Manilow's 'Copacabana' Hits the Road

Wednesday, December 6th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) â€” Everyone knows Lola was a showgirl. You know, the one with yellow feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there. But Barry Manilow has breathed new life into his 1978 hit, ``Copacabana,'' by turning it into a musical.

No one is more surprised by the longevity of the hit tune than Manilow himself. ``The next thing will be the ice show,'' he quips in a recent interview.

The catchy song â€” Manilow once wrote commercial jingles, like ``You Deserve a Break Today'' for McDonald's â€” isn't performed in its entirety until the closing moments of the show. That's when Lola's whole story â€” from the swanky nightclub, her bartender boyfriend to the gun fight and the faded feathers in her hair â€” can be told.

Manilow wrote the ditty while vacationing in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, ``during my first nervous breakdown,'' he says, half-joking. ``I'd become a huge superstar. ... I wrote 'Mandy' and I couldn't walk around. Ask anyone who's done this. It's not a pleasant thing.''

Hence the need for a getaway.

``We stayed at the Copacabana Palace hotel,'' he says. ``There was a Copacabana beach, Copacabana ashtrays.'' His friend, songwriter Bruce Sussman, asked him if there had ever been a song about Copacabana? And so an idea was born.

Miami disc jockeys played the Latin-flavored disco tune straight off Manilow's 1978 album, ``Even Now.''

Manilow was already a fixture on the pop charts. He hit it big with 1974's ``Mandy,'' which soared to No. 1 on music charts. A steady stream of mostly love ballads like ``Even Now'' and ``I Write the Songs,'' followed.

But ``Copacabana'' was a departure for Manilow and the spicy, sexy song rocketed onto the Top 40 list and spent nine weeks there.

Seven years later, the song was reinvented as a television movie, starring Manilow and Annette O'Toole. The New York Times called it ``a sweet salute to old-fashioned musicals.''

``I wasn't bad,'' Manilow recalls. ``I wasn't good, but I wasn't bad.''

Next, he took his ``musical fantasy'' to Caesar's Resort in Atlantic City, N.J. In 1994, ``Copacabana, the Musical'' debuted in England. The production was a glitzy reproduction of the Atlantic City show.

Critics gushed, often against their seemingly better judgment. The (London) Guardian's critic called the show ``mile-high, gold-plated kitsch,'' but added, ``as much as my critical self may deplore it, my uncritical alter ego had a good night out.''

But the show still wasn't quite what Manilow had envisioned.

``It's really an American musical comedy,'' Manilow says after a recent publicity session at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts. He calls it a combination of ''42nd Street,'' ``Crazy for You'' and the big, splashy MGM musicals of decades ago.

The revised production opened in June in Pittsburgh to solid reviews in The Philadelphia Inquirer, which called it ``fizzy and pleasantly retro'' and hailed its ``glamorous sets and costumes, great lighting and music.'' The show will tour through next summer. It stops in San Jose Jan. 9-28, before moving on to St. Paul, Minn.

Lola's story is now being told in a $3 million production: flashy costumes, a cast of 30 singers, actors and dancers, and 19 songs written by Manilow and longtime writing partners, Sussman and Jack Feldman.

Stewart Slater, one of the show's producers, says he was immediately sold on the show.

``Who doesn't know the music? Who doesn't know Barry,'' he says. ``If the word is bad, nothing happens. It's really hard to revive a show that had bad reviews or didn't make money.''

Unlike the popular ``Mamma Mia!'' â€” a retrospective of Abba hits from the 1970s â€” ``Copa'' features original music written specifically for the musical. Manilow does not perform.

``I'm too old,'' the 54-year-old Manilow explains when asked why he's not playing Tony, the bartender who falls in love with Lola. ``The role belongs to a young guy with an energy.''

So, the part went to Franc D'Ambrosio, who starred in road productions of ``The Phantom of the Opera''

D'Ambrosio says that he played Manilow's 1979 ``One Voice'' album so much he wore it out. ``I grew up with Barry trying to stretch to hit his high notes,'' the 38-year-old performer gushes.

``Copacabana'' is not Manilow's first foray onto the theatrical stage. In 1998, he premiered ``Harmony,'' the story of a half-Jewish, German singing group called the Comedian Harmonists, popular in the early 1930s until it was disbanded by the Nazis. A critically acclaimed German movie about the group played in art house theaters last spring.

Meantime, there's ``Copa.''

``This was a very strange road this song has taken us on,'' says Manilow, who has shed his 1970s trademark look of white spandex and bushy, bleachy hair for a take-me-serious look: black jeans, black shirt, black leather jacket. He still looks younger than 54, trim and tanned with close-cut, blond-tipped hair.

``It was a challenge to get a two-hour musical out of a three-minute song,'' he says. ``It's a very thin plot line. ... But it was the way we were going to make it a tribute to those old movies. They had thin plot lines, too.''

Manilow's career itself has gotten pretty thin since his heyday in the 1970s and '80s. He went from being pop's brightest star to a joke almost overnight. People made fun of his clothes, his hair, his sappy songs. But it doesn't seem to bother Manilow. He says he's first and foremost a songwriter.

``This is the year of the composer for me. I've stopped my insane tour schedule and I'm going to concentrate on my writing. This is what my passion has been the past couple years,'' he said. ``I can perform, but that's not what's really in my heart. ... I'm not a superstar, not in my heart and not on my passport ... it says 'musician.'''

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On the Net: www.copacabanatour.com