I love live performances of any kind: concerts from Jimmy Buffet to the Atlanta Symphony, community theater to the Fox Theater. Rarely have I been so moved by a performance as I was by HARMONY – A NEW MUSICAL. I saw it in it’s first run at the Alliance Theater at the Woodruff in Atlanta, Georgia. The story, the music and the actors transported me back to a time in history that makes most of us want to change the channel. It was a reminder to never look the other way. Yet it was intense with sparklers illuminating hope. I laughed and I cried, I even forgot to breathe during the last half of the show. As I left a sold out theater, the echo of quietness reverberates still. I had to put the pieces of my heart back together at the end.
HARMONY – A NEW MUSICAL, with music by Barry Manilow and book & lyrics by Bruce Sussman. HARMONY tells the true story of The Comedian Harmonists, a close harmony ensemble of six young men in 1930s Germany, who took the world by storm until their religious composition – a mixture of Jews and Gentiles – put them on a collision course with history.