The Band’s Visit, music and lyrics by David Yazbek, book by Itamar Moses. Philadelphia Academy of Music through January 19, 2019.
The Band’s Visit is a delicate, intimate show about the power of music, told with an exceptional musical score. The story about an Egyptian band has mostly-Arabic music composed by the half-Lebanese David Yazbek.
It’s the first time this ethnic genre has been heard on Broadway, and I’m happy to see the show on its national tour. The catchy songs are played by the on-stage band which adds an energetic instrumental encore. These melodies make this a must-see event.
A police band from Alexandria Egypt is engaged to perform at an Arab Cultural Center in the Israeli city of Petah Tikvah. Instead, a member of the orchestra buys bus tickets to the tiny isolated town of Bet Hatikvah. The band members are stranded in the desert village and are dependent on the hospitality of its residents. The local café owner named Dina tells the men, “There is not Arab Center here. Not culture, not Israeli Culture, not Arab, not culture at all.”
The Band’s Visit is based on a small-budget 2007 Israeli movie by the same name. This musical version was mesmerizing off-Broadway and in the 1058-seat Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway. The national tour in the 2500-seat Academy of Music still delivers a musical punch, but the story has lost some of its appeal.
Many attendees will still be swept away while others feel that the small-scale musical gets lost in a cavernous theater and the plot seems slow. The problem is partly that all the characters speak broken English with foreign accents, and the amplification has reverberation.
No fault lies with the excellent company. The café owner is attractively played by Janet Dacal (known for In The Heights) and the leader of the band is the courtly Sasson Gabay, who was the star of the original movie. Tony Shalhoub played the role in the musical premiere in New York. The hilarious supporting role of a shy Israeli is played by Adam Gabay, who is the real-life son of Sasson Gabay and who was a troubled adolescent in the HBO drama Our Boys.
The script by Itamar Moses emphasizes the importance of music as Dina reveals that as a child she would listen to music on Egyptian radio stations, and a widower recalls the favorite music of his late wife (“Love starts on a downbeat”), and the band’s clarinetist keeps trying to compose a concerto.
Another theme is the human connections made by dissimilar people from alien cultures. But the story is basically a fairy tale, with no hint of the tensions that exist between Arabs and Israelis. Some attendees will be moved by the tentative connections, and by a hint of incipient romance. Others will agree more with the description in the script at the show’s opening and closing, “It wasn’t very important.” That’s intentional. It recollects the intent of Seinfeld to be “a show about nothing.”
Its 90 minutes are filled with infectious music. My only regret is that most of the songs are too short at three minutes or less. And the closing jam could have been twice as long; it’s that good!