For many of those who see Barry Manilow’s name on the marquee of the new Broadway show Harmony, a New Musical, they might assume that his collaboration with longtime lyricist Bruce Sussman is a jukebox musical collated from their greatest hits. But it is not. The original production, which has been gestating and worked through numerous runs off-Broadway and out-of-town for the last 30 years, is about the real-life German singing group the Comedian Harmonists. They were a talented sextet — three Jews, three gentiles — whose burgeoning international career in the late 1920s and early 1930s was destroyed when the Nazis took over Germany. It starts as a peppy Broadway show, but the beauty of the music clashes more and more with the ugliness of the regime. Still, those great voices cannot be silenced nearly a century later.
At the core of the production is the dynamic collective and their dulcet, six-part harmonies which enchanted their audiences. Harmony was recently resurrected with an off-Broadway run at the 300-seat Safra Hall theater at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Spring 2022 before transferring to the Ethel Barrymore Theater for its Broadway debut this past November. There were some sonic changes along the way, but the core of the show remains the same.
Challenges Abound
A challenge at the centerpiece of the sound design was to make sure those honeyed harmonies resonate throughout, especially with the male singers ranging from tenor to bass. Early on, the show’s Tony Award-nominated sound designer Dan Moses Schreier told the producers that Harmony would be one of the more complex mixes he has ever had to create for a Broadway musical. Whereas many musicals often have numbers that focus on one or two lead characters, the majority of the big numbers here have six people singing as a unit. Beyond needing to blend the voices well, each number offers different challenges, which require different mixes.
The easiest numbers in the show are like the ballad “And What Do You See?,” which is a solo showcase for Sierra Boggess. “That was one of the numbers where I could sit back and relax and go, ‘Oh, that’s such a beautiful voice. That’s a beautiful song’,” recalls Schreier. “That was maybe one of the easier numbers to get right.” On the flip side, “We’re Goin’ Loco!” — the big ensemble Ziegfeld Follies number at the top of Act II — was difficult, as it added the complexity of bringing much of the band onstage.
“Half of the band gets pushed out on a wagon,” explains Schreier. “Some of the people are not on the wagon for the whole show, so we actually had to create two different sound systems — one system for when the band was off-stage in its ‘normal placement,’ and then another sound system had to be created with another set of ABMs and another set of microphones for when they were in their onstage position.”
Another big Broadway challenge was dealing with the gigantic mirror that wraps around the edges of the stage. Schreier and his team spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to keep the conductor’s video shot, normally seen from the front of the balcony, from being reflected in the set. “We discovered that if you use privacy filters (like ones used for computers screens) on the balcony rail conductor video monitors, they kept the video reflections off the mirror-like set,” Schreier reports. “It was a big problem downtown [at the Safra], and we were finally able to solve it uptown.”
The sonic reflection issues were handled through the timing of the P.A.
Harmony’s cast has 25 members including 11 principals, and the band has nine members including trombone/tuba, trumpet/flugelhorn, acoustic bass, violin, clarinet/flute/saxophone, three keyboard synthesizers and the conductor. Schreier says the band is located offstage stage right for all of Act I and most of Act II. For the number at the top of Act II, the conductor, the violinist and the bass player “have to move to a platform that is flown in — because there’s not enough room backstage — and then get into their positions while it’s attached to the wagon stage right with the woodwind, trumpet and trombone players that lives off stage. Then the whole newly assembled band platform moves onstage like a train, with a second set of microphones, video monitors and camera built into the flown section of the band platform.”
In the off-Broadway version at Safra Hall, the band was located on a little platform in front of the stage before the audience, so there was live acoustic sound being pushed into the venue on top of the amplification. “When it was decided to put them offstage [on Broadway], everything had to be miked and everything had to be balanced through the P.A.,” Schreier says. “The sound design of the show on Broadway technically has very little relationship to the sound design of the show downtown. I enjoyed the challenge of making the uptown show sound the same as the show downtown with a completely new system design.”
On Broadway, Harmony is being mixed on a DiGiCo Quantum 7T. The main mics on the cast are DPAs, while the band has a mixture of mics including AKG, DPA, Neumann, Schoeps, Sennheiser, Shure and Radial DI’s.
“All the guys have the smaller elements and are double-miked,” Schreier says of the cast. “They each have both an ear rig and a microphone at the center of the forehead that work as backups and for scenes where the actors wear hats.”
The P.A. system is mainly d&b audiotechnik. But because the musicians perform downstage of the orchestra pit, the hanging points for the sound truss were not in an optimum place. “Because everybody’s really far downstage, the hanging points are actually too far upstage,” Schreier elaborates. “So we built a square truss that hangs on two pick points so we can move the speakers into the house and get them in the right position. But because you only have two points, you had to build the counterbalance. We hung the subwoofers on the other side of the truss to counterbalance the arrays in the front of the truss. We set it up in the shop to make sure everything balanced correctly. As a matter of fact, we had to use bigger (heavier) subs to make the balancing of the truss work out.”
Surround sound was avoided. Instead, the design puts the singers into zones, depending on what location they’re singing from. “It keeps it all in time, so no matter where they are on stage, the way sounds come to the audience provides clarity by making sure the timing is all correct,” Schreier says. “It’s about vaudeville. It’s about the era between the [world] wars, so surround sound doesn’t really have a place in this particular storytelling.”
Working with Pros
Schreier also praises the talent and zeal of the show’s six leads, who he worked with off and on Broadway. “Every single one of them is a real artist and a wonderful singer, a wonderful performer,” he declares. “They were also great collaborators in terms of trying to find positions that worked better for them. For me, every step of the process with them was really wonderful. It helped that for most of them this was their Broadway debut.”
When asked about working with Barry Manilow, Schreier calls him a great musician and a consummate professional. He notes that the acclaimed singer-songwriter is known for his pop songs and not musical theater, but in fact the latter direction is where Manilow wanted his career to go until “Mandy” became a hit and the trajectory of his career changed. But as Schreier notes, the songs that Manilow and Sussman have written here are not pop songs but theater songs.
“One of the things that I truly admire about what Barry has done with the show is that he hasn’t written ‘Mandy,’” he says. “When he came in, he had his pop perspective, and initially we did that. Then as I got to do more of my work, we found this place in the middle, which really honored the time period. Yet at the same time, it gave the show the kind of zing that I think Barry wanted. My admiration for him really just went up leaps and bounds working on the piece. Getting to work with Barry and work with this material was really a pleasure. I have nothing but great respect for the piece.”
An Active Mix
FOH mixer John Sibley relishes the challenge of tackling this old school show with a very active mix. He needs to deftly blend the six-part harmonies and stay on top of things. “They’re also dancing their asses off sometimes,” Schreier notes, of the show’s leads. “As they get tired, the blending and the mixing changes, so it’s very active. John Sibley is doing a fantastic job — even though he says it’s one of the hardest shows he’s had to mix.”
Another element that Schreier loves about the show is that the main cast of Harmony understands the art of projecting. “There’s something glorious about that,” he declares. “I miss it personally — the sound of the human voice, when it’s projected forward, there’s nothing like it. And in this piece, you’ve got six guys who are singing their hearts out. They are giving the audience a lot of sonic level, which makes the show fun to design and mix — creating beautiful Harmony.”
