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Music Is a Time Machine: A Review of “The Band’s Visit” at Writers Theatre

by Amanda Finn | February 20, 2024

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Writers Theatre’s “The Band’s Visit,” with Rom Barkhordar/Photo: Michael Brosilow

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If we can have intentionally small-scale straight theater, so, too, should we have intentionally small-scale musicals. Some shows are best done in intimate spaces. Seeing “The Band’s Visit” in a massive theater with hundreds if not thousands of other people, even at a distance, was a moving experience. Yet that doesn’t hold a candle to seeing it at Writers Theatre . Shows like “Band’s Visit” and “Once” are just too fragile to be tossed onto any old stage.

They’re like music boxes. Meant to be appreciated, delicately, with great care.

After all, the show by David Yazbek and Itamar Moses is all about human connection. In theater, particularly Chicago theater, that connection is at its peak when you’re mere feet from the actors at all times. When you can almost feel the wistful sighs from Michael Joseph Mitchell (Avrum), you know a show has found its home.

An ironic sentiment as the premise of “Band’s Visit” comprises a band trio and their conductor visiting Egypt from Israel—but end up in Bet Hatikva instead of Petah Tikvah. What follows is a whimsical, heartstring-plucking day when the band members await tomorrow’s bus to take them to their concert location. Based on the charming 2007 film by Eran Kolirin, this musical reminds us that we can bypass cultural and linguistic differences when we try.

Writers Theatre’s “The Band’s Visit,” with Adam Qutaishat, Dana Saleh Omar, Dave Honigman/Photo: Michael Brosilow

Don’t take the music-box metaphor too literally. Director Zi Alikhan gives us an evenhanded production that allows audiences to see each of these characters as the vibrant people they are. Bet Hatikva is a small town—no one can hide in a corner and not be noticed.

Tewfiq (Rom Barkhordar), the band’s conductor and Dina (Sophie Madorsky), the townsperson who shepherds the band to homes for the night, are a truly dynamic pair of foils. In completely different places in their lives, the universe throws these two together to learn to open up to others, even the smallest bit. Madorsky plays off of Barkhordar so well that their character-building chemistry is off the charts. When you see this show in a huge audience far away, you miss the subtle moments of connection. But you’d have to be trying to miss them here.

Because this show is so heavily ensemble-focused, everyone gets their moment to shine. At the same time, you may feel a twinge of heartache when those spotlight sections are over. I’m going to need someone to cast Armand Akbari (Haled) in more croon-heavy parts and Sam Linda (Papi) as a musical’s lovable leading man stat. While we’re at it, Harper Caruso (Telephone Guy) is going to need some more centerstage, golden-age Broadway power ballads.

At one point in the show, Avrum says, “music is a time machine.” He’s absolutely right. “Band’s Visit” takes so many of the traditional musical theater-type songs and mashes them together into an enchanting story about what it means to be a person in the world with other people in the world. And suddenly, we’re reminded, hearts full, that we’ve heard this song before.

On stage through March 17 at Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe. Tickets are $65-$75; available at writerstheatre.org .

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Broadway Review: ‘The Band’s Visit’

Seamless transfer of this heart-warming musical brings Tony Shalhoub and Katrina Lenk together in a drowsy Israeli village in the middle of the desert.

By Marilyn Stasio

Marilyn Stasio

Theater Critic

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The set’s a bit grander and the music sounds richer, but success hasn’t spoiled this embraceable musical fable about the surprising friendships that bloom in the middle of a political desert. In this Broadway transfer of an Off Broadway hit , human error sends an Egyptian military band to a depressed Israeli outpost in a desert wasteland — and human connections bring Arabs and Israelis together on common ground.

Tony Shalhoub remains steadfast as lovable Colonel Tewfiq Zakaria, the modest commander of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra. The band was headed for the Arab Cultural Center in sophisticated Petah Tikvah, but was misdirected to Bet Hatikvah, a bleak little village in the middle of nowhere. Katrina Lenk is even more earth-shaking as Dina, the beautiful and incredibly vital café owner who is wasting away in Bet Hatikvah but comes alive when the band unexpectedly arrives in her little ghost town.

Broadway theatergoers looking for something off-the-beaten-musical-track should be charmed by this unassuming show, written by Itamar Moses (book) and David Yazbek (music & lyrics) and tenderly directed by David Cromer . But this disarming musical has the emotional depth that holds up to repeated viewings and the offbeat charm that could make it a cult hit.

“Once, not long ago, a group of musicians came to Israel from Egypt. You probably didn’t hear about it. It wasn’t very important.”  That unassuming statement, projected on the back wall of Scott Pask’s plain and simple (and amusing) set, is enough to grab the most jaded audience.

Actually, the visit turned out to be very important, on a universally human level. But not at first glance, when Tewfiq turns up at a bus station in Israel with his little band of musicians. The show’s musicians are onstage, trying to look like villagers, but members of that extraordinary band are occasionally called upon to pick up instruments of their own — and in some cases, play them very well.

Although the band is smartly outfitted in costumer Sarah Laux’s baby-blue ersatz-military uniforms, their government funding is in peril, and they absolutely must not screw up their assignment to perform at the initiation ceremony of the Arab Culture Center in Peta Tikva. The political and cultural significance of this mission weighs heavily on the fanatically steadfast Tewfiq, who stands ramrod straight (but is dying inside) in Shalhoub’s painfully honest performance.

Like other obsessive characters he has played, most notably Adrian Monk, the beloved OCD-wracked detective he inhabited for seven years on TV, Tewfiq transcends conventional character comedy. In Shalhoub’s hands, he is simultaneously funny and sad and a little bit crazy, and you absolutely have to love him.  When disaster strikes, Tewfiq stiffens his spine and stands straighter. And strike it does when the musicians are misdirected at the bus station. Instead of sophisticated Petah Tikvah, they find themselves in Bet Hatikvah, a dreary town in the middle of the desert.

Thanks to the revolving set and some quicksilver lighting changes by Tyler Micoleau, we can take in the whole town at a glance.  In “Waiting,” the first of the many nuanced (vaguely Arabic, vaguely Israeli, altogether enchanting) musical numbers in Yazbek’s wonderful score, the depressed residents are quick to tell the band what their uneventful life is like.  And in “Welcome to Nowhere,” Dina is joined by other disheartened residents to express their sense of isolation and their hopeless yearning for some kind of human connection.

With nowhere to go and nothing to do until the first bus arrives in the morning, the Egyptians are warily taken in by the Israelis, who reluctantly feed them, house them, and in one scene that is simply out of this world, entertain them at the circa 1970s roller rink.

Although no one exchanges a word about incendiary Arab-Israeli political matters, visitors and hosts slowly begin to acknowledge their common humanity. In “Haled’s Song About Love” (sung with romantic intensity by Ari’el Stachel), the tall, handsome ladies’ man in the band takes pity on a bashful young man (Etai Benson) and shows him how to woo a girl.

There’s nothing big or grand here. Connections are made on little things, everyday things, common things we all share. The transcendent moment of the show comes when the so-called Telephone Guy (the fantastic Adam Kantor) makes one final, desperate effort to reach someone on that infuriatingly silent telephone.  “Can you answer me?” he begs. And the entire ensemble does exactly that.

Broadway Review: ‘The Band’s Visit’ Ethel Barrymore Theater; 1,046 seats; $169 top. Opened Nov. 9, 2017. Reviewed Nov. 4. Running time: ONE HOUR, 35 MIN.

Production A presentation by Orin Wolf, StylesFour Productions, Evamere Entertainment, Atlantic Theater Company, David F. Schwartz, Barbara Broccoli, Frederick Zollo, Grove*Reg, Lassen Blume Baldwin, Thomas Steven Perakos, Marc Platt, The Shubert Organization, The Baruch / Routh / Frankel / Viertel Group, Robert Cole, Deroy-Carr-Klausner, Federman-Moellenberg, Roy Furman, FVSL Theatricals, Hendel-Karmazin, Horipro, IPN, Jam Theatricals, The John Gore Organization, Koenigsberg-Krauss, David Mirvish, James L. Nederlander, Al Nocciolino, Once Upon a Time Productions, Susan Rose, Paul Shiverick, and Executive Producer Allan Williams of a musical, originally presented by the Atlantic Theater Company, in one act with book by Itamar Moses, based on the screenplay by Eran Kolirin, and with music & lyrics by David Yazbek.

Creative Directed by David Cromer. Choreography by Patrick McCollum. Music director & additional arrangements by Andrea Grody. Orchestrations, Jamshied Sharifi. Sets, Scott Pask; costumes, Sarah Laux, lighting, Tyler Micoleau; sound, Kai Harada; projections, Maya Ciarrocchi, hair & wigs, Charles G. LaPointe; production stage manager, Richard Hodge

Cast Tony Shalhoub, Katrina Lenk, John Cariani, Ari’el Sachel, Andrew Polk, Etai Benson, George Abud, Adam Kantor, Bill Army, Rachel Prather, Jonathan Raviv, Sharone Sayegh, Kristen Sieh, Alok Tewari, Ossama Farouk, Sam Sadigursky, Harvey Valdes, Garo Yellin.

