Give His Regards to Broadway

The musicians and their woodwinds, keyboard, cello and other instruments have set up camp in the tight quarters of a windowless bungalow at the local Jewish Community Center. There’s kiddie art taped to one of the walls--a reminder of the facility’s day job--and a card table with cookies and coffee in the corner.

It’s a low-luxury setup, even by the standards of not-for-profit theater. Yet no one seems to mind as they work through the score of a passionate number called “Threnody.” They’re taking their attitudinal cue, of course, from the tall guy leaning against the wall, half-singing the song. He’s the composer, Barry Manilow.

Barry Manilow?

Wait a minute. What’s a mega-pop star like him doing in a place like this?

Preparing the musical “Harmony,” for one thing. And taking to it like beets to borscht, for another.

The man who’s sold more than 58 million records worldwide, posted a string of 25 consecutive Top 40 hits, put five albums on the chart simultaneously and won Tony, Emmy and Grammy awards is, he says, in his element. At long last.

“This whole 20 years of pop music was an accident, a surprise,” says the guy whom a 1990 Rolling Stone profile dubbed the showman of our generation. “This part, being in a trailer with musicians, is where I feel most at home. The part where I feel most not at home is when I have to put makeup on and go up on a stage looking cute and sing.

“Would you believe me if I told you that it’s never had anything to do with money or fame or success?” he continues later, over a meal at his nearby hotel. “I never look up and say, ‘Where am I?’ I never look at it like that. I never looked at my life like that.

“I’m a musician. I’m a creative man. That’s all I care about really.”

Even now, there’s more to this boychik from Brooklyn than his pop career. A versatile musician, he has consistently challenged himself, both within his pop work, and with forays into non-pop genres and other forms.

“One of my favorite things to do with Barry through the years has been to write pieces in other genres and other styles,” says lyricist Bruce Sussman, Manilow’s collaborator of 25 years and co-creator of such hits as “Copacabana” and “Jump Shout Boogie.”

“He’s very good at it, and most people don’t know that.”

Now, Manilow’s ready to take a chance again--on a musical, of all things. “Harmony,” with music by Manilow and book and lyrics by Sussman, is based on the true story of the Comedian Harmonists, a group of young German men, both Jewish and Gentile, who gained fame during the waning years of the Weimar Republic, before coming in conflict with the Nazis. They began as street musicians, developed a unique style of performance that mixed physical comedy with a cappella singing and music that varied from classically inspired to the popular idioms of the time. Directed by David Warren, the musical premieres next Sunday at the La Jolla Playhouse.

Somewhere in the night--a rainy April night in New York City, actually--Bruce Sussman decided to go to a movie. He’d seen an announcement in the New York Times about a documentary on a group called the Comedian Harmonists and he managed to track down the place where it was showing.

Hours later, the lyricist emerged from the theater, made it through the rain, and made a beeline for the nearest phone booth. He plunked in some change and put in a call to Manilow in California.

This, he told the composer, was the project they’d been waiting for. “What took hold of me while I was watching that night was the irony of six incredibly diverse human beings setting out on a quest to find harmony in what turned out to be the most discordant chapter in human history,” says Sussman. “The harmony they set out to find was so much more than musical harmony.”

After two years of research and discussions, Sussman and Manilow completed a rough draft of the work in 1992. They were unsure at that point, however, whether it was a film or stage script. In 1993, they decided the project was best suited to the stage, and that Sussman would write not only the lyrics but also the book.

The final version of “Harmony,” completed last year, traces not only the rise to fame of the Harmonists, but also the effect their success had upon their personal and professional relationships. The show features musical numbers that tell the Harmonists’ story, as well as numbers that re-create the Harmonists’ act itself. There are 18 songs in all, in the style of theatrical and pop music of the ‘20s and ‘30s.

After talking about “Harmony” with a number of other theaters, Manilow and Sussman decided La Jolla was the best home for the project, in part because they felt artistic director Michael Grief shared their vision. Greif, who cites the Harmonists as an influence on his own 1989 staging off-Broadway of “Machinal,” says “I had a leg up because I actually knew who the Comedian Harmonists were. I shared an interest in the Weimar period and a fascination with the project--both the real subject matter and, of course, how Barry and Bruce chose to express these things.”

