Manilow today: Once he recovers from the flu, the 69-year-old pop icon will play B’way. (Tony DiMaio/startraksphoto)
Sitting pretty in pink, the superstar composer Barry Manilow croons his way through a set of his hits in the ’70s. (
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The first inkling of trouble came Tuesday night, right after Barry Manilow finished the first performance of his Broadway concert at the St. James.
The curtain came down, the house lights went up. But Manilow’s fans — as rabid as Hugh Jackman’s — wouldn’t leave. They screamed and stomped their feet for more.
“My voice was gone, but if I didn’t go back out there, they were going to riot,” Manilow says. And so, despite a nagging sense that something wasn’t quite right with his voice, he returned to the stage and sang “One Voice.” The audience sang along. One man shouted, “I f – – king love you, Barry!”
Two days later, after chatting with me for an hour, Manilow went backstage for a sound check before the show. He opened his mouth, and nothing came out.
Manilow’s been laid low with the vicious flu that’s ricocheting ’round New York, and has been forced to cancel last night’s opening and this weekend’s performances.
(It’s not my fault, I swear! I had a flu shot!)
His fans were crushed. But no one’s as devastated as Manilow himself.
“I’ve never felt this bad in my career,” he says. “Even when I had hip surgery and was in agony, I performed. I really want to throw myself off the bridge.”
Manilow, 69, plans to be back Tuesday night, and he’s adding make-up shows in February.
These concerts mean a lot to him. Raised in Williamsburg “before it was hip,” he’s been a Broadway baby since he was 13 and his stepfather brought home a bunch of albums that changed his life.
“That stack of records was a stack of gold,” he says. “There was classical, jazz, Sinatra, Judy, Bobby Darin, and mixed in were Broadway original cast albums — ‘The Most Happy Fella,’ ‘The King and I,’ ‘Oklahoma!,’ ‘Candide.’ I memorized every one. My musical motor was turned on.”
When he was 15 he saved up enough money to sit in the back row of the Broadway Theater for Ethel Merman’s final performance in “Gypsy.” But as good as she and the show were, what transfixed Manilow was the orchestra pit.
“That’s where I wanted to be, playing in the orchestra pit of a Broadway show,” he says. “I would have been very happy being a member of Local 802 [the musicians’ union].”
In the early ’70s, Manilow started making the rounds of the New York music scene. He was a gifted piano player. “I can make a piano sound like the band behind the singer,” he says.
He accompanied Donna McKechnie at her final audition for “A Chorus Line.” He played for Bernadette Peters and Margaret Whiting and, famously, for Bette Midler at the Continental Baths in the Ansonia.
He also wrote and arranged jingles — “I’m Stuck on Band-Aids,” “State Farm Is There,” “Kentucky Fried Chicken.”
“Standards, Michael, standards!” he says. Jingles taught him an important lesson about songwriting: “You had to have a hook. You had to write the catchiest melody in a very short space.”
But not once did Manilow think he’d become a singer himself. What he wanted to do was write a Broadway musical.
All that changed when a demo album he made of some songs he’d written came to the attention of Bell Records. Bell hired him to make a record. Midler was incredulous. “But you don’t sing!” she said.
Manilow had to tour to promote the record. “It was a terrible experience,” he says. “I was awkward. I just wanted to get out of the way. But the audiences didn’t seem to mind.”
When did he finally get comfortable singing onstage?
“Last week,” he says, laughing. “I’m happiest when I’m writing songs.”
In 1974, legendary music producer Clive Davis took over Bell Records and folded it into Arista. Of Bell’s long list of artists, Davis kept just three — Melissa Manchester, the Bay City Rollers and Manilow.
“You need a hit single,” Davis told Manilow, and handed him an up-tempo rock song called “Brandy.”
“If you do it right, it’s a hit single,” Davis said.
Manilow tried it as a rock song, but it didn’t work. So he re-arranged it as a ballad, changed the title to “Mandy” and sang it for Davis.
“That’s it! That’s it!” said the Man with the Golden Ears.
“Mandy” rocketed to the top of the charts, and a kid who dreamed of playing in the pit of a Broadway musical became a pop icon.
With the money from “Mandy,” Manilow moved into the San Remo. His next-door neighbor was the Broadway lyricist Fred Ebb.
“The day I moved in, he saw me struggling with the door, so he gave me his Emmy to use as a doorstop. So now I use my Emmy as a doorstop, too.”
Manilow was shaving one morning when he heard through the wall John Kander at Ebb’s piano, pounding out the notes to what would become “New York, New York.”
Though he’s on Broadway, there are no show tunes in his act. “Barry Manilow on Broadway” is 90 minutes of Barry Manilow hits — “I Write the Songs,” “Can’t Smile Without You,” “Ready To Take a Chance Again,” “Could It Be Magic” and — how could he not do it? — “Copacabana.”
“I rehearsed a bunch of standards,” he says. “I’d love to do ‘Dancing in the Dark.’ I had a great arrangement of ‘Give My Regards to Broadway.’ But they all hit the floor. After all these years, I know what my audience wants, and it’s my job to give it to them. This is not an artistic Broadway show. But I know I’m right.”
Now all he has to do is get well soon.