With the news that the Broadway production of Harmony is closing on February 4, 2024 after only 24 previews and 96 performances, I wanted to reflect on a few things that production does really well. It’s not perfect, but it told an important and timely story. And in doing so it managed to avoid falling into two of the traps that musicals too often succumb to. So as Broadway prepares to say goodbye for Harmony, I want to share these two successes of the show that really stuck with me.
The Truth
Harmony begins with a compelling hook: Chip Zien, as the “present” (or at least older) version of the character Rabbi, is going to tell us why we’ve likely never heard of the Comedian Harmonists. This grabbed me, because so many shows fixate on adding additional dimension to that which is already familiar: recent shows like A Beautiful Noise, The Cher Show, and Tina draw in audiences with music they already know and, so the pitch goes at least, biographical snippets that add a new layer to the songs you already love.
Harmony is sort of the opposite in two ways. First, even though the show’s marketing materials make it quite clear (possibly too clear) that Barry Manilow is involved, all of the music in Harmony is original, and was written by Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman to tell this particular story.
Second, the premise is that the Comedian Harmonists are important enough to make a show about, but somehow the audience has no idea they even existed. Or at least this audience member had no idea they existed, and some early lines to the audience from Rabbi suggest this is the norm. While I’d argue the prominence of Barry Manilow’s name in all the marketing made it look like this was a jukebox musical about him to many prospective audience members, I think the marketing did a great job with the tagline “The extraordinary true story of the greatest entertainers the world would ever forget.”
A screenshot of the Harmony website on 1/21/24. The words “A New Musical” pale in comparison to Barry Manilow’s name front and center.
With this premise, the truth becomes Harmony’s biggest asset. We don’t know exactly what the ending will be, but we know the rocketship to fame that we learn about in the first act must inevitably fall back to earth, and to an obscurity so significant, so total, that we no longer even remember the name of the group.
A potential downside to this approach is that by the end of Act I you get a pretty good sense of where things are headed. We started at the end: today, we don’t know who the Comedian Harmonists were. So Act II ends up presenting a series of moments that make their way toward the conclusion that became inevitable in the Act I finale. But the truth of it all, and the show’s ability to flesh out the six members of the Comedian Harmonists and a couple of their love interests, makes the conclusion hurt no matter how inevitable it seems. And the idea that it was ever possible to erase such talent, popularity, and innovation lends the show its gravity and emotional resonance.
“You’re So Talented!”
The depiction of the Harmonists’ talent is another area Harmony gets just right. Many plays and musicals attempt to depict people who are exceptionally talented, often relying on way too many lines from peripheral characters like “Saw you at the jazz club the other night. That solo was incredible!” or “You’re the best singer I’ve ever met, you have to continue to share that gift forever!” To me at least, these approaches always feel incredibly clunky, and the repetition of the praise leads me to question whether this supposed talent actually exists.1
Harmony does not fall into this trap. From the great sequence where we see the future members initially audition to the several numbers they perform as a group, it’s clear what the appeal is of the Harmonists: they’re incredible singers, individually but most importantly when they sing together (yes, in harmony), and they perform catchy, often incredibly clever numbers with an edge to them that certainly would have felt incisive when they were performing in the 1930s. Their talent is undeniable and therefore doesn’t need to be slammed over our heads by the show’s book. And the undeniability of their talent and dedication makes it easy to root for their artistic success: you want the world to see what they’re going to come up with next.
The strength of the show’s grounding in truth and its effective depiction of the group at the center of the story make Harmony a powerful night of theater. Like the Comedian Harmonists, their incredible story will be gone too soon.
- As a recent example of a character whose capabilities are mostly told to us instead of shown, consider Ashley Amigo in How to Dance in Ohio. She goes to Juilliard for dance and that’s mentioned quite frequently, but somehow it never feels real since we never get a glimpse of that part of her life. ↩︎
Featured Photo: Willy Pragher, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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