Barry Manilow musical ‘Harmony’ to hit Broadway in fall

“Harmony,” Barry Manilow’s musical about a German singing group with Jewish membership crushed by the Nazis, is due to reach Broadway this fall after more than two decades of development, producers said Friday.

The musical, which enjoyed a sold-out run at New York’s National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene last spring, will begin previews at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Oct. 18, the production said. Opening night is scheduled for Nov. 13.

“Harmony” debuted in 1997 at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego and has been reworked and tweaked over the years. But Manilow has always wanted to take the show to New York.

“We’ve had four productions of ‘Harmony,’ and each one of them was better than the last,” Manilow told the Daily News. “We couldn’t get it to New York. We just kept hitting brick walls.”

But the resistance fell when the musical reached lower Manhattan’s National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, where it received warm reviews, paving its path to Broadway.

“This time there was no brick wall,” Manilow said.

The show tells the story of the Comedian Harmonists. Comprised of six real-life German men, three of them Jewish, the popular group was deemed “degenerate” by the noxious Nazi regime. The Nazis destroyed their records and tried — unsuccessfully — to erase them from history.

The musical features songs by Manilow with a book and lyrics by longtime collaborator Bruce Sussman. The story follows the Comedian Harmonists as they rise from Berlin’s subways to become stars, only to be unraveled by antisemitism.

The Brooklyn-born Manilow, 79, continues to tour. He popularized songs including “Mandy,” “Copacabana (At the Copa)” and “Can’t Smile Without You.”

Manilow and Sussman, a 73-year-old lyricist, are both of Jewish descent.

Sussman said last year that the musical tracks the efforts of six men on a “quest for harmony in what turned out to be the most discordant chapter in human history.”

“All I know is that these six extraordinary human beings should be remembered,” Sussman said. “And Barry and I are committed to doing whatever we can to make that happen.”