America's Loss: Manilow's Harmony to Close on Broadway

New York, New York — Harmony, the poignant and beautifully performed musical Barry Manilow worked for thirty years to bring to Broadway, will close on February 4. As it turns out, the show wasn't a money-maker. It's a shame because Harmony was both meaningful and extraordinarily relevant in this strange time we find ourselves. It is a time when authoritarianism, antisemitism, and deliberately orchestrated divisiveness have, once again, re-emerged from the swamp of history's darkest recesses.

I don't do reviews, but I greatly respect the power of art to bring into sharp focus the perils of unlearned history. Barry Manilow's Harmony, while delightfully entertaining, is, at the same time, a skillfully presented reminder that man-made darkness always lurks in the shadows and, in a moment of societal stress, can extinguish the light of human aspiration, and even the most fundamental pursuits of happiness that reside in the human soul.

We owe Manilow our thanks for his perseverance. It is an important work and serves the tradition of theater to make us think of where we are, where we have been, and the choices that will determine where we will go next.

While Harmony has not been a box-office money maker, it is, nonetheless, powerful and exceedingly important. You laugh, pull for the main characters, delight in their successes, and ache at the history you know will soon descend on their lives, along with the lives of tens of millions of unsuspecting, hapless victims of a world gone wild.

The show is based on a true story, and it is good that Manilow persevered. It is a story worth telling, and it is distressing that Harmony will have reached too few people who most needed to see it performed. In Harmony, good people's lives are whipsawed by the cross-currents of history and, of course, by the machinations of patently bad people.

This story of a not-very-distant past imparts an unspoken warning about an impending not-very-distant future. Harmony's audience, of course, knows the history that will unfold. We see the success the song-and-dance troop enjoys as they entertain audiences in Europe and America. We also know it isn't going to last as the weeks and months of the calendar move inexorably through the darkening thirties toward the deadly forties.

Manilow and his writing partner, Bruce Susman, worked on Harmony for decades. I, for one, am glad they stuck to it. It is an especially important story for our time simply because it is about an important story of another time. The audience is transfixed by what it knows is coming even though the main characters do not.

The troop billed itself as the Comedian Harmonists and was immensely popular, playing top venues in Europe and the United States for about six years from 1928 to 1934. They were talented performers and dazzled audiences with wit and music. They even played Carnegie Hall. They were popular wherever they performed until that dark time when the Nazis came to power. Three of the group members were either Jewish or had married someone who was. Their talent didn't matter much when that became an issue, especially in Germany.

There is always tension watching Harmony because the audience knows the good times won't last. Stories about the nineteen thirties and forties, Germans, Germany, and Jews generally do not end well, and this one doesn't either. One feels the same tension watching a car and a locomotive racing to the same railroad crossing. The Nazis really couldn't abide by the popularity of Jewish artistry, so whether the artistry was a manifestation of humor, literature, architecture, painting, or music if the artist was Jewish, their work, by definition, was considered degenerative by the Nazis.

Watching Harmony is time well spent. When we speak or hear of the Nazi era, we are reminded that Nazism despoiled everything with which it came in contact. It is a reminder of the past and a warning about the present.

Perhaps, it is a good thing that it took thirty years for Manilow to bring this important story to our present consciousness because Nazism or the antisemitism in which it traffics is still very much a current phenomenon. Antisemitism is often the last refuge of those among us who gravitate toward hatred. Antisemitism is often described as the oldest hatred. It is both irrational and destructive. Social scientists today recognize hatred as the most violent phenomenon in the history of human nature. Barry Manilow has brought the tragedy of hatred to the stage and presents its impact on a small group of highly likable and vulnerable performers.

Manilow's musical reminds us of the ruinous pathology of irrational hatred, and the show could not have come at a more opportune time. It is a shame that Harmony is not destined to have a long run because the hatred the show lays bare most certainly will.

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Novels by Hal Gershowitz