The reluctant pop superstar

Barry Manilow still writes the songs, but he'd like you to know that some of them are as far from Mandy as you could imagine. Meanwhile, his pop musical, Copacabana, continues its cha-cha across the country.

By JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times, published December 24, 2000

Barry Manilow blames it all on Mandy. If it hadn't been for his hit 1974 song, Manilow says, he might have become a different kind of musician.

"I was much more of a musical theater and jazz fan than I was of pop music," he says. "It was where I was going before Mandy hit. I was going to write for theater or I was going to arrange for other singers or I was going to play piano in some jazz band. Pop music or singing were never in my wildest dreams."

Manilow goes on, in a recent phone interview, to portray himself not as the glitzy singer-songwriter of I Write the Songs, Looks Like We Made It and other easy listening standards, but as a reluctant superstar.

"It was a lovely accident," he says of his performing career, which started to take off when he was Bette Midler's pianist for shows she did in New York's gay bathhouses. "I backed into it. It was only because (Arista Records mogul) Clive Davis saw something about what I did that he felt could be very successful. It wasn't my choice."

Today, Manilow says, he is back where he started before the 58-million record sales, the countless concert tours and TV specials and other triumphs, all meticulously chronicled in his five-page press bio. A musical based on one of his hits, Copacabana, opens this week at Ruth Eckerd Hall. He isn't in the show, but he wrote the songs.

Manilow, 54, grew up in Brooklyn, and he loved Finian's Rainbow, Carousel, Guys and Dolls, Gypsy and other musicals from the golden age of Broadway. In the creation of most of these shows, the songs grew out of a story idea, such as transplanting Romeo and Juliet to the juvenile gang wars of New York for West Side Story.

With Copacabana, Manilow and his longtime collaborators Bruce Sussman and Jack Feldman reversed the process by starting with a song, then developing a musical to go with it.

"It started off as a three-minute pop song, which is a very different thing to write a two-act musical on," Manilow says. "I don't know anyone who has ever done it. I don't know anyone who's even tried it."

The song was the result of a trip Manilow and Sussman took to Rio, where they stayed at the Copacabana Palace. That gave them the idea when they got back home and were ready to write some songs for Manilow's next album in 1978.

"Bruce and Jack gave me the lyric: "Her name was Lola/She was a showgirl . . . ' Anybody could have put a good melody to that. I did in a matter of minutes and we made a record of it, and I must say, I thought it was really catchy, especially that big drum intro. It became just about the biggest single I've ever had."

Copacabana, the musical, has a long, rather involved history. Several years after the single came out, Manilow wrote and starred in a made-for-TV movie based on it. Then came a live version at Caesar's casino in Atlantic City, which spawned a long-running show in Great Britain. That was overhauled for the production on tour in the United States since June.

The hit song about Lola, an aspiring songwriter, and the sleazy owner of the Copa, didn't give Manilow much to work with in developing a full-blown musical.

"Because the story was very, very thin, we decided to concentrate on how we told the story," he says. "We decided to make a love letter to those cornball Technicolor movie musicals from the 1940s: American in Paris, Easter Parade, any of the Mickey and Judy movies where, you know, they fall in love too quickly and the production numbers are ridiculously large, movies where Carmen Miranda sings these songs in outrageous outfits, and the Eve Arden character makes one wisecrack after another."

There are 19 songs in Copacabana, but Manilow fans in the audience have to wait for the one they came to hear.

"There's a little hint of it now and again, but it can't be performed until the very end, because the whole show is about a songwriter writing a song called Copacabana," Manilow says.

"He falls in love with the characters he creates and finds himself lost in this fantasy world, ignoring the world he's really living in, ignoring his wife, struggling to write a song. Finally, at the end of the show, he can sing the whole song."

Copacabana has gotten good notices, but Manilow acknowledges it is lightweight fare. He even agrees with Variety's reviewer, who warned against trying to take the show to Broadway.

"I would keep it away from New York," he says. "I think it's too naive for the critics in New York. I think audiences in New York would like it. I think my audience in New York would love it, but I don't think they would get a chance to see it. The critics are just too harsh. You can't get the crowd to come if they kill you. Look what's happening with shows like Seussical. They never get a chance to find their audience."

For Broadway, Manilow is banking on another musical he wrote with Sussman, Harmony, which is based on the true story of the Comedian Harmonists, a popular sextet in Germany in the 1920s that was broken up by the Nazis because three members were Jewish. It premiered last year at the La Jolla Playhouse in California. A tour is planned next year, then a New York production in 2002.

"Copa is adorable, but it's more my pop experience than it is my Broadway experience," Manilow says. "Harmony is the real thing."

Manilow has turned to musical theater when other pop singer-songwriters from his generation are doing the same. Paul Simon, Jimmy Buffett, Randy Newman and Elton John have all written shows that have met with varying success. The Capeman by Simon was a notable flop.

"I spoke to Paul about it," says Manilow, who didn't see The Capeman. "He didn't really know his way around Broadway musical writing. Just because you can write a story song -- and he is the most brilliant songwriter we have ever had -- doesn't mean you can write a musical. If anyone could have done it, Paul Simon would have been able to do it because he is a real maverick and he is so intelligent. But he found himself hitting brick walls that you hit if you don't know the craft of writing a musical. It's a definite craft, and you've got to stick to some of the rules."

Manilow says pop songs are self-contained stories, while theater songs are extensions of character and situation.

"It's one thing to write a story song, it's another thing to write a song that a character sings in a situation. It's a totally different way of coming at writing a song. You musicalize a scene. You take the best scene the book writer has written and you throw it out and you write a song. You only can have the characters sing when the emotion is so hot that they can't speak anymore."

Manilow admits that Harmony, with its tragic theme, might seem an unlikely vehicle for him. He is well aware that many listeners, not to mention critics, think of him as little more than a schlockmeister.

"When the public thinks of my image, they see the tip of the iceberg," he says. "Everybody's got much more to offer than just the thing that made them famous, and my love has been Broadway theater songs, jazz, classical music. Pop music was a big surprise. It was on-the-job training. But my heart has always been in theater and songs that allow one to sing about something other than baby, oh, baby, come back to me. As a songwriter, I love writing for situation and character. As a performer, I love performing songs that say something."

Theater preview

Copacabana, with music by Barry Manilow, lyrics by Bruce Sussman and Jack Feldman and book by Manilow, Sussman and Feldman, opens Tuesday and runs through Dec. 31 at Ruth Eckerd Hall. Tickets: $25-$45. (727) 791-7400.

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