CDs: Harmony at the Copacabana

Barry Manilow's latest album features the pop giant performing seven songs from each of his two major musical-theatre efforts to date. There's nothing from an obscure Manilow musical, an adaptation of the old melodrama The Drunkard that received an early-'80s A&E telecast starring Tom Bosley.

In 1978, "Copacabana" was a hit song for composer Manilow and lyricists Bruce Sussman and Jack Feldman. The song became the basis for a 1985 CBS made-for-television movie musical, also called Copacabana, and starring Manilow himself as an aspiring songwriter in the 1940s who falls for a singer named Lola.

The screenplay was by James Lipton. In addition to the title number, the TV film included such new songs as "Sweet Heaven" and "Who Needs to Dream?" An homage to movie musicals of the '40s, Copacabana is available on an Image Entertainment DVD.

After a test run in Atlantic City, Copacabana became a full-fledged stage musical at London's Prince of Wales Theatre in 1994. Starring Gary Wilmot and later Darren Day, the stage version included a new framework in which a contemporary songwriter is composing the title number, which then unfolds as the Tony-Lola story of the '40s. For the London Copacabana, Manilow, Sussman, and Feldman added about eight new songs, the best of them Lola's introductory declaration, "Just Arrived."

The London Copacabana survived for more than a year. In the 2000-2001 season, there was a U.S. touring version, directed by David Warren and choreographed by Wayne Cilento, with Franc D'Ambrosio and Darcie Roberts in the leads. In 1999, a one-hour version of Copacabana was featured on Holland America cruiseships. A new U.K. tour went out in 2003, and the show has also had several international productions.

With book and lyrics by Sussman, Manilow's musical Harmony concerns the Comedian Harmonists, the popular German vocal act that was torn apart by the rise of the Nazis. The Harmonists have also been the subject of a good German film as well as the disastrous Broadway documusical Band in Berlin. Manilow's Harmony had its world premiere in 1997 at the La Jolla Playhouse, with Danny Burstein, Rebecca Luker, Patrick Wilson, and Janet Metz among the company, directed by Warren.

Harmony was a far more serious attempt at musical theatre than the kitschy Copacabana, and Harmony has been announced for Broadway ever since La Jolla. It came close in 2003, when a pre-Broadway mounting in Philadelphia was shut down in rehearsal for lack of funds, with the authors thereafter reclaiming rights to the show.

Copacabana got a full-length London cast recording, so the seven Copacabana songs featured on Manilow Scores are familiar. They remain tuneful, lightweight, show-biz-pop confections, from the lush ballad "Who Needs to Dream?" to the snappy "Just Arrived" and the strutting "Sweet Heaven." "This Can't Be Real" is performed here as a duet by Manilow and Olivia Newton-John, and the Copacabana set concludes with a new dance-mix version of the title song.

Of the Harmony tracks, the only number not heard in the La Jolla production is "And What Do You See?" Because the elaborate orchestral and vocal arrangements in which the Harmony songs are heard here lean toward pop, these numbers may sound less theatrical than they would in the actual production. Still, there's the infectious title tune; the dramatic ballad "Every Single Day"; a haunting "Where You Go"; an attractive "In This World"; the driving "This Is Our Time"; and a stirring finale, "Stars in the Night."

Manilow's vocals are expectedly solid throughout this enjoyable program.

THE BROADWAY MUSICALS OF 1960 Bayview

Unlike the previous eight CDs in the Broadway Year by Year series, the latest one, saluting 1960, features no previously unrecorded songs. That's partly because 1960 was a peak year for cast recordings, with even the disastrous Maureen O'Hara vehicle Christine meriting no less than a Columbia cast album.

1960 was the year of Camelot and Bye Bye Birdie, plus Irma La Douce, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and Do Re Mi. Even its flops ---Wildcat. Tenderloin, Greenwillow-- are fairly well-known.

Only three Broadway musicals from 1960 went unrecorded, and only one of them --David Merrick's short-lived L.A. revue import Vintage 60-- is represented in The Broadway Musicals of 1960, recorded at Town Hall on June 9, 2003. Unrepresented in the concert are the book show Beg, Borrow, or Steal, which starred Betty Garrett, Larry Parks and Eddie Bracken, and the Hermione Gingold revue From A to Z, which included material by Jerry Herman and Fred Ebb.