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Theater Review: “The Band’s Visit” — Revelations of Commonality

By David Greenham

This well-directed and -performed production of a musical about the universal longing for connection delivers a stirringly heartfelt experience.

The Band’s Visit . Music and lyrics by David Yazbek. Book by Itamar Moses. Directed by Paul Daigneault. Choreography by Daniel Pelzig. Music direction by José Delgado. Scenic design by Wilson Chin and Jimmy Stubbs. Costume design by Miranda Kau Giurleo. Lighting design by Aja M. Jackson. Sound design by Joshua Millican. A co-production of The Huntington Theatre Company and SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Huntington, 264 Huntington Ave, Boston, through December 17.

Jennifer Apple and Brian Thomas Abraham in the Huntington Theatre Company/SpeakEasy Stage co-production of The Band’s Visit. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

In these American days of divisiveness, name calling, and the general condemnation of people who “aren’t like us,” what a shock it would be to discover that we all have more in common than all the harmful rhetoric might suggest.

In 2018 — which now seems like decades ago — The Band’s Visit , a 90-minute one-act musical, improbably took Broadway by storm. All the more shocking: the show, based on a 2007 Israeli independent film, contained few of the glamorous trappings of a traditional Broadway musical. Missing are big production numbers, swelling with sharp and angular choreography, a cartoonish plot, propelled by formulaic smiles and hummable tunes, and a boffo inspirational ending.

Instead, this surprisingly mature musical details a subtle, moving, and thought-provoking story of loss, one filled with loneliness, ironic mistakes, and missed opportunities. There are challenges for American audiences: the Middle Eastern musical style will be unfamiliar to many and the dialogue contains Arabic, Hebrew, and stunted English with a strong accent. None of that cultural amalgamation lessens the impact of this generously spirited show.

The tale is set in 1996. The Egyptian Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra is booked to travel to Israel to perform at an important concert in the arts-rich Israeli city of Petah Tikva. A linguistic misunderstanding at the airport sends them off course. They end up way down in the country’s south, deep in the Negev desert in the tiny fictional town of Bet Hatikva. Locals Dina (Jennifer Apple), Itzik (Jared Troilo), and Papi (Jesse Garlick) promise the band members that their visit to their village will be terrible. They sing: “This is Bet Hatikva with a B — like in boring, like in barren, like in bullshit, like in bland, like in basically bleak and beige and blah, blah, blah.”

The Band’s stoic leader and conductor, Tewfiq (Brian Thomas Abraham), tries to find a way to correct the mistake, but there’s no bus out of town until the next day. Although they are reluctant to admit it, the strangers have no option but to spend the night. Thankfully, Dina takes charge and arranges makeshift lodging for the unexpected guests.

Dina brings Tewfiq and trumpeter Haled (Kareem Elsamadicy) to her apartment. She makes Itzik invite clarinetist Simon (James Rana) and violinist Camal (Andrew Mayer) to stay with his wife Iris (Marianna Bassham) and their baby, along with Iris’s visiting father Avrum (Robert Saoud).

The arrangement generates three small stories that take place over the course of the evening. Dina and Tewfiq visit a local cafeteria for dinner; Itzik, his family, and guests have a sometimes-challenging dinner at home; and Haled meets up with Papi to tag along on a double date at a roller-skating rink with Zelger (Fady Demian), his girlfriend Anna (Emily Qualmann), and painfully shy Julia (Josephine Moshiri Elwood).

As the trio of narratives progress in unplanned ways, we also watch the patient struggles of the Telephone Guy (Noah Kieserman), who is waiting for his girlfriend to call. He’s been standing by the local pay phone for a month: no one else believes she’ll call, but he is confident that the phone will ring.

Marianna Bassham, Andew Mayer, Robert Saoud, James Rana, Jared Troilo in the Huntington Theatre Company/SpeakEasy Stage co-production of The Band’s Visit. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

Each of the stories confidently explores the emotional depths of the leading characters: Dina and Tewfiq share the loss of the idealistic plans they imagined about love; Itzik and Iris’s marriage is failing; Avrum recalls with great joy the first time he saw his late wife; Simon seems to discover the inspiration that’s needed for him to finish a concerto he’s writing; and Papi’s fear of how to win over Julia begins to disappear thanks to Haled’s support and advice.

Other nonspeaking members of the band variously come in and out, accompanying the revelations with songs that dramatically enhance the primary scenes.

The problem of changing the locations of four stories, told simultaneously, has been cleverly solved by Wilson Chin and Jimmy Stubbs’s deceptively complex set. The staging’s set pieces seamlessly move in and out: the transitions are simple and crisp. (The choreography shares that virtue as well.) A wonderful set change occurs as late as the curtain call: a wall that’s designed to look like a parked bus is raised to reveal the rest of the members of the orchestra. It also serves as a sort of makeshift party platform for the final musical numbers. Also fun is the peripatetic public phone cubicle that the Telephone Guy rolls around the stage during most of the production as he patiently waits and waits.

Miranda Kau Giurleo’s costumes seem inspired by the original designs, especially Dina’s ensembles and the powder blue military-looking band outfits. Given that so many singers and musicians are milling about the stage, Joshua Millican’s sound design needs to be spot on. It is.

Only Aja M. Jackson’s lighting seems to intrude on underlining the material’s nuances. Pin spots frequently frame the soloists as the rest of the stage lighting dims. For me, the impact — with star turn framing — often served to separate the song from the dramatic context. The sumptuous songs and music can hold their own — no need to add a nudge of “the limelight.”

Kareem Elsamadicy, Jesse Garlick, and Josephine Moshiri Elwood in the Huntington Theatre Company/SpeakEasy Stage co-production of The Band’s Visit. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

Despite the separateness of the stories and the ever-changing settings, the ensemble comes off as a beautifully coordinated team long before the glorious “Answer Me” number, which features the Telephone Guy’s (Kieserman) wonderful voice calling the entire company into a splendid unity.

But it’s not the message of universal yearning that really drives The Band’s Visit : it is the compelling depth of its characters. Front and center is the unusual and absorbing interaction between Apple’s Dina and Abraham’s Tewfiq. The highlight of the production is Dina’s wonderful “Omar Sharif,” where she sings of her love for the music of famous Arab singer Umm Kulthum and the movies of her childhood, particularly the 1960 Egyptian film The River of Love , which starred Egyptian actor Omar Sharif. Dina and Tewfiq charmingly share their passion for this cinematic romance.

Needless to say, The Band’s Visit isn’t one of those “wrap everything up in a tidy bow” entertainments. Much like the history of the land where the story is set, this musical is untidy. No easy answers are provided. But, in this well-directed and -performed production, the show’s powerful look at the longing for connection makes for a stirringly heartfelt experience.

David Greenham is an adjunct lecturer of Drama at the University of Maine at Augusta, and is the former executive director of the Maine Arts Commission. He has been a theater artist and arts administrator in Maine for more than 30 years.

This sounds like a thoughtful, subtle show. I remember critics praising it on Broadway. I hope to see a production somewhere (I don’t live near Boston) and might try to watch the original movie. Thanks for such a detailed and nuanced review.

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‘The Band’s Visit’ Review: Music Is Love And Hope

“How does it feel like to do music?” Late at night, standing facing the sea, Twefiq (Brian Thomas Abraham), the conductor of an Egyptian police orchestra, raises his arms to conduct, and Dina (Jennifer Apple), an Israeli café owner, responds by following. They create a melody of their own, together. This breathtaking scene is from the musical “The Band’s Visit.” Running until Dec. 17, The Huntington Theatre and SpeakEasy Stage co-production of the Tony Award-winning musical was inspired by the 2007 Israeli movie about a chance encounter between Egyptian musicians and the people of an Israeli backwater.

The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, a band of men in peculiar powder blue uniforms, set out from Egypt to Israel, booked for a prestigious performance in Petah Tikvah. But an unfortunate blunder at the ticket office lands them in Bet Hatikva, a town off the beaten path in the Negev desert.

Three local families volunteer to accommodate the group of musicians, each of which conveys a different power of music, be it love, friendship, or kinship. The use of cutlery as instruments, with the stage embodying the ocean, momentarily makes the characters forget the differences between them. To witness the beauty of hope and new life, it is astonishing to see the differing forms that human love and sorrow can take. As a musician plays a soothing lullaby for a baby, words cannot do justice to the intense feelings evoked in audience members. Language and culture are no obstacles for music to bring people together.

This play is particularly relevant in recent times. In the midst of the pandemic, the world found itself pulled physically apart — and in a political climate that can make it tough to stay positive, “The Band’s Visit” serves as a reminder that music can act as a bridge between people.

Paul Daigneault’s direction, David Yazbek’s composition and lyrics, and Itamar Moses’s book make “The Band’s Visit” a one-of-a-kind musical. Dina recalls her childhood memories of Arab and Egyptian music on the television, and how it created a bridge between her and people she could not meet in person through speakers and screens; then, she and Twefiq join together to revisit the musical tales from the past. They reenact the scene from the film “River of Love” in which a man and a woman fall in love. Even without knowing the culture, anyone can relate to the feeling of being immersed in someone they love.

