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Barry Manilow is superstitious.
Such an announcement might come as a shock to anybody aware of the 80-year-old pop legend’s profession, with many years of hits, infinite Las Vegas residencies and worldwide fame as a still-smooth crooner who wrote the songs that made the entire world sing.
But, there’s one factor that Manilow has all the time pined for and now conjures up some irrational fears: a Broadway present.
For almost 30 years, that objective has proved tantalizingly out of attain regardless of a labor of affection: “Concord,” a musical he composed together with his longtime collaborator Bruce Sussman, the lyricist who additionally wrote the present’s ebook.
“Concord,” which follows the unlikely story of a sextet of Thirties singing and vaudevillian stars — the Comic Harmonists, torn aside by the rise of Nazism and World Conflict II — is now scheduled to open on Monday on the Ethel Barrymore Theater. Barring, after all, some cosmic disaster that each Manilow and Sussman joke about.
Type of.
“We maintain considering the theater goes to get hit by a twister,” Manilow joked over lunch in Midtown in September after their first day of rehearsal.
Sussman, 74, laughed alongside: “It’s obtained to be one thing.”
To not jinx the opening, each males provide a “kinahora” — a Yiddish locution which means “no evil eye.” It’s a splash of darkish humor that’s not fully unfounded, contemplating the tortuous route that “Concord” has taken from web page to the Barrymore’s stage. Sussman first conceived of the present within the early Nineteen Nineties after seeing Eberhard Fechner’s 1977 documentary concerning the Harmonists in New York.
“I got here out of there and went to a telephone sales space on Lafayette Avenue, and I referred to as him and I began babbling away,” Sussman recalled. “And he mentioned, ‘I’m in.’”
Each males had been instantly intrigued by the story of a well-liked singing group (that they had performed Carnegie Corridor, as an example, in 1933) that was destroyed by — and misplaced to — historical past. Half of the group was of Jewish descent, and the Nazi takeover of Germany would finally silence them.
However the urge to compose a musical was additionally deeply seated in Manilow, who says he was by no means occupied with pop music as a baby in Brooklyn, when he was already a precocious musician, taking part in accordion and piano.
“It wasn’t fascinating sufficient for me,” Manilow recalled, of pop. “I didn’t know what was on the Prime 40. I used to be into jazz and Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. I used to be into classical music. And I used to be into Broadway scores.”
He added: “And I memorized each word from each a kind of albums. And that began it off.”
Manilow performed piano in bars, labored within the CBS mailroom and wrote a raft of jingles, one thing he says that taught him to jot down a “catchy melody in 15 seconds.” (He and Sussman, each of whom are Jewish, met in New York within the early Seventies.)
Nonetheless, Manilow says that it was his sudden pop stardom — starting with ballads like “Mandy” and persevering with with later earworm hits like “Copacabana (on the Copa),” which Sussman helped write — that considerably sidetracked his want to jot down for the stage, although Manilow did do a sequence of Broadway live shows over time.
“You possibly can both write, ‘I really like you’ or ‘I miss you,’” Manilow mentioned of his masterful Prime 40 songcraft. “You go any additional than that, you’re writing a Broadway tune.”
Regardless of that superstardom — and sure, in all probability due to it — “Concord” did debut at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego in 1997, however obtained blended critiques and did not switch. Nonetheless, curiosity within the present continued to percolate, together with in 2003, when an out-of-town tryout in Philadelphia — earlier than a deliberate Broadway run — abruptly evaporated when monetary backing disintegrated.
Extra iterations adopted: In 2013 and 2014, the present had runs in Atlanta and Los Angeles, the place the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle acknowledged the 2 males for his or her rating. Once more, producers expressed curiosity in Broadway, however offers fell aside, one thing Sussman appears remarkably measured about.
“The gantlet {that a} new musical goes by, each step might be the tip,” he mentioned. “You do a studying, it’s over. You survive the studying, you do a workshop, it’s over. You survive the studying and also you go to a regional and it’s over. And everyone knows exhibits that I’ve performed which have died at a kind of steps. We by no means did.”