It was 20 years ago . . . President Jimmy Carter and the energy crisis were news. “Roots” gave us Kunte Kinte. “Saturday Night Fever” spawned a rash of disco Don Juans. And you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing a certain sensitive fella “Tryin’ to Get the Feeling Again.”

Every generation has its guilty pleasure and those who came of age post-’60s were no exception. Back then Barry Manilow was the one you had to say you hated, the sultan of schmaltz. But there were legions of closet Manilow lovers, singing along to his songs, alone in their cars and showers.

“At that time, it was so uncool to like Barry Manilow that I did the best I could not to like him,” recalls director Warren, 36, of his high school years. “I’d find myself in the car, singing along to ‘Copacabana,’ making believe that I didn’t really like it that much. Now, I can like what I like. And the funniest thing is, now that I’m working with him, everyone says, ‘Oh, I love Barry Manilow songs.’ ”

It’s the ‘90s now and the ‘70s are huge. Polyester and platforms are back and so is John Travolta. But Barry Manilow never left.

Sure, there were those years in the 1980s when Manilow’s popularity fell off. Nobody stays in the stratosphere forever. But Barry’s a never-say-die kinda guy, and he’s just kept on truckin’.

Year after year, whether at the top or being dissed, he’s continued to crank out albums and they’ve continued to sell. Even when it wasn’t cool to admit it, there’s always been somebody out there--sometimes a lot of somebodies--looking to buy a Barry Manilow album or five.

Since the early 1990s, Manilow has won a reassessment of sorts. Following the loving Rolling Stone profile by Bill Zehme, Manilow released a retrospective boxed set in 1992 and began winning over a new generation of groupies. His fans now include many who were too young to have swayed to “Can’t Smile Without You” the first time around.

“Now it’s not cool to dislike Barry,” says Warren. “In fact, what’s so great is that young people love Barry now. Barry is hip.”

He continues to sell out his concerts, filling seats by the tens of thousands. He is scheduled to play two nights at the Universal Amphitheater, just after Christmas this year, promoting his “Summer of ‘78” album, released earlier this year. Although he hasn’t released a new pop song in years--his current album features covers of other people’s ‘70s hits--ticket sales for the upcoming shows are strong enough that adding an additional date is under consideration.

Ironically, Manilow says he didn’t set out to be a pop star. “I thought I’d wind up in theater,” he says with a rueful but basically guileless smile. “I was going to be an arranger. I had big aspirations in song writing.

“I got side-tracked in commercials, in the pop world, wound up making records and kind of abandoned the aspirations of being a song writer for the theater,” Manilow continues. “ ‘Mandy’ threw me and my friends and family totally off because I really had no aspirations to be a singer, or to be in pop music at all.”

He’s been a musician all along, of course, but it took a while to get back to the boards. “My interest in theater never waned, never,” says Manilow. “I kept looking for holes in my schedule to get back to it.

Writing songs for “Harmony,” Manilow claims, has been the biggest creative challenge of his career. “I’ve never undertaken anything as big as this,” Manilow says. “It’s a world of music that I’ve loved and admired and respected, but I’ve never done an original score based on this kind of music.”

The kick, in part, is that he doesn’t have to dumb it down. “It is so much more interesting to do this kind of thing than to write for pop records,” says Manilow. “I find that I like writing this kind of material so much more because I can crawl into the world and decide what kind of sound, what style of music.

“Most theater writing is about situation and character,” he continues. “As soon as you start to do that in a pop song, people start to snooze. People want more of a groove. Pop people just don’t want to work so hard. You give them a catchy title and you repeat it over and over and you don’t go too far.

“I was never really good at writing pop songs, though I did it for many years and will do it if pushed up against the wall. It’s the most difficult thing for me to do. Every time Bruce [Sussman] and I would try and write something with a little more content to it, it never made it.

“These days when I sit down I know exactly why I’m writing a song. The songwriting that I’m doing now has got ideas: It’s not just a ‘come back to me I love you I miss you’ song.”

He’s tall, trim and evenly tanned, with friendly blue eyes, chiseled features and an arresting presence. There’s hardly a trace of the gangly guy in the goofy ruffle shirt. At 51, Manilow has not only grown into his looks but seems comfortable with himself.

