Recommended

HARMONY

Photo by: Craig Schwartz

This potent new musical, with music by Barry Manilow and book and lyrics by Bruce Sussman, focuses on a fascinating, little-known footnote to history. It tells the largely factual tale of the Comedian Harmonists, the six-man singing group who were the first boy-band to become, in the 1930s, an international success. (Composer Manilow calls them the Beatles of their day.)

Narrator Josef Roman Cykowski aka Rabbi (Shayne Kennon) had actually been a rabbi in Poland until Polish anti-Semitism drove him away. At the height of their success, the Harmonists toured the world to vast acclaim, released many recordings and appeared in 12½ movies. (The 13^th was never released, and all would later be destroyed by the Nazis.)

Harmony traces their career from their inception in 1927 to their dissolution in 1935. The group’s founding member, Harry Frommerman (Matt Bailey) recruited five additional singers with astonishingly varied histories and nationalities. Rabbi was the first. The others included Erich Collin (Chris Dwan), who tried to keep his show-business career a secret from his wealthy family which thought he was studying medicine; Erwin “Chopin” Bootz (Will Taylor) a former whorehouse pianist; Bobby Biberti (Douglas Williams), an operatic basso; and Lesh Lesnikov (Will Blum), a Bulgarian singing waiter.

They embodied everything the National Socialists hated: three of them were Jewish, they were multi-cultural, they performed Jewish and gypsy music and they were irreverent and amiably subversive. Rabbi had married an Aryan wife, Mary Hegel (Leigh Ann Larkin), and Chopin married a Jewish communist Ruth Stern (Hannah Corneau).  They were protected for a while by their fans among the Nazi high command, but as the Third Reich closed its tentacles, they were eventually forced to disband, and forbidden to leave their nominal homeland. Miraculously, all six survived the war, despite being immediately conscripted and sent to the front.

The show’s program notes insist that this isn’t a Holocaust Musical, but it’s definitely a pre-Holocaust musical. And here, the show’s creators do something very clever. Because the Harmonists were unaware, like most of the world, of where history was taking them, they were oblivious of the impending danger. Manilow and Sussman keep the proceedings funny and upbeat for two-thirds of the show, relying on our knowledge of history to supply the suspense, fear, and dread of what’s to come.

The score is immensely varied, ranging from the low comedy of some of the group’s numbers, to love-songs for the two pairs of lovers, a colorful Jewish wedding, and Hungarian rhapsody, to near operatic arias and chorales as the mood darkens. Tony Speciale provides brisk, dynamic direction, music director John O’Neill supplies impeccable precision in the close harmony, and JoAnn M. Hunter created the sometimes hilariously eccentric choreography for the Harmonists. The cast is fine throughout, with special praise for the six Harmonists and their two ladies. Tobin Ost’s heavily Germanic architectural sets deftly combine with Darrel Maloney’s cheery and colorful Art Moderne projections to create a strong period flavor. –Neal Weaver

Center Theatre Group and Alliance Theatre, Atlanta, GA at The Ahmanson Theatre, 135 North Grand Avenue, Downtown L.A.; Tues.-Sat, 8 p.m., Sun., 1 & 6:30 p.m.; through April 13. (213) 972-4400, www.centertheatregroup.org