It's that time o' year, and so today, we'll have our annual festival of sorts of Thanksgiving related pieces -- from songs to videos to old radio shows.  And this is a good place to start.

And I think it's near-impossible on Thanksgiving to not celebrate with this classic by Stan Freberg, from his great Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America.

Here is his version of how Thanksgiving actually came about.

It begins with the local mayor decided a bit of self-promotion would help him if he threw a big gala and invited some Indians to show what a great guy he was.  Which leads to a Freberg gem, "Take an Indian to Lunch."

​​And once the holiday event was decided upon, things didn't go as smoothly as plans would hope.

We'll finish our brief tribute to the new musical Harmony which opens on Monday -- finally, 26 years after I saw its premiere tryout production in San Diego.  The show's writers Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman have shown remarkable determination getting it here.  I have no idea how it will do with critics and the public.  It had a highly-successful off-Broadway run a couple years ago at the acclaimed Yiddish National Theatre Folksbienne with very respectable reviews.  But Broadway is another animal.

Tonight, we'll end things with three songs from the show.  This first is the opening title song, performed by the main characters, the Comedian Harmonists, a real-life mixed-religion troupe that was hugely popular in Germany and around the world in the early 1930s...until Hitler came to power.  Joining them is Chip Zien, who plays one of the group, known as "Rabbi", but from decades later, a character who looks back at their experience, narrating and commenting on it all.  This comes from a Press Day, which presented highlights of the show.

And finally, this is the breakout song from the show, "Every Single Day."  This performance comes from a cabaret night by performers in the National Yiddish Theatre Folkbienne production, lead here by Shayne Kennon. 

Continuing our to honor the musical Harmony -- which I saw in its premiere tryout in San Diego back in 1997 and which is finally opening on Broadway this coming Monday, after 26 years -- here are a couple of a nice features about the show.

This first from last week is from the AP.
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And here is a story from three weeks ago that CBS Sunday Morning did on Barry Manilow and the journey of the musical getting to Braoadway.

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Back in 1997, I drove down to San Diego to see a pre-Broadway premiere tryout of a new musical called Harmony, which had music by Barry Manilow and a book and lyrics by his longtime writing partner Bruce Sussman.  The show told the story of the real-life, German comedy/music group, the Comedian Harmonists, a mixed-religion group in the 1930s who were phenomenally popular internationally, but disbanded with the rise of Hitler. 
 
The show was very good, though flawed, being a first-run tryout.  I’ve written about it over the years, as it’s come close to getting a Broadway production several times, always falling through.  Most notably, I wrote a long piece about it in 2012, remembering the show and not wanting it to full through the cracks into the dustbin of history.  As it happened, the next year, much to my surprise – and pleasure -- a revival of the show was to be mounted in Atlanta by the well-regarded Alliance Theatre, moving next to the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles.
 
Somewhat out of the blue, I got contacted by the show’s PR representative, who’d seen my article and asked if I’d like to interview Manilow and Sussman when the show came to Los Angeles.  I did, and we had a long phone interview, of which I posted the resulting article.
 
As a side note, there was a story related to the interview which I didn’t include in the article, but only alluded to.  When I was asked later about what that story was, I wrote about it in a separate article --
 
As I mention in the initial article, the interview came about as the result of a long, detailed appreciation I’d written a year earlier about Harmony -- a piece I did before I had the slightest idea that they were reviving the show.  What’s funny is that it turned out Barry Manilow didn’t realize that history when we spoke. 

Manilow had read that first, glowing article about Harmony -- the PR person for the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta gave him a copy at the time.  (I was pretty sure he had seen it, but just to confirm, since it was a year ago, and I wanted to be on solid footing, I asked, "Oh, so you know about the article?"  He replied lightheartedly, but bluntly -- "I know everything about this show.")  But what he thought and reasonably assumed is that I had written it after I knew Harmony was being done again, thinking that that's what had prompted me.  Why else, I’m sure he thought, would someone write such an article about a failed, pre-Broadway tryout 15 years earlier?  I corrected him, explaining that, no, I had been completely unaware about the Alliance production, and in a stunned voice he almost cut me off, “Wait, you didn’t know we were doing the show???!!”  I answered, “No, I wrote it before I had any idea you were reviving it.  I just thought the show was wonderful and wanted to write about it.”  And that's when he said --

“Robert, I love you even more than I did before!”
 