The story-sharing between Twefiq and Dina is nearly a remedy for the pain they have experienced. The pursuit of love, hope, and solace is enough to bring audiences to tears, but the musical cleverly injects humor into the melancholic tale with witty lines like, “Is he singing about two hearts searching in the dark, or is he just singing about fishing?”

Jennifer Apple’s portrayal of Dina, a powerful female character, is another rarity on stage. Her heartfelt and compelling female vocals animate Dina. With a keen understanding of Dina’s struggles and life choices, Apple’s performance embodies a raw strength, conveying a resolute determination to break free and pursue “Something Different” in life, as the song’s title and lyrics suggest.

In the role of Twefiq, Brian Thomas Abraham delivers just a few impactful lines, and only sings at the request of Dina. His commanding tone and to-the-point statements give him an air of authority. However, deep down, he yearns for intimate connections and the chance to heal from past trauma. Tewfiq carries a weighty burden, while Abraham’s performance is layered with a heavy heart.

“The Band’s Visit” flowers with the grace and joyful insistence of life itself. Music is a major part of the story — its influence on people from different backgrounds and its relevance in a present-day society that, unfortunately, places great emphasis on money and effectiveness. The musical only needs the audience to spend 90 minutes hearing the music in the whispers, murmurs, and silences of human life at its most mundane, to rediscover the beauty, love, and hope in our surroundings.

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Review: 'The Band's Visit' turns the theater into a garden of sound

Asu gammage's fourth show of the season whispers a song of loss and romance.

A scene from the musical "The Band's Visit" performed on Sunday, June, 23, 2019.

" The Band’s Visit " forces you to listen harder than any other show, to drink deeply of the joy and the loneliness baked throughout. 

Rather than exciting you with over-the-top dance numbers and high-octane belting, the show embraces silence, with multiple scenes absent of any music or dialogue, leaving audiences desperate for the next pluck of a string.

The show follows an Egyptian band, the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, on their journey to Israel for a concert, but a linguistic mixup at the bus terminal sends them to Bet Hatikva, a small town in the middle of nowhere, rather than the similarly named Petah Tikva.

The band’s leader, Tewfiq (played by Sasson Gabay), realizes their dilemma when he asks a local cafe owner, Dina (standby Hannah Shankman), for directions. She then explains where they are and that they are stuck there until the next bus comes the following morning. Suddenly stranded, Dina opens up her home and offers to help find other locals to take in the band for the night. 

Tewfiq and the easy-going Haled (Joe Joseph) stay with Dina while Camal (Yoni Avi Battat) and Simon (James Rana) spend the night with the new father Itzik (Clay Singer) and his family.  

As day slowly turns to night, the plot turns into three storylines: Dina decides to take Tewfiq out on the town, Haled joins Papi (Coby Getzug) on a double date to the roller rink and Camal and Simon stay with Itzik, his wife Iris (Kendal Hartse) and his father-in-law Avrum (David Studwell) for dinner. 

In the subtext of every interaction is the long and rocky history between neighbors Israel and Egypt, with the controversial beginning of Israel's statehood leading to multiple wars and living conditions of Palestinians in Israeli-occupied zones. Although Egypt was the first country to recognize Israel in 1979, the relationship since has been characterized as a “cold peace” with very few relations outside of military operations.

But the conflict is never made explicit, leaving the subtleties of the characters’ dialogue lost on some. While there is never outright hostility, there is level of distrust between two strangers. 

The strange and unfamiliar feeling is a part of nearly every scene, in particular those between Dina and Tewfiq, as she opens up to this quiet, closed-off man and they discover just how much they have in common.

Dina sings about how "the ship from Egypt always came / Sailing in on radio waves" in " Omar Sharif " when she and her mother would listen to Egyptian singer Umm Kulthūm and watch movies starring Omar Sharif. She was entranced by this taste of Arabic culture as a child and Tewfiq could share in those memories with her, recounting scenes with Dina over dinner.

The relationship between Dina and Tewfiq is the core of the show and even stronger than in the 2007 film the musical adapts, also titled "The Band’s Visit." The movie tells the exact same story, just without any of the singing. The emotional foundation is built upon by Tewfiq’s actor, Gabay, who reprised his role for the national tour and finds even more depth in the character on stage than on screen.

This evolution is made most clear and most heartbreaking in " Itgara’a ," a song that follows Dina asking him how it feels "to do music." Unable to express it in words, he begins faux-conducting and singing a hymn in Arabic, that in English is the crux of the show, "When you drink, drink deeply / Drink deeply of the moonlight / drink deeply of the dark / of the loneliness/of the joy."

Dina falls back into the same trance she described in "Omar Sharif," mimicking his movements and inviting the audience into the wonder they didn’t see coming, "Nothing is as beautiful as something that you don’t expect." 

It’s clear why "The Band’s Visit" swept the 2018Tony Awards winning 10 awards, including Best Musical — beating out "Mean Girls," "Frozen" and "SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical." It pulls you into a dreary world and tells you one of the most fanatical stories you’ll see on stage. 

With a Gammage season as star-studded as this one, including "Hamilton," "Hadestown," "Come from Away" and "Mean Girls." "The Band’s Visit" is an essential viewing for any musical theater fan and anyone looking for something magic.

"The Band’s Visit" plays at ASU Gammage Feb. 8-13, with tickets ranging between $10-$174 .

Reach the reporter at [email protected] and follow @Ryan_Knappy on Twitter.

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Review: ‘The Band’s Visit’ brings its musical poetry to Dolby Theatre

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A musical doesn’t have to make a lot of noise to dazzle. “The Band’s Visit,” the exquisitely delicate Tony-winning show now receiving its Los Angeles premiere at Dolby Theatre, treads lightly across the stage in a hush of magic.

Based on Israeli writer-director Eran Kolirin’s screenplay for his 2007 film of the same title, “The Band’s Visit” follows a group of Egyptian musicians who are stranded overnight in a sleepy desert town in Israel. Strangers in a suspicious land, they don’t expect to be welcomed. But instead of enmity, they find hospitality — their differences bridged first by courtesy, and later, as they get to know each other better, a somber-hued humanity.

Composer and lyricist David Yazbek infuses Itamar Moses ’ book with lyrical poetry. Discreetly flecked rather than dolloped, music provides a vehicle of shared expression for grief, longing and hope — a universal language that recognizes no borders.

The state-of-the-art Dolby, where the production runs through Dec. 19, is an ideal venue for a show that relies on quiet clarity. The theatergoing experience is refreshingly unharried. Spacious enough to comfortably accommodate a crowd, the Dolby manages through the crispness of its sound system and the sharpness of its lighting to feel intimate even at a distance.

And intimacy is essential for “The Band’s Visit,” a musical that moves lightly yet deeply into Chekhovian territory. The tone is playful, almost casual. But some essential truth about life is captured in the insouciant flow.

The scene is drolly set in a few sentences projected onto the stage at the start of the show: “Once not long ago a group of musicians came to Israel from Egypt. You probably didn’t hear about it. It wasn’t very important.”

Insignificance, however, marks the majority of our days. And what doesn’t make headlines turns out to matter a great deal.

The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, which was invited to perform at an Arab cultural center in Petah Tikva, is blown off course by a pronunciation error. The band winds up in Bet Hatikva, a fictional backwater that its own residents dismiss as “boring,” “barren” and “bland” in the wry number “Welcome to Nowhere.”

Dina (Janet Dacal), the owner of a café, greets this troupe of men with brusque bemusement. Tewfiq (Sasson Gabay, reprising the role he played in the film), the commander of the orchestra, asks with impeccable manners whether he and his musicians may dine at her establishment. With a businesswoman’s shrug, she consents.

Formality is out of place in Bet Hatikva. “Pick a sandhill of your choosing,” jokes Papi (Coby Getzug), one of the friendlier locals. But Dina is drawn to Tewfiq’s gravity and thinks he looks cute in his powder-blue Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band suit. She offers to find sleeping accommodations for the musicians after breaking the news that there are no more buses today.

The town is reluctant to open its doors, but Dina proves to be as formidable a commander as Tewfiq. She divides the men up, taking Tewfiq and Haled (Joe Joseph), a young romantic trumpet player obsessed with Chet Baker, to her place.

Haled has reason to be nervous. It was his innocent miscommunication that landed the band on the wrong bus. Tewfiq has made his impatience with dreamy-headed Haled loudly known. Haled, however, is like a puppy unable to stop chasing after fun even after getting whacked with a newspaper.

As in a Chekhov play, a busy plot isn’t needed for revelations to emerge. “The Band’s Visit” relies on the alchemy of unexpected encounters. Dina and Tewfiq, ships in the night that aren’t supposed to be in the same waters, discover a shared love of old Egyptian movies, which Dina sings about in a lovely ode appropriately called “Omar Sharif.”

