Scooter! Thank you and long time no speak! I hope all is well with you.
Yes, you found my review of “Harmony” in Los Angeles from April 2014.
Everyone, here is the text of my that review via the link Scooter graciously found.
Hi, everyone. I'm Steven, and though I haven't posted much here in the last three years or so, many of you newsgroup veterans will know me as among the first and more active posters in this newsgroup dating to the mid-1990s.
Before I get to my review of "Harmony," which we saw today in its last performance in Los Angeles, I want to wish you a happy Easter, happy Passover or simply a happy spring of renewal. In other words, chag sameach - happy holidays to you all.
My better half and I, who live in the New York City area, happened to have scheduled a trip to Los Angeles for Passover to see family - and when we realized our stay was coinciding with the last day of Harmony, we rushed to buy tickets. Or I did, I being the Manilow appreciatee and my partner along for the ride.
To be sure, I also care a whole lot about the subject matter, having studied it as well has having entered rabbinical school myself in mid-career. And like you, I've loved the songs of "Harmony" ever since Barry started including them in concert around the time the show premiered in La Jolla around 1997.
I digress only to tell you how much I desperately wanted to love "Harmony." I entered the Ahmanson today in the best frame of mind possible. I came in floating on air to finally see Barry and Bruce's dream.
Friends, I agonized as to whether to review the show here after we saw it, because there's no way public figures ignore newsgroups about them - certainly their managers and other staff don't. And in no way would I ever want to hurt anyone's feelings, given how much Barry's music has made a difference in our lives, often with Bruce's brilliance.
I want to be kind.
I didn't love the show, and I am being kind.
The Los Angeles Times' review, which was mixed, was, in my opinion, spot on. No, I don't believe any negative reviews of particular works of Barry, or of anyone else's or heck, of my own work or yours or that of anyone close to us in real life, means the reviewers didn't "get it" or that the reviewer is being mean. That is, unless the meanness is gratuitous.
That won't happen here. I'm going to rein in many of the negative sound bites I could write like any other reviewer, only better. Barry and Bruce deserve better personally.
The music is magnificent. We all knew that.
But first, the direction is tooth-achingly and near-fatally clunky. As The Los Angeles Times wrote, the direction is stagey, unimaginative, literal, so darn unsophisticated compared to what the best directors on Broadway to today. If this is Tony Speciale's first direction of a musical - and I think he's a superbly talented director - well my goodness, you can tell. The actors incessantly turn to the audience when they sing the numbers. The cast doesn't have enough layered interactions with each other - too little that feels like real life, too little that breaks the third wall.
It's a huge problem with the show, making it feel like an early MFA program production. If that's an ouch to those personally involved in the show reading this, my apologies.
The show feels like too thin a production on the one hand, too few cast members beyond the principals, notably in extras, that give it any sense of the grand evilness of the time as a counterpoint to the six. The vibe is that of a stripped down road show of something that was much fuller on Broadway. That might be okay for any far smaller city, perhaps, but not for Los Angeles and not for the Ahmanson, a massive theatre, equal in size or bigger than the biggest theatres on Broadway.
The paradox, on the other hand, is while the show feels too thin, with too small a cast - and frankly too small an orchestra with not a full-enough sound for the Ahmanson; a bit of a shock because none of us are used to anything without a full sound coming from Barry - there indeed is insufficient character development in Bruce's book to make us feel emotionally attached to the principals on stage.
Again, The Los Angeles Times has it right: To the extent we feel emotion, it's because we know the brutal real history rather than because we're attached to the people on stage.
The show does get better as it goes on. I preferred Act Two infinitely to Act One.
Act One is now longer than what I hear is a substantially pruned down Act Two, and most of the songs we've gotten to know best from "Harmony" are in Act One.
But the book is much stronger in Act Two - indeed there are flashes of character development in Act Two that teeter us on the cusp of caring about the people on stage.
But Act One? The exposition in show's beginning half hour or so is, well, challenged. That's as kind a word as I could use - a euphemism exponentialized.
The show introduces each character in rapid succession with changing signs and logos, of a sort, rotating as each character comes on, and that's the exposition. It is not enough. It does not work. And from what I read in other posts here, if Barry and Bruce took out some character development at the beginning, they need to put it back in and put in more. More, more, more. Desperately more character development.
The writing delves into huge predictability at points, especially in the first Act that takes place just before the genocide of Jews, as the actors make multiple references to time being on their side because things won't get as bad for the Jews in Germany as things are getting elsewhere.
We're supposed to gasp at the naivete. But it is so heavy handed. At some points - and remember, I'm a hardcore Barry Manilow fan who cares deeply about this subject matter - the obviousness had me rolling my eyes. And that's not me besides - no cynic I am.
The acting? Hannah Courneau as Ruth, a communist anti-Nazi protester who vaguely evokes Barbra Streisand's emerging leftist character in "The Way We Were," nearly steals the show. Will Blum is the best of the male characters.
A central problem: Shayne Kennon, I believe humbly, is obscenely miscast as the rabbi. Oh, technically he does a fine job - a nice, nearly operatic singing voice. But there is nothing about him, not a bone in his body, that enables him, as an actor, to pass for, well, who he is supposed to be playing.
The production seems to want to overcompensate for that by having assigned him what seems to be a New York Jewish accent, something I know a bit about as it comes out of my mouth. But it's a terrible facsimile of an accent and even if it were a good one, why? The show takes place in Germany, not in Flatbush.
Yet at other times, when Shayne isn't overdoing the not believable accent, he overenunciates - as does some of the rest of the cast - in yet another stagey, artificial theatre way, or I should say the way theatre used to be and thankfully no longer is. Again, that makes it hard to relate to the characters and hard to break down the third wall to become organically connected with the show.
Look, I could go on - writing for another hour and holding back less. The show is not ready for Broadway. The songs are beautiful, the love put into it is beautiful, the story upon which the show is based is undeniably compelling. The direction needs to be entirely different. Bruce could use a collaborator on the book for fresh eyes - frankly, it may well be that after having spent 20 years on the book, it's hard to approach it with freshness. That could happen to any of us.
You get the picture: I did not love "Harmony" and I thank you for letting me post what may not be a well-received review.
Steven