(Which would have made a great line in a Barry Manilow-Bruce Sussman song…)
 
Anyway, I kept periodically writing about the show, posting occasional videos of one of the songs he included in his act, a wonderful ballad “Every Single Day,” as well as other videos related to the show.
​
Eventually, in 2022 -- and wonderfully -- the musical got a production in New York.  Off-Broadway, yes, but at the highly-regarded National Yiddish Theatre Folksbienne (which only the year before had mounted an acclaimed version of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, directed by Joel Grey).  The show was set for only a limited run, but got respectable reviews and was very successful.  It also won the Off-Broadway League Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical, and won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical (and got two other Drama Desk nominations – for Best Musical and Best Leading Actor in a Musical).
 
And then…thanks to the success of its run – the show, finally, after 26 years, announced it would at least have its Broadway premiere.  Which will be this coming Monday, November 13.
 
I’m thrilled.  After 26 years yammering about a show, it’s so wonderful to see I wasn’t totally off-based.  And I’m thrilled for the writers who stuck with it for over a quarter of a century.  I have no idea how it will do.  It’s certainly timely – and has been at the various times it’s been mounted, but especially now.  It’s a very good show, not “great” but thoughtful, interesting, funny, tragic and with an extremely good, evocative music score. 
 
And because of all those years of yammering, writing and interviewing, I feel a certain kindred spirit to the musical.  As such, I’ll be posting several items about Harmony, including a CBS Sunday Morning piece on it that recently aired, several of the songs, and starting here today, I thought I’d repost the interview that I did with Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman in 2014.  It includes a link to the original article that brought about the conversation.
 
(What I also didn’t mention in the article at the time is the one challenge I had doing it.  I don’t take shorthand.  So, it was hell trying to write down accurately what the two of them were saying.  Sitting with someone, they can see you’re writing, but over the phone…it’s just conversation.  There was one trick I was able to manage – as I would ask my next question, I would stretch it out just a bit with some background and specifics for clarity…but the actual point was to delay their answer until I finished writing down what they’d just said.  Writing on the one hand, while also talking at the same time.  It was a convoluted effort, but happily it worked out.)

                Finally in Harmony Again
                                           February 24, 2014

A year ago, I wrote here about a wonderful musical I’d seen 16 years earlier in its 1997 world premiere tryout at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego.  The show, Harmony, was written by Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman, and took on a challenging, fascinating subject.  It concerned the real-life Comedian Harmonistes, a hugely popular close-harmony singing and comedy group of mixed religion in Germany during the 1920s into the 1930s, whose existence was threatened as Nazi rule was taking over the country.   Not without flaws, understandable for a first tryout, the musical was nonetheless terrific, with a thoughtful, involving book and lyrics, and rich, evocative music score, and looked to have a big life ahead.  But things don’t always happen the way we expect, and Harmony never made it to Broadway, or even had subsequent productions.  I didn’t know why, but felt that something that good deserved to be at least be known, so I wrote about it.

To my huge surprise, a few months after writing my article, I was contacted by the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta (a Tony Award-winner for Best Regional Theater) to say that they were reviving Harmony.  And that it was doing so in conjunction with the highly-regarded Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles.

The finally-revived Harmony had a very successful re-opening.  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution headlined its review, “Manilow’s Harmony is a glorious work of art.”  Critic Wendell Brock wrote that, “In the end, ‘Harmony’ is a nearly flawless work of art that almost manages to cloak the harrowing underside of history in a bubble of elegance, sophistication and wit.  At the end of the night, the waltz fades away, but the stars never dim.” I must admit, it was nice to have my memory vindicated, as well as effort to bring attention to something so good which I’d been telling people about to skeptical looks for almost two decades.  It really was that good.

