Harmony closing February 4- Page 2

[PipingHotPiccolo]

Posted: 1/17/24 at 6:42am

allofmylife said: "I'd like to see Julie Benko get more meaty roles."

Amen-- and ditto for the rest of this very talented cast. The show--particularly the insufferable writing--was elevated by incredible performances. Chip Zien deserves a Tony nomination for selling those lazy, almost feverishly insane, monologues, and if there were a Best Ensemble award as their should be, this team would be on the short list. 

Cant help but find myself feeling sorry for Manilow, whose heart was in the right place, and who chose a worthy story/subject to throw his work into, only to wind up with this mess. 

[muscle23ftl]

Posted: 1/17/24 at 7:19pm

I hope the Tony voters are generous to these great actors! A certain critic is literally ruining Broadway, he shall remain nameless.

[rosscoe(au)]

Posted: 1/25/24 at 5:54pm

Saw this today for a whopping 18 buck rush ticket. Four rows from the front. Sadly this didn’t work for me. A fascinating story that should have left me feeling something. I found it hard to connect to any of the characters. I will say the audience around me loved it, some giving standing ovations mid show. Glad I had the chance, but it should have been devastating and it was fluff. Of course as always just my opinion. 

[BrooklynGal20]

Posted: 1/26/24 at 12:58am

I’ve seen Harmony several times, including off Broadway last year, and I think it’s a heartbreakingly, beautiful show with a phenomenal cast. Maybe it should’ve been a limited run because now that it’s closing, the remaining shows are almost sold out. 

[KarenValentine'sheadband]

Posted: 1/26/24 at 8:02pm

I saw it and loved it too. Shame it didn't find its audience. Considering all the junk that has played Broadway in the last ten years I'd say this was not as offensive as some are making it out to be. I do think it deserves some Tony nominations. 

[Jarethan]

Posted: 1/26/24 at 10:57pm

BrooklynGal20 said: "I’ve seen Harmony several times, including off Broadway last year, and I think it’s a heartbreakingly, beautiful show with a phenomenal cast. Maybe it should’ve been a limited run because now that it’s closing, the remaining shows are almost sold out."

It is mostly sold out because of the extreme discounting they have done.  I admit that I really disliked this show.

[Charley Kringas Inc]

Posted: 1/27/24 at 8:17pm

Two thirds of this show was a hot mess express, and the remaining third was compelling and frustrating in equal measures. There's an interesting story in there about people stepping aside as evil rolls through, but they spent a quarter of a century working on this show and the best they can do is bring it to a simmer for about twenty minutes.

As for what works, Sussman's lyrics were quite good, very solid and punchy, and a lot of the musical numbers had a kind of shapely muscle to them that I appreciated. The sequence at the end, where Rabbi accounts for how all of the other members of the show passed away (some immediately, some over time), and reconciles with being the last one alive, and the one who has to remember, was also very moving.

Unfortunately, the rest of the show is just...this and that. Putting Zien front and center means we get lots of Zien, which is wonderful, because he's up there acting his heart out and doing his best to sell the stale zingers he's been saddled with. However, the memory-play aspect feels incredibly tacked-on, and his function throughout the evening is muddled, which means the epiphany and closure he receives at the end feel disconnected from the rest of the show. For too much of it, he's just doing antics and occasionally going into hysterics.

It also means that the Harmonists themselves get almost no room at all to be developed as characters, to the extent that I honestly couldn't identify them individually in a lot of scenes until the dialogue informed me, and even then, who are they? Why, for example, does Bobby want to go back to Germany at the end of the first act so badly that he gets a big impassioned number about it? This element of his character seems to come out of nowhere because he's spent the entire first act as That Guy #4. When they all get their send-offs at the end, I knew almost nothing more about them than I did at the start of the show.

As a musical, it's mostly a mess, though I Will say that "And What Do You See" and "Every Single Day" are both genuinely very good (the former in particular is extremely good at developing Mary's point of view). The rest struggle in some way or another, with many of them feeling their age (they could be cut songs from his two Don Bluth scores), and to me, Manilow has a tough time building on his initial melodic themes. The most obvious example is "Where You Go", where Manilow's deviations from the original Chopin are like a dated, tacky extension to a classic building, but you also have the comedy numbers, which are weighed down by pounding repetition.

None of this is helped by the book, which makes a lot of baffling structural choices (the Josephine Baker number??) and saddles the actors with leaden, lumpy dialogue. They do their best with it, and the production itself is fairly slick, though the neon floor tape is unfortunate. It's a shame those lightbulbs at the very end couldn't stick around for longer, it produced the same effect as some of the Kusama mirror rooms, and I do kind of wonder if Borritt reverse engineered the entire design to get to that moment. However, the overall visual sense of them being lost in this glossy, black void felt appropriate.