After a forthright rendition of "Kids," guest star Tovah Feldshuh gets to deliver the rarity of The Broadway Musicals of 1960, a sweet Vintage 60 waltz, "Isms" Sheldon Harnick-David Baker, in which a child rejects the wordly "isms" that adults throw around in favor of a nicer one she has just discovered. The song was previously recorded on the album 18 Interesting Songs from Unfortunate Shows.

Brent Barrett, who played Camelot's Arthur at Paper Mill, gets to preserve handsome renditions of "How to Handle a Woman" and the title song. Marc Kudisch repeats the "One Last Kiss" that he sang in a Birdie tour and telefilm. The star of the recent revival of the Comden-Green-Styne Bells Are Ringing, Kudisch also provides a big-voiced "I Know About Love" and "Make Someone Happy," from the same team's Do Re Mi.

He's joined in the latter by soprano Lisa Vroman, who is also in fine form on a vibrant "Fireworks" duet with Barrett and in two of Julie Andrews' numbers from Camelot. An animated Eddie Korbich does Tenderloin's "Picture of Happiness," and returns for a bravura "Late, Late Show" from Do Re Mi.

Previously unknown to me, baritone Douglas Ladnier makes a strong impression with songs from three flops, "Summertime Love" Greenwillow, "Tall Hope" Wildcat, and Christine's title tune. He and Vroman share Irma's lovely "Language of Love." Liz Larsen leads a lively "I Ain't Down Yet," then takes Lucille Ball's half of "You're a Liar" opposite Kudisch.

As ever, the accompaniment is from Ross Patterson's versatile, four-piece band. Even though The Broadway Musicals of 1960 features little that you haven't heard elsewhere, it's a mostly pleasant outing.

100 YEARS OF PETER PAN Sepia

J.M. Barrie's stage play Peter Pan had its debut at London's Duke of York's Theatre in late 1904, and to mark the centennial, Sepia has issued a compilation of related music.

The original stage version included songs by Barrie and John Crook, the latter also the composer of the incidental music. The new CD opens with orchestral medleys of Crook's original score, recorded in 1919.

No Peter Pan cast recordings were made until 1940, when several 78s were issued featuring dialogue, background music, and some brief songs. For the recordings, Jean Forbes-Robertson returned to the title role she had played throughout the '20s and '30s, and Dinah Sheridan repeated the Wendy she had played on a '30s tour.

The 1950s produced two Peter Pan Broadway cast albums. The most celebrated one is, of course, from Mary Martin's full-fledged musical version of 1954. But in 1950, the Barrie play got a successful Broadway revival co-starring Jean Arthur and Boris Karloff, and it featured incidental music by Alec Wilder and songs music and lyrics by Leonard Bernstein. Issued on CD in 1988, Columbia's Broadway cast album of the Arthur-Karloff production is mostly dialogue, with incidental underscoring and Bernstein's brief song score.

On its new release, Sepia offers the CD premiere of a separate, two-disc 78 set featuring Arthur, Karloff and company in an adaptation of the play for children, narrated by canine Nana Miriam Wolfe and condensing the dialogue and incidental music no songs to about fifteen minutes. As a neat bonus, Sepia has also extracted from the largely spoken-word Columbia cast album Bernstein's five songs, sung by Marcia Henderson as Wendy and Karloff as Hook. Two of them --"Who Am I?" and "Build My House"-- are lovely, although Henderson doesn't do them justice.

Sepia's CD continues with cover versions of the songs by Sammy Fain, Sammy Cahn, Frank Churchill, and Jack Lawrence from Disney's 1953 animated feature film version of Peter Pan. Doris Day offers creamy accounts of "Second Star to the Right" and "Your Mother and Mine." The Sandpipers with Mitch Miller and his orchestra perform five other numbers, as recorded for the children's Golden Records series.

The new CD concludes with two recordings of "Peter Pan I Love You," a popular song of the 1920s not from any stage version. Wisely avoiding anything from the well-documented Mary Martin version, this new disc makes for a charming seventy-five minutes.