‘Harmony’ Broadway Review: Barry Manilow Musical Finds Sweet Notes In Sour Era; Aubrey Plaza & Christopher Abbott Ignite ‘Danny And The Deep Blue Sea’

Broadway loves a recognizable name, a famous band or singer that can fuel a jukebox musical on nostalgia and familiar tunes. To its credit, Harmony isn’t that.

If you’ve heard of the Comedian Harmonists, it’s likely that you’ve either seen Harmony or heard about it. Maybe you’re among the countless Barry Manilow fans who follow his every move (and he’s been trying to move with Harmony for decades). But otherwise, chances are good that you don’t know the Harmonists.

And exactly why you don’t know the Harmonists is the most intriguing aspect of Harmony, the new musical directed by Warren Carlyle opening on Broadway tonight. A Berlin-based vocal and comedy group of the 1920s and ’30s, the Comedian Harmonists were hugely popular, successful and famous in their day, selling millions of records, appearing in dozens of films and selling out major venues across the world, not least Carnegie Hall.

The word “Berlin” in the previous paragraph should have stopped you cold. Three of the six Harmonists were Jewish. One gentile member was married to a Bolshevik activist. Though Harmony, through its very structure, tips us off to the fact that one of the singers lived into the 1980s – he’s the show’s narrator – we might well assume that the Harmonists, or most of them, were among the millions who never left the camps.

But with their fates being readily available to anyone with access to Wikipedia, it’s no spoiler to say that all of the six Harmonists survived World War II, most living well into the late 20th Century. So how have they been so completely and thoroughly forgotten? What became of their legacy? Why have these one-time superstars faded entirely from cultural memory?

Manilow and his longtime writing partner and collaborator Bruce Sussman have set out to answer that very question, and Harmony accomplishes that goal handily. As a musical, Harmony occasionally soars, occasionally stumbles, but the former more often than the latter. With a structure that takes fewer chances than one might hope, Harmony is nonetheless steadily compelling and not infrequently stirring, attributes that speak as much to the Manilow-Sussman craftsmanship as to an intriguing tale long-lost to history.

Playing on an attractive, minimalist set designed by Beowulf Boritt that make fine use of the Art Deco trappings of so many nightclubs, concert halls and movie sets, Harmony introduces each Harmonist with an easy-to-remember character trait or personality type. Among them are Bobby (Sean Bell) is the well-connected German gentile whose semi-aristocratic background helps the group escape a jam or two; the nicknamed Rabbi (Danny Kornfeld as the young version, the irreplaceable Chip Zien as the older) is the heart (and later broken heart) of the group, a survivor of a pogrom in Poland who should have known what’s coming but fails to act on it). The nicknamed Chopin (a sweet-voiced Blake Roman), the worldly whorehouse pianist who isn’t nearly as savvy as he pretends, his bluster crumbling when Nazis threaten his Bolshevik wife Ruth (Julie Benko).

Benko, who recently rose to Broadway royalty as the much-utilized and extremely popular stand-in for Lea Michelle in Funny Girl, makes full use of one of the musical highlights of the show, a duet with the other female cast member Sierra Boggess, who plays the Catholic wife of the Jewish Rabbi. While the two women characters generally get shorter shrift than the men in terms of development, they get a terrific spotlight in “Where You Go,” one of the lovelier power ballads in the show and a perfect showcase for these two truly excellent singers.

The Manilow-Sussman songs (latter wrote the lyrics and book) enticingly capture the Weimar era and its musical stylings, from the bouncy schlager music and slightly bawdy vaudeville-style comedy numbers (“How Can I Serve You Madam?” being the best) to more contemporary efforts like Zien’s big 11 o’clock number “Threnody,” a full-throated lament filled with regret and warnings of doing nothing in the face of evil.

If the real-life tale of the Comedian Harmonists lacks the extreme inherent tragedy of, say, The Diary of Anne Frank or the more recent Leopoldstadt, it nonetheless raises questions of duty and responsibility when confronted with pure evil. Zien’s powerful performance of “Threnody,” in which, as an old man haunted by memories he poses just those questions, sadly giving Harmony a resonance today that it might not have had even a year ago.

Harmony insists we pay attention, to it, and to the world.

Title: Harmony
Venue: Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre
Director and Choreographer: Warren Carlyle
Book and Lyrics: Bruce Sussman
Music: Barry Manilow
Principal Cast: Chip Zien; Sierra Boggess; Julie Benko; Sean Bell, Danny Kornfeld, Zal Owen, Eric Peters, Blake Roman, Steven Telsey, Allison Semmes and Andrew O’Shanick.
Running time: 2 hr 35 min (including intermission)

DANNY AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA

John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea has had no shortage of Off Broadway revivals since the 1983 premiere that proved a career-maker for both the playwright and star John Turturro, yet the new production opening tonight at the Lucille Lortel Theatre makes a strong case for the two-hander’s lasting legacy in the 21st Century. Starring Aubrey Plaza (The White Lotus, Parks and Recreation) in a very impressive stage debut and Christopher Abbott (Poor Things, Girls) in an equally weighty return to the boards, this Danny is electrifying.

First-time stage director Jeff Ward takes a bold approach to the play, and even if all of the risks won’t pay off for all of the audience members – a sudden shift from brutal realism into avant garde modern dance (yes, you read that right) is bound to divide longtime Danny devotees – this revival nonetheless makes a fine display of Shanley’s streetwise Bronx poetry.

The play opens in a Bronx bar (the ever-reliable Scott Pask designed the dive with such authenticity you think you smell stale beer and booze-logged floors), where a 29-year-old Danny (Abbott) drinks alone, tending his wounded hands, bruised face and battered heart. Also solo-nursing a beer is 31-year-old Roberta, every bit the match for Danny’s combative social skills.

The two lost souls – Danny is panicked over the fear that he might have killed someone in the fight that left those marks, and Roberta drinks to forget a horrendous secret involving her father – argue, insult and, eventually, open up with one another. There’s considerable back and forth – will they? won’t they? should they? – before Shanley delivers these seeming dead-enders to their moment of unsteady grace.

The one-act play has always included a difficult, clunky transition from the bar setting to Roberta’s bedroom, and Ward has decided to insert a segue that adds that vaguely avant garde element to the production: When Danny and Roberta decide to leave the bar together, the light’s go dim and the two engage in a goofy, awkward yet somehow entirely sexy pas de deux, an interlude that owes as much to that famous ballet scene in Carousel than to anything in Shanley’s oeuvre.

The effect is, no doubt, jarring, yet Plaza and Abbott commit themselves so thoroughly that they’re all but impossible to resist. They make no false steps in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, and we follow wherever they might lead.

Title: Danny and the Deep Blue Sea
Venue: Off Broadway’s Lucille Lortel Theatre
Director: Jeff Ward
Writer: John Patrick Shanley
Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott
Running time: 80 minutes (no intermission)