I think the best thing about this show is how, much like Glazer's Zone of Interest, it feels like an overt call to action, even if both works focus on an extreme example. I still think "would you have killed Hitler?" is such a hoary chestnut that it's hard to take entirely seriously, but regardless, I never thought I'd see an overtly pro-assassination musical. Tasking the audience with considering how they might stop events, if they would give their lives to halt a train of unimaginable cruelty, is a highly respectable goal. If they'd found a better way to center the show around exploring how people step aside, this might have cohered, but it's so all over the place up until the end.

Also, though Zien does a great job of massaging Threnody into a functioning number, Nathan Lane singing Betrayed will forever be imprinted over it for me.

[Patti LuPone FANatic]

Posted: 1/27/24 at 10:23pm

With the lovely Julie Benko outside of the Barrymore Theatre   Dec. 24, 2023.
 

Updated On: 1/27/24 at 10:23 PM

[KarenValentine'sheadband]

Posted: 1/27/24 at 10:59pm

The cast recording cd arrived today. I'm thrilled and thankful I have it. I will say I much prefer Shayne Kennon's { from the LA cast in 2013/14 } beauiful voice over Danny Kornfeld as the young Rabbi. Kornfeld's works his vibrato on overtime. It's a lot to take at times. 

Updated On: 2/4/24 at 10:59 PM

[KarenValentine'sheadband]

Posted: 2/4/24 at 11:25am

I was lucky to see it again yesterday. A friend had an extra ticket. It was wonderful. Sad it never found its audience. It's better than many other shows out there, IMO. It will be missed. 

[muscle23ftl]

Posted: 2/4/24 at 12:21pm

It's always sad when great shows close because people don't go to see them. Yet, they pay high prices to see a circus or woke garbage- left and right. But oh well, that's showbiz!

[BETTY22]

Posted: 2/4/24 at 1:04pm

GREAT show TERRIBLE director.....

How does Warren Caryle get work as a director? 

[bwayphreak234]

Posted: 2/4/24 at 1:15pm

I saw this in previews last year, and I honestly don't remember much about it. It was an underwhelming and forgettable evening.

[BroadwayNYC2]

Posted: 2/4/24 at 1:19pm

“ Yet, they pay high prices to see a circus or woke garbage- left and right.”


there’s not much going on up there, is there? 

[JSquared2]

Posted: 2/4/24 at 1:50pm

BETTY22 said: "GREAT show TERRIBLE director.....

How does Warren Caryle get work as a director?"

Carlyle was the least of the show’s problems. He was saddled with authors who have grown too close to the material over the last 25 years and were resistant to changes.  He also had one of the worst producers on Broadway.  

[GottaGetAGimmick420]

Posted: 2/4/24 at 1:57pm

I can’t help but feel sorry for all those “micro investors” Davenport and co had investing money into this. When it’s rich people blindly writing checks, it somehow feels less scummy than when you convince “normal citizens” to shell out money for a flop……… 

 

anyway 

[EDSOSLO858]

Posted: 2/4/24 at 6:22pm

Hearing today’s final performance featured mid-show ovations for “Every Single Day”, “Where You Go”, and “Threnody.”

Final curtain call and brief remarks from Zien:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C28Yl_gOmw5/?igsh=MTNxaGg3c2VmZWxoMA==

[KarenValentine'sheadband]

Posted: 2/4/24 at 6:56pm

EDSOSLO858 said: "Hearing today’s final performance featured mid-show ovations for “Every Single Day”, “Where You Go”, and “Threnody.”

Final curtain call and brief remarks from Zien:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C28Yl_gOmw5/?igsh=MTNxaGg3c2VmZWxoMA=="

 

 

"Every Single Day" is a spectacular song. One of the highlights of the show. 

[BoringBoredBoard40]

Posted: 2/4/24 at 11:22pm

Was at closing, and wow Chip Zien performing Threnody, probably one of the most powerful things I have ever witnessed on a Broadway stage

[Mr. Wormwood]

Posted: 2/4/24 at 11:54pm

I really hope Zien still gets a Tony nom for this but I have my doubts with the closing happening now

[BrodyFosse123]

Posted: 2/5/24 at 9:26am

Mr. Wormwood said: "I really hope Zien still gets a Tony nom for this but I have my doubts with the closing happening now"

Why? Laura Benanti and Patti LuPone were Tony nominated for WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN (as was the score) and that musical had a shorter run and closed in January (2011).

[nealb1]

Posted: 2/5/24 at 9:56am

Nobody, regardless of their income level, is forced to invest in a Broadway show.  That we can all agree on.  

[Alex Kulak2]

Posted: 2/5/24 at 10:26am

Broadway is taking no prisoners this season. As others have said, audiences don't have the disposable income they used to, and tickets cost a much bigger piece of that disposable income. A show's not going to last very on the back of a few good tunes and a single great performance.