Last time in this space, I urged you to see The Pianist. Here's something in a similar vein worth looking forward to.

When I was a kid, I had an older cousin who today would probably be called a "groupie." But back then, the term was "bobby-soxer"; my cousin was one of the female teen-age herd that ran after Frankie and "swooned" at his concerts. She actually belonged to a group called S.S.S. - "Souls Suffering from Sinatra-itis"!

Well, that cousin is long gone; today I have a younger one who is something of a Barry Manilow "groupie." She thinks little of flying long distances to visit relatives - like me - in places where she can see various productions of his "Copacabana." She thinks nothing of driving a couple of hundred miles by herself to see more "local" productions. And, as a card-carrying member of his fan club, she gets regular recorded messages from Manilow himself.

Well, that cousin is long gone; today I have a younger one who is something of a Barry Manilow "groupie." She thinks little of flying long distances to visit relatives - like me - in places where she can see various productions of his "Copacabana." She thinks nothing of driving a couple of hundred miles by herself to see more "local" productions. And, as a card-carrying member of his fan club, she gets regular recorded messages from Manilow himself.

From Cousin Barb, I learned that Barry Manilow is following "Copacabana" with a stage version of the story about (now, note the similarity to "The Pianist" here) six German musicians - including a couple of Jewish ones - who made it big time in pre-World War II Europe.

This impossibly diverse group, dubbed "The Comedian Harmonists," included one certified musical genius plus a doctor, a rabbi, a singing waiter, an opera basso and a pianist from what used to be termed "a house of ill-repute." There is already a film about them, "The Harmonists," that details their unlikely coming together to create what Manilow's Web site calls "a new brand of entertainment which ... combined the physical humor of the Marx Brothers with the musical sophistication of a singing group like our modern-day Manhattan Transfer."

"The Harmonists" comes around every once in a while, and I urge you to see it next time. The sextet started as street entertainers and wound up filling major concert halls in the United States as well as throughout Europe. They made a dozen movies of their own, and their records sold in the millions. And then came the Nazis, and the inevitable problems - both external and internal - of a group that combined men embraced by the new regime and men that the new regime would rather do away with. This film is not filled with the visual, visceral horrors of "The Pianist," but it delivers its own powerful, emphatically cautionary message.

Manilow's take on the entertainers he says "were completely unique and remain so to this day" is called, simply enough, "Harmony." According to Robert Simonson on the Web site, it was first tried out late in 1997 at the La Jolla (Calif.) Playhouse. Manilow had high hopes of taking his newest baby to Broadway in 1999 and, when that didn't pan out, to Chicago in 2001. But that didn't happen either. Maybe, Simonson opines, "The fortunes of 'Harmony' may have been slowed by the failure which met the 1999 Broadway bow of 'Band in Berlin', another musical retelling of the Comedian Harmonists' tale."

I never heard of "Band in Berlin." But I know that we will all soon hear about "Harmony," because its fortunes are looking up now. Even as I was writing this, Cousin Barb posted an excited e-mail: a message direct from Barry to his fan club members announces that the show will finally open in mid-October of this year at Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale, and after a three-month run, will indeed move on to New York.

The nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn who has been scoring musical shows since he was 18 - the man who was able to turn a single hit song with a rather thin plot line into a full evening of entertainment - is certainly the one who'll be able to bring the Comedian Harmonists to real life on stage.