The characters catch glimpses of one another’s souls. Music leads the way by lifting the banal exchanges into a sudden sublime. In one of the most moving instances of this elevation, Simon (James Rana), a clarinetist and aspiring conductor who’s staying with a husband and wife (played by Clay Singer and Kendal Hartse) in the throes of marital problems, soothes their crying baby with some strains from his instrument.

Peace breaks out in this tempestuous household, and suddenly all of the built-up resentments don’t seem all that important. Simon hasn’t been able to finish the concerto he started writing long ago, but his art has done its job of easing the daily suffering.

The unspoken hangs between Dacal’s Dina and Gabay’s Tewfiq as they share a drink in the evening air. An affectionate melancholy fills the gaps in what they have time to say.

Joseph’s Haled radiates a sensual enjoyment, made all the most precious by his awareness that his days of youthful freedom are drawing to a close. The eclectic blend of musical styles — traditional Arab, klezmer and jazz, among them — enhances the cast’s subtle emotional chemistry.

David Cromer’s fluidly directed production glides from the café to domestic settings to a roller disco, all the while keeping tabs on a phone booth, where a forlorn-looking guy (Joshua Grosso) waits eternally for a call from his girlfriend that never seems to come.

The scenic design by Scott Pask has the same jaunty quality as the show itself. The settings are sketched with a simplicity that is more like a diagram than a photograph. Yet the moonlit atmosphere lends this elsewhere a haunting individuality.

At a time when everyone seems to be so angry, conflicts appear to be irresolvable and communion no longer within reach, “The Band’s Visit” is like balm for a tired spirit. The musical touched me deeply when I saw it on Broadway in 2017, but after such a long period away from the theater, I found the show even more profoundly affecting.

Operating on a subtler-than-usual Broadway frequency, Yazbek and Moses’ musical drama invites us to transcend our rifts. I didn’t realize how badly I needed “The Band’s Visit,” but this gift of a show has arrived in just the nick of time.

'The Band's Visit'

Where: Dolby Theatre, 6801 Hollywood Blvd., L.A. When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends Dec. 19 Tickets: Start at $30 (subject to change) Contact: 1-800-982-2787 or BroadwayInHollywood.com or Ticketmaster.com Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes Also Segerstrom Center for the Arts March 22-April 3 at scfta.org

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The Band's Visit

Review Highlights

“ The musical is based on a 2007 Israeli film of the same name. ” in 3 reviews

“ Katrina Lenk is one of the best actresses/singers on Broadway right now. ” in 6 reviews

“ Much to my surprise it was a pleasure seeing Tony Shalhoub (the Monk) talking in his native tongue. ” in 5 reviews

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243 W 47th St

Ethel Barrymore Theater

New York, NY 10036

Broadway & 8th Ave

Theater District, Midtown West

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Overall rating

If you're looking for a lot of razzle-dazzle with a battery of sparkly-dressed toe-tappers with big voices, this is not the show for you. I knew it won the Tony earlier this year for Best Musical, but I heard so little about it that I didn't bother getting tickets - even though Broadway nerd that I am, I just noticed that I have by default, seen every Best Musical Tony winner on Broadway since 2002. How's that for a useless record by this random left coaster? Jamie W. and I only decided to attend on our last night in New York, and it had been playing at the Ethel Barrymore Theater for nearly a year. Although rotating sets fill the shadowy stage, the show itself played on a small scale in almost a cabaret style. It's only ninety minutes long with no intermission, so if you're measuring the value of your ticket price by the minute, you probably won't be happy. However, it was an enigmatic ensemble piece based on a 2007 Israeli film that focused on a single one-night episode where an Egyptian band of uniformed musicians find themselves lost in an Israeli desert town where they are greeted with initial hesitancy by the local residents. It was not a political drama but more a subtle mutual cultural lesson that finds both the band and the locals emotionally richer for their encounter. Last heard on the failed "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" on Broadway in 2010 (review: http://bit.ly/2pKoxMZ), composer David Yazbeck has written an affecting score full of Arabic colors and influences. None of the songs felt like pop hits waiting to happen but rather provided more melodic insights into the various characters. Unfortunately I missed seeing Tony Shalhoub as the band's reserved conductor Tewfiq, but in his place was the actor who played the role in the original film, Israeli actor Sasson Gabay. He definitely provided the gravitas upon which the slight plot spun. We were lucky to see the gorgeous Katrina Lenk in her Tony-winning role as Dina, the café owner seizing a moment to have something exciting happen in her humdrum life. Her writhing performance of "(Umm Kulthum and) Omar Sharif" was genuinely memorable. I can see how some would be disappointed by the show's low-key nature and decidedly off-the-beaten-path style, but it's definitely a most worthwhile evening of theater capped off by a wondrous jam session that combined the actors with the real musicians playing uniquely Arabic instruments. RELATED - Looking for a few thoughts on some Broadway shows? Here's a collection of shows I've attended and reviewed: http://bit.ly/2INr814

See all photos from Ed U. for The Band's Visit

True to the negative reviews, if you're looking for a cookie-cutter formula of a musical (which admittedly we sometimes are) to laugh and forget, this probably doesn't fit the bill. But if you're looking for a beautifully woven story with mesmerizing music, incredible acting and a show that touches you emotionally while intriguing you intellectually - this show is what good broadway is about. The set is well designed and reflects the setting perfectly. The stories of love, through its various stages and ages, is subtle yet powerfully portrayed. The acting is wonderful and the captivating live music performed onstage through the whole show weaves the story together. You laugh, you cry, and you walk away longing for more.

The Band's Visit left me a little frustrated. The musical numbers were solid gold but the acting and the story, I felt, were a bit slow and monotonous. I didn't mind the lack of substantial plot but stronger dialogue would have made that technique work a little better--in my humble opinion. You could tell some of the actors were singers and skilled in a number of instruments, which is phenomenal but impressive music with lackluster dialogue created an underwhelming show, unfair to the talented actors. I did read initial reviews, which were great. So I suppose I may have seen it on an off night. I've spoken to a few friends who seem to be split on determining if this was good or not. Seeing that tickets are affordable it may be worth a try. Maybe you'll get to see it on a night most - if not all - the jokes land.

While the Band's Visit was cute at best, it was not the "best new musical on Broadway" as they claim. Without a doubt, the music was the best part of this show - mesmerizing and beautiful - elegantly sung by Katrina Lenk and passionately played by skilled musicians. Some great performances by some of the lesser known actors who actually overshadowed Tony Shalhoub. Katrina Lenk's performance was passionate, but Tony Shalhoub's was lackluster and sleepy. Love him in Monk, but his stage performance was too similar to his Monk character. Plus, he tried too hard to mimick an Egyptian accent. It was painfully clear that this musical is low budget and not well rehearsed. There were some "new" musical kinks that need to be worked out - the choreography, the transitions from scene to scene need to be smoother and the awkward silences on stage need to be eliminated. There was a lack of a plot or story, there really isn't anything more to it than what is listed in the previews - a band spends the night in a town (mistakenly arriving there instead of the town they were supposed to go to). There are too many pointless sub-story scenes (guy staring at phone booth waiting for a girl to call and the couple with child fighting), which contribute nothing to what little story there is and are just an annoying distraction from the potential romance brewing between Lena and Tony's characters (which ends with a thud because nothing comes of it). The play tries really hard to get you to feel some sort of emotional attachment to some of the characters who feel trapped in the small town or in bad relationships, but when there is no plot or story to follow through with, it's really just a middle without a beginning or ending. There's not enough depth developed for any of the characters and even background info on Tony and Lena's characters don't fully flesh them out. It's just a snippet - a snippet which is not engaging enough to stand on its own and meet the expectations of demanding Broadway audiences. The play does move slow at times and does get rather boring - fortunately there is no intermission and it's a straight shot and done. If you are intrigued by the music and want to watch it for fun without any expectations, I'd say go ahead. If you have high expectations, then I'd say you may be disappointed and may want to skip it.

This was by far the worst Broadway musical I have ever slept through! Seriously when I go to a "show" I want to be entertained, not put to sleep! For those selling the subtle story line/plot, I argue it was glaringly horrible! Skip this one. One day a man went to a musical with his wife you probably didn't hear about it unless you are reading this review.

Really disappointed after seeing this show. Spent $220 on 2 tickets. The show was only about a hour and a half - much shorter than a typical Broadway show. The seats were the tightest of any theatre I've ever been to. Not sure how this won 9 Tony Awards... the sets were very drab, I was in the middle of the orchestra and I could barely hear the dialogue (no - I don't have hearing problems). There was really no story - there was almost no plot, no conflict, and no resolution. A band from Egypt (could have been any group of men from anywhere in the world because the fact that they're a band is rarely used or referenced) winds up in a town in Israel accidentally. They spend the night, walk around town a bit, and leave. The end. The songs were really dull and boring, there is no dancing, and the band rarely even plays (for about a minute between the set changes). Having seen 7 Broadway shows this summer, this was ALMOST the worst (though quite not as terrible as "The Play That Goes Wrong"). Would recommend spending your money on something else - felt like a waste.

Can I give this 10 stars?? Please! Hypnotic. Subtle. Poignant. Every. Single. Cast. Member. Is. Amazing! A must-see! Congrats to all the cast members and crew at The Barrymore!

