Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman had been striving for years to acquaint Broadway patrons with this group’s true story. Their stick-to-itiveness lastly paid off with “Concord,” the environment friendly if formulaic “new” musical that marked its official opening Monday night time on the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.
New is in quotes as a result of Manilow, who composed the music, and Sussman, the guide author and lyricist, have been engaged on “Concord” because the Nineteen Nineties. It’s probably the very best musical based mostly on the Comic Harmonists you’ll ever see. (There have been others.) Earlier than “Mandy” and “I Write the Songs,” Manilow had his coronary heart set on writing Broadway musicals; Sussman, one other musical theater lover, has been Manilow’s collaborator on greater than 200 songs. The spectacular pedigree extends to a forged that features Chip Zien, Sierra Boggess and Julie Benko, all belongings right here with confirmed Broadway chops.
However “Concord” has one intractable dilemma: the Comic Harmonists themselves. The actors who painting them — Sean Bell, Danny Kornfeld, Zal Owen, Eric Peters, Blake Roman and Steven Telsey — are vivacious and polished. As an act, although, the group lacks the intrinsic enchantment which may maintain our curiosity by way of music after music. Manilow and Sussman write for them comedian Center European pastiche carried out in six-part harmonies. It’s all performed with achieved musicianship, in addition to energetic choreography by director Warren Carlyle. And nonetheless, the novelty wears skinny, rapidly.
The framework is the rise of Nazism in Germany within the early Nineteen Thirties, because the Harmonists’ fame reaches its pinnacle; they even carried out in Carnegie Corridor in 1933, after they did not act on a possibility to remain in america. The easy account of their compelled dissolution is narrated by Zien, who performs Rabbi, the aged model of the final residing Harmonist (portrayed as a youthful man by Kornfeld).
Boggess performs a Gentile who marries Rabbi, and Benko a Jewish radical who weds a non-Jewish member of the group. (Each give vivid supporting performances.) This ecumenical dimension dominates the primary half of the musical; it’s the tradition’s blind spot that the present is highlighting, the fallacy that Adolf Hitler is a passing fad and that Jews and non-Jews on the time may proceed to coexist, even intermarry. The blending of faiths among the many Harmonists is posited in “Concord” as a false flag of nationwide concord, which proves helpful to the Nazis. For some time.
An excessive amount of of “Concord,” nonetheless, fixates on the Harmonists’ sterile stage personas, together with throughout an odd fantasy sequence through which they carry out, “Copacabana”-style, with a feather-covered Josephine Baker (Allison Semmes). Solely in a bitter second-act quantity, “Come to the Fatherland,” do Manilow and Sussman make impressed theatrical use of the musical’s prospects. The music, paying homage to Kander and Ebb’s “Cabaret,” is ready at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, the place the group, nonetheless allowed to journey however outraged by the rising menace, performs a satirical anti-Nazi music — as puppets. On this quantity and all through the present, costumer designers Linda Cho and Ricky Lurie work wonders with the wardrobe finances.
Carlyle confers a Broadway sheen on the proceedings, performed out on Beowulf Boritt’s easy set, outfitted with darkish glass panels that replicate the Harmonists’ silhouettes. It’s as if their ghosts are stalking the Barrymore stage, with Zien within the position of haunted grasp of ceremonies. The impact in these troubled instances is of a cautionary word, about how quickly violence fed by prejudice can take maintain. That’s an alarm this earnest musical does handle to lift, potently.
Concord, music by Barry Manilow, guide and lyrics by Bruce Sussman. Directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle. Music course, John O’Neill; set, Beowulf Boritt; costumes, Linda Cho and Ricky Lurie; lighting, Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer; sound, Dan Moses Schreier; orchestrations, Doug Walter. About 2 hours 40 minutes. At Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. forty seventh St., New York. harmonyanewmusical.com.