Get him talking about “Harmony” and he fairly glows.

“I had one of the most thrilling moments just two days ago,” he begins, over a pre-rehearsal breakfast that happens to fall on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. “I came in after a band rehearsal and sat in the back of the house. David [Warren] was on the microphone, telling the actors to move here, move there. Then he said, ‘OK, start it from there’ and the [rehearsal pianist] just started playing my music as if it was music that he’d been playing 30 years.

“He played beautifully, and it wasn’t even mine anymore. It was somebody else’s. They were out there, playing this thing that I’d been working on for three years. Then these guys started to sing up there. And they were good, just like I’d imagined, or even better. Such a thrill.”

It’s a thrill that’s been a long time coming. Raised in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn by his mother and grandparents--he never met his father--Manilow was introduced as an adolescent to the music that he would come to love for his whole life.

“It came from one guy, an Irish truck driver named Willy Murphy, who was my stepfather,” says Manilow. “My mother remarried when I was around 13. It was great because I must have needed a male role model.”

That wasn’t his first taste of music, but it was the formative one. “I always knew that I was musical, but my grandmother and my mother just didn’t know what to do with me, so they put an accordion in my hand. When [Murphy] came into my life, there also came stacks of albums--jazz, big band and Broadway show scores.

“These albums changed my life and gave me a direction. I threw out my accordion and from then on, I knew where my life was going. I knew that it was going to be music.”

Manilow recalls memorizing the scores and lyrics to such classic shows as “The King and I,” “The Most Happy Fella” and “West Side Story,” and trying to pick out the tunes on the piano.

“I had never even seen these shows, but I was so transfixed and fascinated by what they were singing and how they were singing it,” he says. “Pictures were being made not only by the words and music, but by the scoring.”

Unable to actually see the works on stage, Manilow would make up his own imaginary productions. “I found myself swept away into these worlds,” he says. “I knew every single word and every single note of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ but I’d never seen it.”

Manilow also grew to adore the sounds of the big bands and jazz, and took these passions with him when he struck out on his own.

He went to school at the New York College of Music and Juilliard, while working a day job in the CBS mail room. During this period, at the age of just 18, Manilow wrote the original score for a musical adaptation of a melodrama called “The Drunkard,” which became a long-running off-Broadway success. Although it was a positive experience, Manilow doesn’t consider his efforts on that show a prelude to his present work: “That was so long ago,” he demurs when asked.

He subsequently began doing some arranging and conducting for television and live cabaret, and it was during this time that he first hooked up with Sussman.

“When we got together, he was not a pop singer or interested in pop music, and I knew nothing about pop music,” says Sussman, 48, who has co-written more than 150 published and recorded songs, many with Manilow, as well off-Broadway shows with playwrights Wendy Wasserstein and Ted Tally. “We were getting together to write shows.

“We started writing jingles and things together, anything that would pay the rent,” Sussman continues. “Then this pop thing happened and we just took a left turn and put this all aside for awhile.”

In 1972, Manilow became Bette Midler’s musical director, arranger and pianist. He co-produced her first record--the Grammy-winning “The Divine Miss M”--as well as her self-titled album “Bette Midler.” But the really big break came when he opened for her act and was noticed as a solo artist.

Then came Manilow’s unexpected detour into meteoric fame. Enter Clive Davis, the Arista Records founder and recording industry legend who first tapped Manilow in 1974 and has been the architect of his career since then.

“First of all, he’s a tremendous showman,” says Davis. “When you have an artist that can transcend the musical tastes of each decade, you have the ingredients [for success] that very few artists who have merely recording hits can enjoy. Those few artists who are really performing stars--those that stand for the universality of music, and Manilow is among them--continue to make new fans. Plain and simple, he’s a star.”

The hits began to come fast and furious in the mid-1970s. “The pop music that I found myself in with ‘Mandy’ was a world that I had never ever thought about,” says Manilow. “I’d never taken it seriously. I had no interest in pop radio, no interest in it at all.”

When he had time to think about it, Manilow came to realize that he was still using what he’d learned from theater. “When I found myself with hit records, I realized they were being accepted for two reasons: My instinct was to make them theatrical with key changes, big endings,” he says. “The other reason was my co-producers knew how to make very theatrical sounding records.”