Next stop for Harmony, then, would be Los Angeles, and the show opens there on March 4.

The result of all this is that I had the chance to talk with the show’s creators, Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman.  What interested me most was the show from the perspective of having seen it – its history and artistic construction.  And how it may have changed in the intervening years.  In short, how in the world it got from there to here in just, at this point now, 17 years.

And that begins with a simple, nagging thought since that day long ago in San Diego.  Their never having written a stage musical before, and in the midst of a hugely successful pop music partnership – how in the world did they come across this unlikely story – one inherently filled with singing and comedy, and even romance, but also much harrowing darkness against the bleakest of backdrops, and what was it that cried out that this, with all its challenges, was the one to do?

“Bruce saw a documentary on the Comedian Harmonists,” Barry Manilow recalls, “and he was out of his mind about it.  We’d been looking for something all these years.  And he was so excited about it.  He said to me, ‘Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah’ (and yes, that’s how Manilow laughingly describes his writing partner’s explosive, bubbling enthusiasm.  His amusing point coming across that when you work with someone and they are that enthused about something, the enthusiasm is sometimes all you need.)  “And I said, ‘Okay.’”

As big a leap as it might seem, to go from pop music into writing for Broadway, it turns out that it really wasn’t.  In fact, it was that very interest that initially drew the two together years ago.

“When we first met in the Calvin Coolidge administration,” Bruce Sussman jokes about their long-term collaboration, it wasn’t to do pop music at all – “we wanted to write musicals.”

“I always wanted to get into writing musicals,” Manilow reiterates.   “I thought that that was what I would do, write shows. Conduct musicals, be in the theater.  I thought I was a theater writer.”

Manilow’s interest didn’t immediately translate with Sussman.  It was one thing to appreciate the field, but taking the next step was something else entirely.  “I didn’t know about writing this.  The first time he asked me, I actually said, ‘No.’  I didn’t know how.”

What changed is that in 1970, the musical Company by Stephen Sondheim with a book by George Furth opened.  It was different from the type of show Broadway was used to – in its edgy score, pointed and episodic book, and inventive staging.  And it galvanized the two writers.

“Both of us had seen Company,” Sussman recalls.  “Everyone around us saw Company.  Everything stopped.  We all went, ‘Okay, we have to do this.’”

The problem though was one of time – and more surprisingly, of unexpected success.  Much as the two now wanted to write a musical, and knew precisely the sort of material they now wanted write, “It takes a lot of time to write a musical,” Manilow relates.  “It can take five years.  Because my career exploded, though, I just never had the time.  I didn’t have time until 1992.”  To be clear, not writing a show was never for lack of interest or even opportunity.  “ People offered us shows to do,” he continues, “but they never spoke to us.   Steven Sondheim told me that if you’re going to write a musical and spend all that time, it has to be something you love, that you want to spend all that time with.”

“And nothing interested us enough,” Sussman adds.  “So, we just waited.  And then this project came along.”

Among the things that stood out about seeing Harmony back in San Diego is that the songs did not sound like a “Barry Manilow  score.”  Most composers have their “sound.”  Listen to any show by Rodgers and Hammerstein, even an ethnic period piece like The King and I, and you can nonetheless hear Richard Rodgers in it.  Something like Cabaret has the flair of John Kander.  But listening to Harmony, if someone asked who you thought composed the music, it’s unlikely that you would single out Barry Manilow.  Rather than sounding like a jukebox pop show, the score instead evokes the era, as Manilow put aside his comfort zone for the sake of serving the story and its time.

As much as that might seem, though, like a specific artistic decision to have avoided what was familiar and comfortable to him, “I did not consciously set out to not write in my comfort area,” he answers – and then pauses a moment to give the suggestion more thought, and continues with a surprising explanation. 

“Actually, this is my comfort area.  Theater.  My comfort area is not writing a pop song.  With pop songs all you have to go on is ‘I love you,  I miss you.’  That’s the whole blank page.

