THE NEW SONDHEIMS?

By Richard Zoglin

When he was 13, Barry Manilow got a new stepfather, an Irish-American truck driver who brought with him a stack of Broadway albums. The Brooklyn teenager listened over and over again to musicals like The King and I and Kismet, and since he couldn't afford a Broadway ticket, he dreamed up his own narratives to go with the songs. Says Manilow: "I think my story was better than the Fiddler on the Roof I eventually saw."

Now Manilow is not only writing the songs, he's helping to tell the stories as well. His new musical Harmony (with book and lyrics by his frequent collaborator Bruce Sussman), at California's La Jolla Playhouse, recounts the career of the Comedian Harmonists, a popular German singing group of the '20s and '30s--composed of Jews and non-Jews--that was disbanded by the Nazis. Manilow on Hitler's Germany? Why not? "The pop-music business doesn't want to work hard; it just wants a catchy melody," says the sentimental troubadour, whose string of pop-chart-topping melodies--Mandy, Looks Like We Made It, I Write the Songs--ended years ago. "You get to a point where you look for other places where you can do it, and Broadway seems like the right place."

It is seeming like the right place to more and more pop songwriters. Paul Simon is putting the finishing touches on his first Broadway musical, The Capeman, based on the life of a New York City teen convicted of a gang murder in 1959. Elton John wrote most of the songs for The Lion King, a stage version of the hit movie, opening on Broadway next week. Jimmy Buffett has tried his hand at a musical--Don't Stop the Carnival, which had a successful run last spring in Miami--and so has Randy Newman, whose musical version of Faust is shopping for a new venue after stagings in La Jolla and Chicago. Even country star Garth Brooks is reported by Variety to be mulling a musical based on the western movie Shane.

It's a logical turn of the wheel. In Broadway's golden era, the songs Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and others wrote for the stage were the same ones that sat atop the nation's hit parade. But with the advent of rock 'n' roll, pop and show music diverged. Though a stray Broadway hit might get radio airplay (Don't Cry for Me, Argentina), and a whiff of something like rock occasionally stirs the Great White Way (Rent), Broadway became a separate and self-contained musical domain, irrelevant to the most creative musicians of the rock generation.

Now that's starting to change. One reason is that those rock-era composers are getting older, and Broadway looks more enticing than it did when they were churning out Top 10 hits. But it can be tougher than it looks: telling a coherent, musically integrated story onstage is not like choosing songs for a concept album. Newman, for example, has written some of his richest, most antically likable music for Faust, but the jokey, sophomoric book doesn't serve it well enough.

Manilow's new musical has a problematic book as well. The story is narrated in flashback by one of the music group's members, a former rabbi (Danny Burstein), who is forced to step outside the story constantly to foreshadow the impending tragedy. (The sound of a train is heard: "No, not yet," he cries. "There's time!") The provocative subject matter is sometimes trivialized (gentiles cutely mispronounce Yiddish words); at other times, romanticized. In real life, after being forced to split up, the Harmonists formed two rival groups (the Jews having fled the country), and there was animosity between them afterward. In the show, everyone gazes at the heavens at the end and sings, "Are we fools to see the harmony that fills the sky?"

Still, there's ambition here, and a tuneful, often lovely score in Manilow's swoony, retro mode. What's more, the central metaphor--a group known for harmony trapped in the most tragically discordant time in modern history--is hard to resist, even amid the Manilow schmaltz. What the heck: he wrote the songs that made the whole world sing. Doesn't he deserve a chance to make Broadway choke up?

--With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles