What’s the use of frivolity in an unstable time? That’s the question asked, in form and content, by Harmony, a light curio of a musical that comes with a riptide of political anxiety. The songs are by Barry Manilow; the setting is Germany in the years before World War II; the tonal incongruity you might deduce from that juxtaposition is, mostly, the point. Harmony takes for its subject the Comedian Harmonists, a sextet of singers formed in Berlin at the end of the 1920s, who toured the world until the Nazi regime turned on the group. The show aims to re-create the crew’s winningly sophomoric onstage antics and try to thread them into a large political history, and it tends to be better when addressing the former than the later, though its by-the-book history hits, at least glancingly, at compelling unease.
Though it’s filled with original music, Harmony’s book by Bruce Sussman follows the familiar didactic structure of a biomusical. We begin with the Comedian Harmonists near the peak of their success as they perform at Carnegie Hall in 1933 and then cut backward to the group’s origins in 1927. In rapid montage, you meet the six members, who each get one or two defining bits of characterization: the eager founder Harry (Zal Owen), the fame-seeking Lesh (Steven Telsey), a high-born medical student named Erich (Eric Peters), a lothario who goes by Chopin (Blake Roman), a pretentious bass named Bobby (Sean Bell), and Joe (Danny Kornfeld), nicknamed “Rabbi†because he was training to be one before being displaced from Poland. Rabbi is functionally Harmony’s main character, as the piece is narrated by the older version of himself, played by Chip Zien, one of Broadway’s great avuncular presences ever since he originated the Baker in Into the Woods. Zien provides all the Wiki-level historical context — “the inflation!†he reminds you while setting the scene of Weimar Berlin — while draping his telling with regret for choices the young Rabbi made. In one of Harmony’s goofier staging choices, Zien also slaps on a variety of wigs and costumes to play historical personages the Comedian Harmonists encounter along the way, including an Einstein get-up that makes that scientist’s appearance in Oppenheimer seem subtle and restrained.
That may sound like a strike against Harmony, but the musical is good at pulling off the goofy, even if it comes a the expense of its other elements. Warren Carlyle, the director-choreographer, is good at putting together onstage shenanigans, and he’s got a chipper ensemble that sells them with broad zinging smiles and tightly tuned vocal cords. Sussman, who wrote the lyrics as well as the book, and Manilow work best in the satirical realm: “Your Son is Becoming a Singer,†in which the Harmonists send up the stuffiness of Erich’s parents, is an earworm of a tune with gleefully on-the-nose rhymes. “We’ll say he contracted malaria / Then quietly slip from the area / And hide in a hut in Bulgaria†goes one run. (Maybe it’s not Cole Porter, but a nice enough imitation.) The humor may remind you of college a cappella groups, clever and twee and earnest and pleasant enough in small doses. When the Harmonists get their big break at a hoity-toity Berlin establishment, the cast does well sending up overserious waiters, holding platters in front of their crotches for a flurry of phallic jokes.
By Act Two, that sensibility runs up against the increasingly grim history, and the results are intriguing but not so successful. Sussman and Manilow hit at the situation but never quite get their heads around it. The Harmonists, strong-armed into acting as cultural ambassadors by the Nazis, rebel by performing a satire of nationalism on tour in Copenhagen, a number called “Come to the Fatherland,†where they dance in lederhosen while strung up to the ceiling like Marionettes. The parody is about as obvious as the dialogue that proceeds it when the young Rabbi announces, “They want ambassadors? Let’s give ’em ambassadors.†And, like so much of Harmony, it can’t help reminding you of the sharper, darker work that Kander and Ebb pulled off at the Kit Kat Club. The same goes for the show’s female secondary figures, a gentile who marries Rabbi (Sierra Boggess) and a fiery Jewish Bolshevik activist (Julie Benko, fresh from Funny Girl). Both are roughly drafted characters, in the vein of any number of archetypes evoking the Weimar era, though both actresses have powerful voices and share a moving, if unnecessary, duet.
But rote as that second act is, it arrives at the story’s most compelling tension. In their tours of the world, the Harmonists’ onstage shtick, apolitical as it may have been intended to be, acted as propaganda for a rising fascist state, whitewashing its cruelty. The tragedy of the tale, as the elder Rabbi repeatedly reminds the audience, is that they realized what they were doing too late and suddenly found the force of history bearing down on them. Three of the group’s members are targeted by the Nazis owing to their Jewish ancestry. Harmony’s later scenes depict this clumsily — there’s a sequence where the elder Rabbi rues not taking advantage of the opportunity to kill Hitler himself — but the discomfort sticks with you.
That may itself be due to another twist of historical timing. Manilow and Sussman have been working on Harmony for more than a quarter-century (it was first at La Jolla Playhouse in 1997), but it happens to have made it to Broadway now, as audiences are hyperaware of both antisemitic violence and of the bombing and brutality committed by the Israeli military in Gaza. Lines in Harmony about the recurrence of hate against Jews and state oppression in general, fashioned as generalities, are suddenly much more charged. The show — basically a fable — doesn’t meet the moment as much as the moment crashes over it. It’s hard to see the thing itself amid the currents of extra-theatrical context, but there’s no use in ignoring that context, which happens to be the point of Harmony. You may want to perform your little ditties and step to the side, but history will find you.
Harmony is at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.