If there was a way to give this play aZERO rating then I would. I just sat through an hour and 45 minutes of excruciatingly painful boredom. The storyline was very weak, and dialogue was difficult to understand due to their fake accents. It drug on, and on, and on. I wish I had my time and money back. Please, choose another play over this one.

I must be missing something, because the show was well-received by the audience. Music dreary. Singing weak..More tedious dialogue than singing .....Sloooow. . .Only good thing is that it was only 90 minutes and there was no intermission. It's my bet that the show has a short run, despite reviews that proclaim meaning and depth... saying so doesn't necessarily make it so.... my opinion is to spend your money elsewhere ... and I love the Broadway Theatre.

Possibly the best new Broadway show of the season. The music is haunting, at times enchanting, and the performances captivating and touching. Katrina Lenk, the female lead, is a true talent--gifted. She was wonderful recently in the play "Indecent." (Seems that getting to play the part of a Jewish girl is her regular gig). Her performance of "Omar Sharif" is captivating, elevating the song to a domain beyond the composition itself. There is no dancing in this play, but her body movement is as if it is choreographed. You also get to see Tony Shalhoub, who is endearing (isn't he always?). No one could play his role as well. The stage sets are deceptively simple but clever, and evoke a mood that works well with the narrative. The musical is based on a 2007 Israeli film of the same name. An Egyptian Police Band mistakenly winds up in a small, middle of nowhere, Negev desert village instead of a larger similar sounding town where they were going to perform. With no transportation until the next day, they spend the night with the locals. The Times review says it all: "A Ravishing Musical That Whispers Romance." You would never guess it from the storyline, but it really is about romance. I pick my Broadway shows carefully and I'm glad that I chose to see this one. You'll love the score, the musicians and the other performers are great.

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The Band’s Visit review – entrancing musical about nothing and nowhere

Donmar Warehouse, London When an Egyptian orchestra accidentally tips up in a sleepy Israeli backwater, lives are changed in the quietest of ways

‘N othing is as beautiful as something you didn’t expect.” That’s the story of this 2016 musical, and also its entrancing effect. Based on a 2007 Israeli film about an unplanned encounter between Egyptian musicians and the people of an Israeli backwater, the musical is a charmer about lives changed in the quietest of ways.

We first see a luggage carousel, and a clutch of men in incongruous powder blue uniforms. This is the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, booked for a prestigious gig in the city of Petah Tikvah. A mid-flirt mistake at the ticket office lands them in Bet Hatikva, a nowhere town in the Negev desert, “basically bleak and beige and blah blah blah”. It’s a place where nothing happens, every day.

The bus to the city doesn’t leave until tomorrow, so the musicians bed down around town. And that’s it, that’s the plot. We follow characters through a long warm evening – from a fractious family apartment to the local roller disco and a poor excuse for a park. Everything here is unfinished business: neglected ambitions, an incomplete concerto, a never-ringing payphone. Even Soutra Gilmour’s set is backed by tiers of bricks from an abandoned building project. At least the band has somewhere to sit.

And it’s music that drives the show forward, nudging the characters’ anxious minds and clouded hearts. With its klezmatic clarinet, emphatic oud and a flute like a desolate wind, it’s thrilling to hear the band’s squall and rumble. David Yazbek’s Tony-winning score begins in twitchy languor – the sigh of a place where nothing happens, the fret of wishing it would – then deepens, cradling songs of desire and disappointment.

If there is a central thread in this ensemble show, it’s the near-romance between Tewfiq and Dina, the gruff conductor and the local cafe owner. Alon Moni Aboutboul’s Tewfiq hides behind his peaked cap and mournful courtesy. As the night unrolls, he demonstrates the conductor’s art in a delicate hand ballet and scrapes the rust off his voice in lilting Arabic song.

Dina is smart, disillusioned and ragingly unfulfilled – we don’t know exactly how she feels about her ex-husband, but the decisive way she carves up a watermelon gives an idea. In a stunning performance by Israeli performer Miri Mesika, each song reveals new textures in her voice, from sardonic iron to yearning velvet. The standout number has her sink into the memory of watching Omar Sharif’s romantic movies, “floating in on a jasmine wind”.

Scenes in Itamar Moses’s tangy script often end too soon – they scarper at a song’s close rather than linger with a situation. Both hosts and visitors know each other too well, but encounters with strangers mean that people must explain themselves. Every conversation prises a lid off complex emotion, probes at tender places.

Even scene changes thrum with character in Michael Longhurst’s open-hearted production. I loved spending time with his poker-faced cast, masters of shrug and eye roll. They include Michal Horowicz’s miserable wife, too worn down to sing, Marc Antolin’s drifting manboy, Sargon Yelda’s attentive composer and Ashley Margolis, waiting by the phone like a lonesome muppet.

The smallest things can lift them. A doleful waiter (Harel Glazer), easily panicked by women, gets romantic advice at the roller disco. A tearful baby is soothed by a clarinet lullaby. This unexpected night may not change lives forever – but it helps people face a new day.

At the Donmar Warehouse, London , until 3 December

• Donmar Warehouse
• Soutra Gilmour

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A moving portrait of hope and heartbreak in ‘The Band’s Visit’

About midway through Paul Daigneault’s exquisite and luminous production of “The Band’s Visit,” Tewfiq, the conductor of an Egyptian police orchestra, and Dina, an Israeli café owner, are swapping quotes from an Egyptian film they both like.

“Love in itself is hope,’’ says Tewfiq. “And hope is a reality in our lives. Who can live without hope?”

Two declarative sentences and one rhetorical question, each of them built on the same simple but powerful word, all three of them combining to form the bedrock of a remarkable musical that refuses to give up on that word.

In a geopolitical moment when holding on to hope is extraordinarily difficult, “The Band’s Visit” is a reminder that our experience of theater has not only to do with what we see and hear once we’re settled into our seats. There are times — and this is one of them — when our responses are ineluctably colored by events in the outside world.

The horrors that have unfolded in Israel and Gaza in the past six weeks can make “The Band’s Visit” — with its belief in building bridges one person at a time, and its message that to step across cultures is to take a step toward peace — seem naïve, even Pollyanna-ish.

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It’s neither. The undertow of melancholy pervading “The Band’s Visit” reveals a musical that knows all about human sadness, and how many shapes it can take. But it also knows about the quite real possibilities for human connection when, say, Egyptians and Israelis join together in a vigorous rendition of “Summertime,” or when they whiz and totter around a roller-skating rink together.

David Yazbek’s score is a thing of beauty, utterly unimprovable. A band hidden upstage, as well as the performers portraying the Egyptian orchestra, capture all the vibrancy and poignancy of that score. The book by Itamar Moses is restrained, almost to a fault in spots. But overall, that restraint has the effect of forcing the audience to train our attention on small moments and small gestures — a focus that, in terms of generating an atmosphere of intimacy, pays off.

A first-time collaboration by the large Huntington and the midsize SpeakEasy Stage Company (where Daigneault is the founding artistic director), “The Band’s Visit” features knockout performances by Jennifer Apple as Dina and Brian Thomas Abraham as Tewfiq.

Essaying the role that made Katrina Link a star when “A Band’s Visit” opened off-Broadway and then, six years ago, on Broadway, Apple is an unstoppable, stage-seizing force. Her portrayal burns with intensity and a churning restlessness, depicting Dina as a woman who believes in action above all but is stymied by circumstance.

Apple is mesmerizing in her performance of the gorgeous “Omar Sharif,” in which Dina reminisces about watching Egyptian movies on a black-and-white TV with her mother as a child. (Of Sharif, Dina sings: ”He was cool to the marrow, the pharaoh of romance.”)

Abraham’s Tewfiq is gravely formal, starchy, and ultimately moving, conveying the sense of a man who’s comfortable being an authority figure (he’s a colonel) but is much less certain of himself in one-on-one interactions. Even as he moves toward a possible romance with Dina, Tewfiq projects a heaviness of spirit. The reasons for that become evident by the end of “The Band’s Visit.”

Dina and Tewfiq are thrown together when a transportation mix-up strands the Egyptian orchestra, attired in smart blue suits (costume design is by Miranda Kau Giurleo), in a small and sleepy Israeli town in the Negev Desert in 1996. (The set by Wilson Chin and Jimmy Stubbs transitions among several locations in a way that is both evocative and efficient.)

Jared Troilo, one of Boston’s finest actors, excels as Itzik, an employee at Dina’s restaurant, as does Emily Qualmann as Itzik’s desperately frustrated wife, Iris. (Qualmann substituted for Marianna Bassham, who usually plays the role, at Sunday’s performance.)

Also delivering textured portrayals are Robert Saoud as Avrum, Iris’s father; Kareem Elsamadicy as Haled, a trumpeter and a would-be ladies’ man whose come-on consists of asking women if they like Chet Baker; James Rana as Simon, the band’s assistant conductor and clarinetist; Jesse Garlick as the desperately shy, anxiety-riddled Papi; his crush, Julia, played by Josephine Moshiri Elwood, always an asset to any production; Fady Demian as Zelger, Papi’s friend; Anna, Zelger’s high-spirited girlfriend, played on Sunday by Jordana Kagan; and Noah Kieserman as the Telephone Guy, who waits anxiously near a pay phone in hopes of hearing from his beloved. Kieserman sings “Answer Me,” a spine-tingling ballad of yearning, with other members of the ensemble joining in to give voice to their private wishes.

“The Band’s Visit” puts its faith in individuals, in their power to make change, but it’s also realistic about the limits on that power. It begins and ends with the same words, but those words have acquired an enormous emotional weight on the journey from start to finish. Like much else in this exceptional musical, it’s likely to live in your memory for a long time.

THE BAND’S VISIT

Music and lyrics by David Yazbek. Book by Itamar Moses. Directed by Paul Daigneault. Choreography by Daniel Pelzig. Music direction by José Delgado. Presented by the Huntington and SpeakEasy Stage Company. At the Huntington Theatre, 264 Huntington Ave. Through Dec. 17. Tickets $30-$185. At huntingtontheatre.org or 617-266-0800.

Don Aucoin can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him @GlobeAucoin .

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The eight men wear sky-blue uniforms with gold braid on the shoulders. They look like extras in an opera. They dismount from a bus in the middle of nowhere and stand uncertainly on the sidewalk. They are near a highway interchange, leading no doubt to where they’d rather be. Across the street is a small cafe. Regarding them are two bored layabouts and a sadly, darkly beautiful woman.

They are a band from Egypt, the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra. Their leader, a severe man with a perpetually dour expression, crosses the street and asks the woman for directions to the Arab Cultural Center. She looks at him as if he stepped off a flying saucer. “Here there is no Arab culture,” she says. “Also, no Israeli culture. Here there is no culture at all.”

They are in the middle of the Israeli desert, having taken the wrong bus to the wrong destination. Another bus will not come until tomorrow. “ The Band ’s Visit” begins with this premise, which could supply the makings of a comedy, and turns into a quiet, sympathetic film about the loneliness that surrounds us. Oh, and there is some comedy, after all.

The town they have arrived at is lacking in interest even for those who live there. It is seemingly without activity. The bandleader, named Tewfiq ( Sasson Gabai ), asks if there is a hotel. The woman, Dina ( Ronit Elkabetz ), is amused. No hotel.

They communicate in careful, correct English; she more fluent, he weighing every word. Tewfiq explains their dilemma.

They are to play a concert tomorrow at the opening of a new Arab cultural center in a place has that almost, but not quite, the same name as the place they are in.

Tewfiq starts out to lead a march down the highway in the correct direction. There is some dissent, especially from the tall young troublemaker Haled ( Saleh Bakri ). He complains that they have not eaten. After some awkward negotiations (they have little Israeli currency), the Egyptians are served soup and bread in Dina’s cafe. It is strange, how the static, barren, lifeless nature of the town seeps into the picture, even though the writer-director Eran Kolirin uses no establishing shots or any effort at all to show us anything beyond the cafe — and later, Dina’s apartment and an almost empty restaurant.

Dina offers to put up Tewfiq and Haled at her apartment, and tells the young layabouts (who seem permanently anchored to their chairs outside her cafe) that they must take the others home to their families. And then begins a long, quiet night of guarded revelations, shared isolation and tentative tenderness. Dina is tough but not invulnerable. Life has given her little that she hoped for. Tewfiq is a man with an invisible psychic weight on his shoulders. Haled, under everything, is an awkward kid. They go for a snack at the restaurant, its barren tables reaching away under bright lights, and Dina points out a man who comes in with his family. A sometime lover of hers, she tells Tewfiq. Even adultery seems weary here.

When the three end up back at Dina’s apartment, where she offers them wine, the evening settles down into resignation. It is clear that Dina feels tender toward Tewfiq, that she can see through his timid reserve to the good soul inside. But there is no movement. Later, when he makes a personal revelation, it is essentially an apology. The movie avoids what we might expect, a meeting of the minds, and gives us instead a sharing of quiet desperation.

As Dina and Twefiq, Ronit Elkabetz and Sasson Gabai bring great fondness and amusement to their characters. She is pushing middle age, he is being pushed by it. It is impossible for this night to lead to anything in their future lives. But it could lead to a night to remember.

Gabai plays the bandleader as so repressed or shy or wounded that he seems closed inside himself. As we watch Elkabetz putting on a new dress for the evening and inspecting herself in the mirror, we see not vanity but hope. Throughout the evening, we note her assertion, her confidence, her easily assumed air of independence. Yet when she gazes into the man’s eyes, she sighs with regret and mentions that as a girl she loved the Omar Sharif movies that played daily on Israeli TV, but play no more.

There are some amusing interludes. A band member plays the first few notes of a sonata he has not finished (after years). A bandmate calls him Schubert. A local man keeps solitary vigil by a pay phone, waiting for a call from the girl he loves. He has an insistent way of showing his impatience when another uses the phone.

In the morning, the band reassembles and leaves. “The Band’s Visit” has not provided any of the narrative payoffs we might have expected, but has provided something more valuable: An interlude involving two “enemies,” Arabs and Israelis, that shows them both as only ordinary people with ordinary hopes, lives and disappointments. It has also shown us two souls with rare beauty.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The Band's Visit (2008)

Rated PG-13 for brief strong language

Sasson Gabai as Tewfiq

Ronit Elkabetz as Dina

Saleh Bakri as Haled

Khalifa Natour as Simon

Mad Jabarin as Camal

Written and directed by

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Theater | review: lovely ‘the band’s visit’ gets an intimate staging at writers theatre.

Great Broadway musicals invariably are made up of one of two things: a community under stress (think “Fiddler on the Roof”) or a relationship between two good people dancing on the edge of Eros (think “Once”).

“The Band’s Visit,” the lovely little musical by David Yazbek and Itamar Moses about a traveling Egyptian police band lost in a boring Israeli town in the middle of the desert, actually has both of those themes in play at the same time. That’s why it works so beautifully. The show is based on an obscure 2007 Israeli movie and premiered on Broadway in 2017, and comes with uncommon warmth, as currently intensified by an intimate Writers Theatre production from director Zi Alikhan that interprets Yazbek’s superb score in surround sound.

There’s another full-circle aspect to this staging, in that “The Band’s Visit” originally was the work on Broadway of the director David Cromer, a Skokie native who cut his teeth often at this particular theater. This you might say that a Chicago, even specifically a Writers Theatre, sensibility was already baked into the material. Cromer has long specialized in shows about people living lives of quiet desperation and the two main characters in “The Band’s Visit” certainly fall into that category. You have the band leader Tewfiq (Rom Barkhordar, doing the best work I’ve ever seen him do), trying to pass the time until he and his guys can get out of there and Dina (Sophie Madorsky), a local woman who runs a sad cafe and wonders for a second if this Tewfiq guy in the Sergeant Pepper suit might just be the right match for her own ennui.

There is something about Moses’s book that taps into the persistent difficulty of late-in-life relationships, I think, whether they are taking place in Bet Hatikvah or Highland Park — the inevitable intrusion of past experiences, the likely presence of previous losses, the craving for a soulmate, the sense that this might have worked years ago, but now, how? That’s the secret sauce here, a kind of sad passion, if you would, as reflected in a score suffused with longing. You can hear vitality and hope fighting tooth and nail with resignation.

And, it has to be said, a musical set in Israel puts the events of last fall in mind, as does the arrival of Egyptians. Egypt has been something of a mysterious presence in the current Middle East crisis and “The Band’s Visit’ explores that nation’s role in cultural memory, especially its Hollywood diaspora. But this show is really focused on how ordinary people can reach across these divides, given open hearts. This is not a story about war but about the human need for connection; that’s manifest not only with the leading couple but through a character called Telephone Guy (Harper Caruso), who we see longing for a phone call, Haled (Armand Akbari), whose suave skills with women mask his loneliness, and the Egyptian musician Simon (Jonathan Shaboo), who finds himself stuck while trying to complete a concerto.

Madorsky sings the difficult lead role exceptionally well and she’s a dynamic presence to boot, which puts you in mind of what I think Moses intended: spectacular people can get stuck. That’s the message of “Once,” of course, another small musical that Writers staged with similar success last year and has clearly learned from the experience: “The Band’s Visit” is conceived here as immersive. As on Broadway, where I adored this show , the cast plays the score and their unusual instrumentation (by Broadway standards, at least) but at Writers, they can envelope the audience musically in a way that was not possible in a traditional proscenium theater.

You might have seen “The Band’s Visit” when it toured here in 2019 . I’d argue this staging (and this fine cast) adds a whole lot to the piece and it merits another look, especially if you are a fan of what Yazbek achieved here musically.