Manilow was rather less sanguine concerning the course of. “I put it within the drawer many occasions,” he recalled. “It was so heartbreaking each time it didn’t make it.”
In the course of the coronavirus pandemic, nevertheless, Sussman and Manilow began to “kick the tires” on the present once more with Warren Carlyle, the British director and choreographer who gained a Tony Award in 2014 for his work on “After Midnight” and was nominated for Tonys for his work on the revivals of “Hiya, Dolly!” (2017) and “The Music Man” (2022).
One doable turning level within the present’s luck, Carlyle mentioned, was the addition of a narrator character — an older rabbi performed by Chip Zien — who walks the viewers by the assorted eras of the present.
“It was large,” he mentioned. “For me as director, it unlocks the entire present as a result of beforehand it was type of a six-headed dragon. You recognize there have been these six guys: All of them have great tales. All of them have wealthy lives. And I simply didn’t know who to comply with and I didn’t know learn how to focus the present.”
To resolve the issue, Sussman advised splitting the present position of one of many Harmonists in two. Along with his youthful self the present would additionally embody his older self, a rabbi, serving as a narrator. “And abruptly for me, it was like, now the story has a viewpoint,” Carlyle mentioned.
Following that work, the present was staged in 2022 on the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Dwelling Memorial to the Holocaust, the place audiences — and critics — appeared to reply in ways in which they hadn’t earlier than. Writing in The New York Instances, Elisabeth Vincentelli praised the songs “crafted in a defiantly basic mildew,” which steer the present again to “stable emotional floor.”
She additionally famous the inventive groups capability in “balancing the shifting moods, which isn’t any simple feat as a result of they need to shuffle broad humor and, properly, Nazis.”
Zalmen Mlotek, the creative director of the Nationwide Yiddish Theater Folksbiene, which introduced “Concord” on the museum, mentioned that he had heard about “Concord” after a advice from the developer Bruce Ratner, the chairman of the museum.
“After I heard that Manilow and Sussman had written a chunk concerning the Holocaust, I checked out it, the concept of the Comedians, this singing group, had had their careers destroyed, it was simply very compelling to me,” he mentioned.
Sussman and Manilow additionally mentioned they had been conscious of a special relevance to their decades-old present when watching it final 12 months on the museum, amid a rising variety of antisemitic incidents within the nation. That disturbing pattern has solely been amplified in current weeks as warfare broke out in Israel and the Gaza Strip.
In the course of the Folksbiene run, Sussman mentioned, “I’d sit at the back of the home and there’d be audible responses from the viewers and sure traces, and I began getting nervous that individuals would assume I used to be writing into the headlines. However a few of these traces are 15, 20 years previous.”
A lot of the main solid members from the Folksbiene manufacturing have transferred to Broadway, although most are lesser-known performers, one thing which will make advertising and marketing the present troublesome. And whereas Manilow is aware of he’s a draw — see all these years in Vegas — he’s additionally not performing, after all.
“I hope the present is robust sufficient to face by itself,” he mentioned.
Nonetheless rail skinny and apparently indefatigable, he has been commuting from the West Coast, the place he’s nonetheless doing three exhibits every week on the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & On line casino. (He simply handed Elvis for essentially the most exhibits ever at that resort.)
A onetime heavy smoker, Manilow is now a vaper, who — in contrast to his booming singing voice — is a quiet speaker. (Sussman nonetheless remembers seeing burn marks on Manilow’s piano keys the place his Pall Malls would burn down as he composed.)
Generally standing to vape, he additionally conveys a nervous power about watching a present from the viewers for a change. “It’s a horrible, horrible factor: I see all the failings and faults,” he mentioned with a chuckle.
Nonetheless, he and Sussman mentioned they hope to keep away from any unhealthy luck — theatrical, important or in any other case — this time round.
“Individuals say, you understand, ‘Oh, you have to be so excited?’” Manilow mentioned. “I don’t know what I’m, actually. We’ve been simply ready for this second for thus a few years.”
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