessarily make a case for the group, once globally popular, as unsung artists. Rabbi (played as a younger man by Danny Kornfeld), Lesh (Steven Telsey), Bobby (Sean Bell), Erich (Eric Peters), and Harry (Zal Owen), and Chopin (Blake Romin) meet as young men in 1920s Germany, forming a close-harmony ensemble that eventually seems to incorporate some elements of slapstick and double entendre – though the show is so relatively light on craft details and so wan in its comedy that it can be difficult to tell how seriously they were about comedy. (Each group member is introduced with a tepid joke – one went to medical school but can’t stand the sight of blood, ho ho!) The songs they perform in the show itself, with music by Manilow and lyrics by Sussman, are not from the group’s real-life repertoire. These tunes, and the show in general, suggest a cornier version of Cabaret, though the uptempo numbers are robustly performed by the six-man ensemble.
