But in the musical Harmony, which premiered in New York this week, Barry Manilow and his longtime songwriting partner Bruce Sussman seek to give the Comedian Harmonists’ six young men their rightful place in history by telling their story .
It’s a project they’ve been working on for decades, but the relevance of Harmony is chilling now as war rages in Ukraine and innocent lives are shattered by hate.
“It sounds very timely,” Manilow said in an interview during a rehearsal last month.
“I think one of the many joys of doing this show now is that it resonates more than ever,” Sussman added.
“There are actually moments on the show where I worry people will think I’m making the headlines. These things were written, some of them years ago, and right now they seem like they’re straight out of the series front page or your cover story on CNN,” he said.
Three of the Comedian Harmonists were Jews, three were non-Jews. They were closed by Hitler, their 12 films and many records were burned and destroyed. All the men scattered and fled, and one of their Jewish wives was kidnapped by the Third Reich and never seen again.
But before that happened, the men, global sensations in the early 1930s, were in New York, playing Carnegie Hall and had the option of staying in America, but decided to return to Germany.
The shock of these men, who cannot imagine that a dictator like Hitler could kill innocent people the way he did, is a chilling parallel to current events as Vladimir Putin, in his own bloodthirsty quest for land, finds civilians – children and women – targets and power.
When the character known as “Rabbi,” played by Chip Zien, uttered a painful line, “Why? Audiences don’t need to be transported back nearly a century to connect with wanton evil. It is happening as we speak in Ukraine.
“It’s the same hate, just different uniforms” is one of many lines in the musical with this tragically contemporary meaning.
The group was officially disbanded by the Nazis, not only because some members were Jewish, but because the singers were labeled “degenerate” and censored, also the sort of tactic you see in Putin’s Russia today.
“This is the kind of Broadway musical I’ve always wanted to write”
Sussman wrote the lyrics and Manilow wrote the music.
“This is my proudest moment as a songwriter,” Manilow said.
“That’s what I wanted to be at first. I wanted to be a Broadway songwriter and an arranger of pop music. That was it. And here it is. It took a little longer, a little longer than I thought. But that’s the Broadway way -Musicals I’ve always wanted to write. It’s every style of music I’ve always loved. It’s not just one style. You’d think, ‘Oh, Barry Manilow, it’s going to be all ballads.’ It’s not. Anybody Song is completely different from the one before it,” Manilow explained.
“This is the Barry I want everyone to know,” Sussman interjected.
The two have worked together for 50 years and co-wrote one of Manilow’s most enduring hits, “Copacabana.”
“‘Copacabana’ was a sundae. It was frothy, and fun to make, and stylish, stylish. It was also a very strange pop song because there was nothing like it on the radio. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why it was so successful the way it was. That’s – we have to put ourselves in the Germany of the 1920s, 1930s between the wars,” Sussman explained.
“We’re talking about the depth of this piece. It’s not a serious night. The first act is as cranky and upbeat and fun and energetic as any Broadway musical I’ve ever seen. it’s starting to get dark,” Manilow said.
The idea came about decades ago after Sussman saw a documentary about the Comedian Harmonists and called Manilow to tell him he’d found the musical for them to write. Before Manilow became a pop star in the early 1970s with his debut hit “Mandy,” the staff and friends wanted to be the next Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Both native New Yorkers and Jews said they felt an immediate connection to this story.
“We know these people. I mean there are Jewish characters and Gentile characters. We certainly know the Jewish characters. These are people we grew up with. These are people in our family. These were people in our neighborhood who also happened to be incredibly talented,” Sussman said.
“We know what matters to them. yes it was deep This part was a deep experience. Bruce had to go much deeper than me since he is the book author, the story writer. But I had to do my own work and find tunes that made sense in this German and Jewish world,” Manilow said.
And to those Manilow tunes, the characters sing of the impending doom the audience knows is coming: “Darkness grows. The world is getting cold. And the light is still glowing. Heaven knows.
For more on the subject, CNN’s Dana Bash presents “Being…Barry Manilow,” which airs Saturday at 11:00 p.m. ET on CNN.
An earlier version of this story used an image incorrectly labeled as the music group The Comedian Harmonists. The image has been corrected to reflect the actual group.