At 90 minutes, it leaves you wanting more. Aptly enough.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

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Review: “The Band’s Visit” (4 stars)

When: Through March 24

Where: Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe

Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes

Tickets: $35-$90 at 847-242-6000 and www.writerstheatre.org

Adam Qutaishat, Dana Saleh Omar and Dave Honigman in "The Band's Visit" at Writers Theatre in Glencoe. (Michael Brosilow)

Rom Barkhordar, Armand Akbari and Sophie Madorsky in "The Band's Visit" at Writers Theatre in Glencoe. (Michael Brosilow)

Harper Caruso and Adam Qutaishat in "The Band's Visit" at Writers Theatre in Glencoe. (Michael Brosilow)

Rom Barkhordar and Sophie Madorsky in "The Band's Visit" at Writers Theatre in Glencoe. (Michael Brosilow)

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In moving musical ‘The Band’s Visit,’ strangers from distinct Mideast cultures find harmony

Magnificent writers theatre production of the tony-winning show pulls you in to the characters’ world and you don’t want to leave..

Café owner Dina (Sophie Madorsky, with Rom Barkhordar and Armand Akbari) is among the people in a remote Israeli town showing hospitality to stranded Egyptian musicians in “The Band’s Visit.”

Michael Brosilow

Quirky, character-driven, self-declared at the start as being not “very important,” the 2018 Tony-winning best musical “The Band’s Visit” has always been a modest, heartwarming show, a pixelated slice-of-life about the ways humans feel connected with each other. It’s mostly about love, but also about how music and movies help bring people together.

I enjoyed the piece immensely on Broadway, where it was directed by David Cromer, a longtime Chicago artist now on the A-plus-list in New York. He won the directing Tony for his work on this show.

But I was far more deeply moved by this intimate, intensely engaging production at Writers Theater, directed by Zi Alikhan. Alikhan worked under Cromer on the national tour of the “The Band’s Visit,” and has an impressive, mostly regional-theater resume. He’s making an extremely memorable mark in his Chicago debut.

This offbeat musical from composer David Yazbeck (“The Full Monty,” “Tootsie”) and writer Itamar Moses, based on a 2007 Israeli film, tells the story of a small Egyptian orchestra invited to perform at the Arab cultural center in the real-life Israeli city of Petah Tikvah. Instead, the musicians accidentally, and understandably, find themselves in Bet Hatikvah, a fictional, remote desert town. Stranded awaiting the rare bus, and in a town too tiny for a hotel, they must rely on the hospitality of locals who aren’t used to visitors, let alone those from another culture. Two of the songs, to give you a sense, are called “Welcome to Nowhere” and “Something Different.”

This production has the cast playing nearly all the instruments — including Middle Eastern ones like the pear-shaped, lute-like oud — with a few supplements from offstage. A benefit is that the musical interstices serve as an indication of how the townspeople manage to pass the time, given that there is so little going on in Bet Hatikvah.

• From 2019: ‘The Band’s Visit’ a marvelous, exquisitely crafted arrival indeed

Yazbek’s lovely, nuanced score, highly unusual for a Broadway show, feels deeply connected to the region, which is essential for bringing an authenticity to the setting and story, which itself is minimal but involving.

During a single evening, the strangers get to know each other. Café owner Dina (Sophie Madorsky) and the orchestra’s leader Tewfiq (Rom Barkhordar) bond over memories of Omar Sharif movies and the music of Egyptian Umm Kulthum, which Dina grew up with. Simon (Jonathan Shaboo), the orchestra’s clarinetist, finds himself observing the quarrels of a married couple (Dave Honigman and Dana Saleh Omar). The Chet Baker-loving Haled (Armand Akbari, exuding friendly charm) tags along as an extra wheel on a roller-skating date with locals (Sam Linda, Marielle Issa, Becky Keeshin, Jordan Golding).

This ensemble is extraordinary: un-showy, uniformly honest, remarkably likable.

I understand Madorsky’s Dina more than I did that of Katrina Lenk, who played the role on Broadway and just couldn’t cover up her sense of glamor, that Dina was truly stuck in this small town, so clearly out of place. While equally as compelling, this Dina may long for something more, but also very much belongs here, and she comes across as far more vulnerable.

Sam Linda and Becky Keeshin play locals in Bet Hatikvah on a roller-skating date.

Another standout is Sam Linda, a performer I’ve seen before without his making this type of impression. He seems born for this part, and his “Papi Hears the Ocean,” about what he hears when he tries to talk with girls, is wildly enjoyable, all the funnier for its fundamental believability and the careful timing of Sebastiani Romagnolo’s choreography.

I was concerned, given the current, horrifying events occurring on the Israeli-Egypt border, that this show would feel too slight for the moment, a “can’t we all get along?” message at a moment when reality suggests the answer to that is a resounding “No.”

• From 2019: David Cromer sees ‘everyday heroes’ as the heart and soul of ‘The Band’s Visit’

But from the moment this story starts, this magnificent production pulls you in to the characters' world and you don’t want to leave. It’s an innocent, peaceful place. The actors all speak with accents — believable to my ear, for sure — as the Arabic- and Hebrew-speaking characters use sometimes-halting English to communicate. It’s about what people have in common. Politics doesn’t exist. The characters expose their inner selves to strangers; although at first surprised to be dealing with the situation, they’re ultimately emotionally unguarded.

But the show also gains deep, complex, upsetting layers from the fact that, when you awaken from the reverie of its sweetness, you realize these people — that is to say, people just like them — may be dead or hostages or at least in mourning for loved ones, and times past.

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‘The Band’s Visit’ review

• Theatre, Musicals
• 4 out of 5 stars
• Recommended

Time Out says

This bittersweet, idiosyncratic musical about a lost Egyptian band gets a gorgeous UK premiere

The original US production of ‘The Band’s Visit’ stormed the 2018 Tony Awards and spent 18 months on Broadway. Which is pretty wild when you consider it’s a barely 90-minute musical with no interval, no dance routines, no power ballads and performed in Arabic, Hebrew and heavily accented English.

I’m sure that production was great. But it feels like the right decision to have David Yazbek and Itamar Moses’s musical effectively start from scratch in the UK, in a new production from the Donmar’s Michael Longhurst that couldn’t be in a more perfect theatre.

It’s adapted from a 2007 Israeli indie film about an Egyptian police band that arrives in Israel to play at the opening of an Arab cultural centre in the city of Petah Tikvah, but accidentally gets a bus to Bet Hatikvah , a fictional one-horse town in the middle of the desert. It has no Arabic cultural centre, or, indeed, hotel – something that becomes a problem when the band realise they’re stranded there overnight.

For a moment, it looks like ‘The Band’s Visit’ will be a sort of Middle Eastern ‘Come from Away’ – an aggressively heartwarming drama about a group of people who randomly end up in a small town and everybody grows and learns something, vom vom vom.

In fact it’s a beautiful, haunting work about loss, loneliness and the desire for human warmth. Though an ensemble production, its headed up by Alon Moni Aboutboul’s stiffly dignified old band leader Tewfiq and Miri Mesika’s restless, unfulfilled local cafe owner Dina. She takes a shine to him and much of their night is spent sat at a local restaurant, making small talk, obliquely flirting and enquiring about each other’s pasts – which they only get into tangentially, with huge revelations kept to a minimum.

The other strands to the story are similarly delicate. There’s the band member who calls the Egyptian embassy from a pay phone jealously guarded by a local lad who has been waiting a month for his girlfriend to ring. There’s Sharif Afifi’s Casanova-ish younger band member Haled, who is desperate for something to do and blithely inveigles his way onto a double date at the town’s roller rink. And there’s the stressed young married locals whose tensions are exacerbated by having clarinettist Simon (Sargon Yelda) stay with them.

All of the stories are marked by a gossamer fragility and a wilful incompleteness, a sense we’re just getting flashes. Yazbek’s songs don’t add razzle dazzle. They offer a delicate magic: exotic instrumentals, hesitant ballads and the odd, sparing bit of witty wordplay. Longhurst’s still yet fluid production feels full of the hush and intimacy of the night – the songs are little bursts of wonder, none of them blowing the roof off, all of them making the air tingle. Soutra Gilmour’s set is minimalist in the extreme, but a nifty little revolve keeps the pace up perfectly when needed. 

Much of the magic is to do with the exceptional casting (big props to casting director Anna Cooper). In an international ensemble of mostly (possibly entirely) Middle Eastern extraction, the band members all really play instruments, with many taking on substantial acting roles too. There’s something ineffably beautiful about the mournful solo trumpets or clarinets that cut through the night air; and then the percussive, rhymic roar of their final ensemble instrumental tune is pure joy, morning sun exploding over the horizon after a long night. 

It’s anchored by Israeli actors Mesika and Aboutboul: her Dina tough, charming, lost; his Tewfiq dignified, wounded, wise. They’re not big flashy roles though: everyone on stage essentially has a small part that they nail, and it feels like the sum is greater than the individual parts, a vivid snapshot of a temporary community. 

Should we make anything of the fact it’s a show about Arabs and Israelis getting on with each other? It certainly doesn’t lay it on very thick: nationality, ethnicity and religion are barely touched upon. Indeed, the wry message that bookends the show – ‘it wasn’t very important’ – is perhaps testimony to the fact the writers are wary of making a Big Statement. 