“But this was easy.  It’s not easy to write a musical, I don’t mean that, but the songs in a musical have a story they fit in, a context.  If you put a chair in front of me, I could write a song about what that chair is.  But to write a pop song, and find a new way to say, ‘I love you, I miss you’ – that’s torture.”

Though the two men finally had found the story they wanted to tell, and were filled with enthusiasm for it, there still was that whole issue of time.  Not about finding the time, but taking the time to get things right.

“I did three years of research before I even started to write the show,” Sussman states.  “And Barry came back from a tour, and he had all these suitcases full of material, songs from the 1930s he’d collected.  We did a great deal of research.”

It didn’t occur to them to work any other way, since it’s how they always worked.  “If I was to write a song about China,” Manilow says, “I would have studied it and researched it.”

What they ended up with was a score for Harmony that stands separate and unique from the Manilow-Sussman collection, and for many years Manilow wouldn’t even perform any of its songs in his concerts.  They weren’t “Barry Manilow songs,” they were Harmony.  As the years passed, he finally did record an album with several of the songs from both Harmony and his other musical with Sussman, Copacabana.  And one song from Harmony at last made it into his concerts, the beautiful, “Every Single Day.”

(Although now a part of the concert opus -- though this performance below is from a PBS special on Broadway -- you can tell Manilow’s affection to the song.  More than just singing it, he almost throws himself into the number, as if acting it from the show.)
​

​Clearly, his concert performance  of the song does sound like it belongs in that pop world. Oddly, though, when seeing Harmony back in 1997, even “Every Single Day,” with a totally different, subtle, resonant arrangement, sounded nothing like a song for a Manilow concert.  It fit the moment of the show and the character perfectly.  So, I was curious how audiences of the musical react when what is now “The Big Hit Song” starts up.

“We don’t ‘pop’ up the arrangement of ‘Every Single Day,’ explains Manilow.  “In fact, we do some interesting things with it, and at first the audience doesn’t even realize it’s That Song.  People are so engrossed in the show, in what’s going on in the scene.  And it sneaks up on them before they recognize it.  By the time the song is over, though, audiences have been going wild.”

Which brings us to today.  And how these two writers got their show back on stage after a mere 17 years.  And how they’ve revisited it themselves.

My recollection from long ago was that the first act of that original production was very strong and tight and rich with story, extremely involving, while the second act, though quite good, was trying to find focus.  I was curious if that had been their perception, as well.

“That’s interesting what you say about focus,” Sussman laughs.  “The first act was an hour and 45 minutes. But even running that long, we never got complaints about length.  None.  However, we always felt it could be stream-lined, and now it’s only an hour and four minutes.”

“In that first production,” adds Manilow, “we threw everything up on stage.  We were just trying to find out what worked.  We didn’t even think anyone would come down to San Diego to see the show!  We just wanted to get it onstage, and work on it.”

In the intervening years, though, they two have been able to step back and look at the production with a dispassionate eye, and have indeed kept working on the show.  From what they said, it seems that most of the effort has been with the second act – although “We did add major new element in the last scene of the first act,” Sussman explains. “It’s a theatrical device that’s thrilling.  In the new second act, though, three songs have been removed, two new songs were added, and we even removed one character.”

Because the show is so centered on this group of six men and the powerful, dramatic turns their lives go through, they take up the bulk of the stage time.  However, there are still two wonderful roles for women, who the men get involved with.  (When I saw it in San Diego, one of those roles was played by Rebecca Luker, then at the start of her already-burgeoning Broadway career.  She’s since been nominated for three Tony Awards.  Interestingly, also in the cast was Danny Burstein, and the two subsequently married.)  I was curious if the limitation of female roles was ever a concern for the writers, to try and expand those stories – or did they feel more compelled to stick to the core story and however the women developed from it.)

“The women have been better developed than in the original production,” Sussman acknowledges but then laughs self-effacingly.  “You should have seen the original script, though.  There were eight women in it.  You needed a scorecard to keep track!  I even put one of the character’s mother in it.  I felt he needed a female relationship to his story.”  Needless-to-say, all that got dropped.