The Manilow-Sussman-Jack Feldman “Copacabana,” for instance, is clearly theatrical, with narrative and character. “It had a story,” says Manilow. “And it’s the biggest hit of all of my catalog. I’ve got a lot, and it’s the biggest one. My drummer starts playing it and people go out of their minds.”

In 1994, “Copacabana: The Musical” opened in Britain. Written by Manilow, Sussman and Feldman, the two-act revue contained 16 original songs without a strong narrative connection; the show played London in 1995, before touring the U.K. last year. Not including “The Drunkard,” it was Manilow’s only experience with the legitimate stage prior to “Harmony.”

But “Copacabana” the song was something of a fluke to begin with. “One of the problems we’ve had over these years is that a lot of people don’t recognize that we’re doing it with a wink,” says Sussman. “ ‘Copacabana’ was with a wink! I’m delighted it was successful but I couldn’t believe people took it seriously.”

What really strikes Manilow’s keys, however, are his trips into other forms. Among the accomplishments of which he’s most proud, for instance, is the 1984 jazz album “2:00 AM Paradise Cafe,” on which he performed with the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Mel Torme and Gerry Mulligan, among others.

The true warmup for “Harmony,” and another experience Manilow considers highly rewarding, was his and Sussman and Feldman’s work on the animated films “Thumbelina” (1994) and “The Pebble and the Penguin” (1995). “Animated films basically [use] the Rodgers and Hammerstein formula,” explains Sussman. “That got us back to reminding us how much he and I really enjoyed writing for character and developing plot.

“We started revisiting the idea of doing shows again.”

When Manilow first heard the New York city rhythm in Sussman’s voice on that rainy night seven years ago, he knew his collaborator was onto something important. “I didn’t even know what he was talking about but I heard it in his voice, that after all these years he was ready to dive into a major project,” he recalls. “I trusted Bruce’s instincts and I found that it spoke to me as well.”

The challenge was not only recapturing the era of the 1920s and 1930s, but also the variety of musical styles in which the Comedian Harmonists worked, including jazz, classical and the popular music of the day. “I crawled deeply into a world of music that I’d never written before,” says Manilow. “I had to do my homework and look into everything that came out of that era --not only the Comedian Harmonists themselves, but the music and the world surrounding them. Then I threw everything away, closed my eyes and hoped that whatever came out would be right.”

Manilow thinks it’s a miracle. “It’s been just the most amazing experience,” he says. “I always hear [a song] in my head--how they’re going to sound. But when you see two beautiful girl singers, coming right out of the scene and singing, it’s breathtaking.”

And yet, Manilow has no plans to put songs from “Harmony” in his stage show, as many a pop artist might do. In fact, there aren’t any solos in “Harmony.”

“I don’t want to be identified with this [as a singer or entertainer],” says the composer. “I want people to come fresh to the play and not think of Barry Manilow the performer.”

Although Manilow came straight off the road and into “Harmony” rehearsals--and will return to touring in November and December--he keeps his concertizing and his musical theater completely separate.

“That Barry the performer part is exciting and a fantastic gig--to have 15,000 to 20,000 people a night after all these years, and they’re all so happy, screaming and yelling and having the best time,” he says. “But it’s a whole different world.”

It’s a somewhat split existence, but Manilow is used to making his own way--both personally and creatively. Mostly he’s just done his own thing, whether or not that happened to be in step with the trends of the moment.

“When everybody was making records from disco, there was this guy yelling at the top of his lungs, trying to be passionate, trying to fit in,” he says. “There was nobody else doing that kind of thing. And here I am again. I’ve always had a very small slice of the pie--even in pop music--and this doesn’t feel any different. And if it winds up that it’s just a small slice of the pie, I feel fine.”

He’s prepared for whatever may come “Harmony” ’s way, somewhere down the road. Could it be magic? He’s not sure.

“Every time pop music people try to write Broadway shows, they never make it,” muses Manilow. “And I might not either. But I see why people just kill themselves to do Broadway shows. It’s such a gorgeous experience so far. I am so hooked. Bruce and I are already talking about the next one.”

*

“Harmony,” La Jolla Playhouse, UCSD campus, La Jolla Village Drive and North Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla. Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Nov. 23. $26-$42.50. (619) 550-1010.