When rehearsals began for Concord within the still-sweltering days of early September, it marked the beginning of one thing new and likewise the fruits of many years of ready and hope for its creators, pop icon Barry Manilow and author and lyricist Bruce Sussman. The flurry of exercise over that week, which additionally included the musical’s marquee going up and the field workplace opening, had Manilow—actually no stranger to accolades and fanfare—feeling a degree of shell shock.
“It’s coming at us,” he shared, sitting in a midtown restaurant throughout an escape from the warmth. “We’ve gone via so a few years of believing on this present, and it is a [moment of], ‘grasp in there lengthy sufficient, that is what you get.’”
Sussman, his collaborator of fifty years, couldn’t include his feelings throughout that first day within the rehearsal room. When he stated, “Welcome to Concord on Broadway,” he compelled the final phrase out with a crack in his voice.
From Julieta Cervantes.
It was a “catharsis,” he stated, seated subsequent to Manilow, including later that he hoped the duo would have the ability to take these milestones in as they saved coming. As a result of when Concord—which boasts authentic music from Manilow (learn: not a jukebox musical) and e-book and lyrics from Sussman—formally opens at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre on November 13, it will likely be a Broadway bow almost 30 years within the making.
Concord is predicated on the true story of the Comic Harmonists, a German sextet that rose to fame within the late Nineteen Twenties and early ’30s with their musical and comedic stylings, however as a result of three of these members have been Jewish, the group was all however erased from historical past as soon as Hitler got here to energy. On the top of their fame, the Harmonists have been worldwide sensations, promoting tens of millions of albums, making films, and performing with the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Josephine Baker. However beneath the Nazi regime, possessing their music in any respect was thought of against the law.
Director-choreographer Warren Carlyle (The Music Man), who’s directing the Broadway manufacturing and likewise helmed Concord’s 2022 off-Broadway run, put it in a extra fashionable context: “They have been essentially the most well-known boy band on the planet—and we by no means heard of them.”
Sussman first realized of the Harmonists by way of a German documentary in regards to the group. After watching the movie, he rushed to a downtown Manhattan pay telephone (this was the ’90s, in spite of everything) to name Manilow; they’d been in search of one thing to write down a musical about, and this could possibly be it.