One of the hurdles that was most intriguing about staging the show is that the real-life Comedian Harmonists were utterly remarkable in their vocal gymnastics.  (A recent German film on the group uses recordings of the real group.)  So, it seemed like that would be a huge challenge to mounting this musical.  The actual Harmonists trained for years to be as pitch-perfect and intricate as they were, not just in their singing, but also comic timing.  So, how do you find performers who – while not duplicating the artistry of what the originals did – would be able to sing close harmony so well and have such impeccable stagecraft that audiences would believe and accept that these six men on stage are truly that otherworldly good?

“This is a very complicated score for actors to do,” Manilow admits.  “On the other hand, it might be a dream come true for them.  It’s what they studied their whole lives – singing, dancing, acting, doing harmony, timing, everything -- and they get to do all of it in the show.  But you do have to be a real actor-musician.  They’re not just singing melody, they’re all singing harmony.”

All of which begs the overriding question:  how in the world did Manilow and Sussman get here?  After 17 years wandering in the desert, what happened??  Not only “what happened” in what had been blocking them – but how were they able to get over that hump that had been in their way for almost two decades.

It’s a question that the two men have lived with for a long time.  “Every Broadway musical has a big mountain to climb,” Manilow says in a voice dripping with experience.  “The issue was never the show.  People always loved the show.  The problems were always investors, producers, financiers, and we’d be stuck for three years.  I don’t want to get into specifics, but when you sign a contract with a producer, it’s for three years.  There’s nothing you can do.  We spent years going from producer to producer, and it just took so much time.”

Eventually, the two men decided to regroup and simply “put the show in the drawer” as Sussman says, for the time being.  To not press the issue, but wait until they could get it right.  Then last year, taking matters into their own hands, they did something vibrantly uncommon.  Without lawyers involved, without agents, without anyone else involved, they themselves alone picked up the phone and called the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, which they were aware had a very good reputation.  Yet it’s far more odd than that.  This wasn’t a case of just calling the Alliance Theatre on their own, cutting through all the red tape and going straight to the top through one of their many connections, but rather –

“We called the main number of the theatre,” Sussman laughs.  “We just called the lobby.”  They didn’t know anyone at the Alliance.  They just thought it would be a good theatre.  Needless-to-say, the operator at the front desk was a bit surprised by the call.  (One can only imagine the conversation, “I have Barry Manilow on Line 2…No, really.”)  But she eventually was convinced who it was she was talking with and connected the two men with Susan Booth, the artistic director who heads up the theatre.  It turns out that the reputation of the show over the years preceded the call, and Ms. Booth was not only aware of the musical, but hopeful.  “The first thing she said was, ‘Please tell me it’s about Harmony.’” 

Booth asked for some time to think about the show, needing to decide what she wanted to do with it, and how the musical might fit in with the Alliance.  Given that Manilow and Sussman had waited almost 17 years at that point, waiting a while longer wasn’t a problem.  What they didn’t expect was how incredibly short they would have to wait.  “One hour later she called back to say they wanted to do it,” Sussman says, his voice still not quite believing it – or quite believing what came next.  “And she also gave us a start date.”

After roadblocks of 17 years, just picking up the phone and calling the front desk did the trick.  In a single hour they not only had an acceptance, but a green light to go ahead.  Yet success breeds success, because things only got better.  “Six weeks later,” Manilow adds, “we then got a call from the Ahmanson.  They’d heard about us working with Alliance, and they wanted to get involved, too.”

​And today, we conclude the Third Elisberg Industries Film Festival with our presentation of the original 1960 cast production of Camelot. 

(For those who may have missed any or all of the previous videos, I'll post links to them below.)
 
In 1980, Richard Burton did a revival tour of Camelot, which later returned to Broadway.  It played in Los Angeles, but unfortunately I didn’t go immediately because that’s when his back issues got too much, and he had to drop out.  He was replaced by Richard Harris, which as of course a good choice, but I had no interest in going.  I’d seen him in the movie (and didn’t care for his performance), and he recreated it for a live-onstage TV production (which I saw, and thought he was much better than in the movie).  And mostly, not only had his performance been recorded twice, he wasn’t Richard Burton, the original, which was the entire point of the tour in the first place. Most especially since  there was no video record of his performance, 
 
However, there is now a poor-quality recording of that 1980 revival production with Richard Burton online.  And while most such bootleg recordings irresponsible, I do make exceptions when they are preserving something important in cultural history that would otherwise be lost forever, and I posted it on my site here.
 
So, as a bonus, and sort of finale button on this whole “original Camelot” tribute, here is the famous four-minute finale of that revival production, with Richard Burton singing the reprise of “Camelot” to young Tom of Warwick.  A battle is about to start, which marks the end of the dream of Camelot.  That’s when King Arthur discovers a young boy, Tom of Warwick, hiding out, enthralled by the Knights of the Roundtable and the meaning of Camelot.  And Arthur realizes that this is his chance to let the story be told and passed on to history.

(SIDE NOTE:  I believe that I read long ago, and even if not, it's been my firm certainty, that the character here of the young boy, Tom of Warwick, who King Arthur knights to run off and tell the story, is Alan Jay Lerner's homage to Sir Thomas Malory who in 1470 wrote Le Morte d'Arthur, which is considered the source today of most Arthurian mythology.  Further, Sir Thomas was from Warwickshire.  His book, actually a series of eight short books, was published in the form we now know after his death in 1485.)

This finale from Camelot is deeply moving, and the line “For one brief shining moment” is not only glorious on its own, but for those who lived through the Kennedy years, it’s has such powerful resonance.
 
In fact, Alan Jay Lerner discusses this final scene in his memoir, The Street Where I Live.  He says that initially, the first act was seen as the strongest, for its charm and whimsy, and that the darker, more political second act was seen as more problematic.  But after the Kennedy assassination, he says that that perception of the show all flipped.  The following week, Theodore H. White wrote an article on Kennedy for Life Magazine, which quoted Jacqueline Kennedy saying how much Jack had loved the musical Camelot, and played the cast album often at night.  And how he loved to hear the lines at the end, “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”    When the article ended, it was with the passage, “She said it is time people paid attention to the new president and the new first lady.  But she does not want them to forget John F. Kenney or read of him only in dusty or bitter histories:  For one brief moment there was Camelot.”
 
The magazine article made major news across the country, and then Lerner tells the story of the first performance of the show after it appeared.  Camelot was on the road at the time, touring in Chicago, playing at the Lyric Opera House, a huge facility with 3,000 seats.  He writes what he was later told happened that night –
 
“The theatre was packed.  The verse quoted above is sun in the last scene.  Louis Hayward was playing King Arthur.  When he came to those lines, there was a sudden wail from the audience.  It was not a muffled sob; it was a loud, almost primitive cry of pain.  The play stopped, and for almost five minutes everyone in the theatre – on the stage, in the wings, in the pit, and in the audience – wept without restraint.  Then the play continued.”
 
This is that scene. 
 
No, this isn’t from the original production.  But it’s the original himself.  And the production.  You'll probably have to turn the volume up quite a bit -- but it's worth.

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And here are links to all previous episodes of this Third International Elisberg Industry Film Festival of Camelot.

Part 1 – https://www.elisbergindustries.com/blog/dont-let-it-be-forgot-the-overture
Part 2 – https://www.elisbergindustries.com/blog/dont-let-it-be-forgot-part-2
Part 3 -- https://www.elisbergindustries.com/blog/dont-let-it-be-forgot-part-3
Part 4 – https://www.elisbergindustries.com/blog/dont-let-it-be-forgot-part-4
Part 5 -- https://www.elisbergindustries.com/blog/dont-let-it-be-forgot-part-5
Part 6 – https://www.elisbergindustries.com/blog/dont-let-it-be-forgot-part-6
Part 7 -- https://www.elisbergindustries.com/blog/dont-let-it-be-forgot-part-7