Instead it’s a romantic, inventive, deeply disarming show about how we’re all defined by the need for connection. Given it was a hit on Broadway, I’m sure it could be a hit on the West End. But I wonder how easy it would be to hold this sprawling and uniquely talented international ensemble together; and, frankly, it’s hard to see how such an intimate show could possibly have the same impact in a big, formal West End playhouse. Catch it before it slips away into the night.

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Critic’s Pick

‘Dead Outlaw’ Review: Not Much of a Bandit, but What a Corpse

The creators of “The Band’s Visit” return with this mischievous ghost story of a musical based on an odd slice of Old West history.

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By Laura Collins-Hughes

In the final chapter of Elmer McCurdy’s macabre posthumous journey through the American West, his red-painted corpse dangled from a noose inside a Southern California amusement park ride: a creepy bit of décor to spook the thrill seekers.

More than six decades after his death, poor old arsenic-preserved McCurdy was presumed to be a mannequin — until, in 1976, the TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man” came to shoot an episode at the ride, and a crew member discovered otherwise.

“This is a man!” the freaked-out Teamster shouts in “ Dead Outlaw ,” a mischievous but never meanspirited ghost story of a musical about McCurdy from the creators of “ The Band’s Visit .”

Conceived by David Yazbek, who wrote the “Dead Outlaw” music and lyrics with Erik Della Penna, this oddball new show reunites Yazbek with the book writer Itamar Moses and the director David Cromer. Based on a sensationally ghastly scrap of Old West and pop culture history that has inspired books , previous plays and a documentary , it is 180 degrees different from “The Band’s Visit,” the gently comic, Tony Award-winning tale about an Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli town. It’s also terrific fun.

“Dead Outlaw,” which opened Sunday in an Audible production at the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, is a compact, deliciously deadpan yarn that stretches over almost a century.

It traces Elmer’s hapless life as an alcoholic drifter turned bungling criminal, and his involuntary second act as a formidably well-embalmed sideshow attraction. Along the way, it casts a jaundiced eye at the callous American lust for guns and money, and takes puckish pleasure in reminding us that we’ll all be shadows like Elmer soon enough.

“Dead Outlaw” is a Western, kind of, and when at its start we meet Elmer (Andrew Durand, in a wow of a performance), he is lying under the stars in Oklahoma, singing a soft and longing country-flavored song. It is 1911 and he is alive, yet his face is deathly pale, his eyes shadowed. He is beguiling anyway. Then the show does a tonal quick change, all romance vanished: Elmer, comically, rushes off to rob a train.

At 30 or so, he is a long way from the Maine of his childhood and the fractured family he left behind: the mother who raised him in comfortable circumstances was actually his aunt; the woman he always thought was his aunt was the mother who gave birth to him as a teenager. Disaffected, aching, entitled, Elmer is looking for easy riches, which elude him thanks to his general ineptitude at being an outlaw.

It probably doesn’t help that whenever he grabs some nitroglycerin to crack a safe, Douglas MacArthur (Ken Marks) — Elmer’s old commander at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he joined the Army for a while — starts hectoring him in his head: “That’s not how you do it, maggot!”

The show takes a too-lengthy detour into the story of an ambitious young Cherokee man, possibly as a contrast to Elmer’s laziness and a rebuke to his racism. (He is sure he is more deserving of the local Osage people’s money than they are.) Weirdly, the musical exhibits no curiosity about Elmer’s birth mother, who is almost a non-presence — though with the only woman in the cast playing his aunt, that might just be a practical consideration.

Still, this is lean-in storytelling, performed by eight actors conjuring several dozen characters. With a high-energy onstage band conducted by Rebekah Bruce and including Della Penna on guitar, banjo, vocals and wailing lap steel, the score hopscotches from country to rock to jazz. (Sound design is by Kai Harada and Joshua Millican, soundscape composition by Isabella Curry, orchestrations by Della Penna, Yazbek and Dean Sharenow.)

Audible plans to release a recording of “Dead Outlaw.” Close your eyes and you can imagine what a vivid experience that might be, a whole Western landscape painted aurally. Live, though, you get to savor the visuals: our charming narrator (Jeb Brown) transforming into a disreputable, trench-coated bandit; Elmer’s tender dance with the spunky Maggie (Julia Knitel), in his doomed attempt at love and normalcy; Durand’s unnerving turn as Elmer’s corpse, propped upright in a coffin, swaying whenever someone moves it; the gruesome prop mummy (by Gloria Sun Productions) laid out on a coroner’s table.

In a fabulous moment, that coroner, Thomas Noguchi (Thom Sesma, perfect), grabs the dangling microphone meant for his autopsy notes and delivers a big, purple-lit, nightclub-style number — a high point of the show. (Lighting, by Heather Gilbert, is superb throughout.)

Noguchi is the unlikely hero here: the sole person who looks at Elmer’s desiccated remains and sees someone deserving of dignity.

So does the show. It would be easy to exploit Elmer’s story, to play it entirely for laughs. “Dead Outlaw” has lots of those, as well as a healthy sense of absurdity. But if it forgot Elmer’s humanity — and it never does — it would lose its soul.

Dead Outlaw Through April 7 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; deadoutlawmusical.com . Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

Stage and Cinema

Arts and Entertainment Reviews

Theater Review: THE BAND’S VISIT (The Huntington and SpeakEasy Stage Company in Boston)

by Lynne Weiss on November 17, 2023

in Theater-Boston , Theater-Regional

AN UNEXPECTED AND BEAUTIFUL VISIT

Once, not very long ago, a group of musicians came to Israel from Egypt. You probably didn’t hear about it. It wasn’t very important. These sentences, projected on a screen, are the opening of The Band’s Visit , the musical that won 10 Tony Awards in 2018. Directed by Paul Daigneault with choreography by Daniel Pelzig , the Boston premiere of this highly-anticipated production — delayed due to COVID — is just the latest in the Huntington ’s string of triumphs under new artistic director Loretta Greco . I wondered, given current events not only in Israel-Palestine but locally at Boston’s many universities , how a show about unexpected friendship between Arabs and Jews would go over . The answer, in this case, is very well. As one Israeli sings to an Egyptian in “Something Different,” “Nothing is as beautiful as something you don’t expect.”

Based on the Israeli film of the same name, with music and lyrics by David Yazbek and book by Itamar Moses , it’s a story that starts with a misunderstanding. A group of Egyptian musicians—the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra—end up in a drab and boring desert town in Israel due to their inability to properly pronounce the name of the place they are trying to get to when buying their bus tickets.

Because there are no other buses until the next day, and because the town has no hotels, members of the band end up spending the night in the homes of three residents. Through the power of music, layers of grief and fear are peeled away in the course of this adult chamber musical.   Small miracles occur : love-starved Dina ( Jennifer Apple ) gets to reenact a brief scene from her favorite movie with band leader Tewfiq ( Brian Thomas Abraham ) taking the role of Egyptian leading man Omar Sharif ; widower Avrum ( Robert Saoud ) relives the moment of meeting his late wife; Itzik ( Jared Troilo ) recognizes his responsibilities to Iris ( Marianna Bassham ) as a husband and father; painfully shy Papi ( Jesse Garlick ) learns how to court Julia ( Josephine Moshiri Elwood ) thanks to instruction from Haled ( Kareem Elsmadicy ), a man who has never court ed a woman because he will have an arranged marriage.

The music , under the direction of José Delgado , is crucial . And fantastic. What a delight to enjoy the score, played by an 8-piece orchestra behind the screen at the back of the stage (joyously revealed at the end) as well as the terrific clarinet work by Joe LaRocca  and percussionist Fabio Pirozzolo on the traditional Egyptian d arbouka , or goblet drum ( as Simon, one of the longest running members of the band, James Rana also plays clarinet on stage) . The show includes not only Egyptian and Arab musical styles and instrumentation , but cites influences ranging from Chet Baker and George Gershwin to the Beatles and Michael Jackson . At one point, the whole audience clapp ed along with the beat of an instrumental number , but for the most part, this is a “quiet” musical. There is singing and dancing, but there are no big production numbers. Most of the songs involve only one or two people; the exception is the joyous “The Beat of Your Heart” in which Avrum , Itzik , Simon, and Camal evoke the power of romantic love . These solos and duets give the songs both tenderness and a certain dignity , exactly the emotional tone one might expect in an experience of intimacy with a stranger .

The evocative music, along with Wilson Chin and Jimmy Stubbs ’s scenic design and Miranda Kau Giurleo ’s costume design, go a long way toward placing us in the Negev Desert in 1996, a time when Egypt was actively engaged in peace efforts in the region . Nonetheless, the first women we see in this play are in Israeli military uniform s , reminding us that peace is not a given in this environment. 

At the end of the play, the Israelis and the Egyptians still speak different languages. They are still strangers, with a lot of potential for misunderstandings. Even so, they have glimpsed one another ’s shared hopes and disappointments and are able to say s halom aleichem and a laikum salaam and know that despite the differences, they mean the same thing.

photos by T. Charles Erickson

The Band’s Visit The Huntington in a co-production with SpeakEasy Stage Huntington Theatre, 264 Huntington Ave. near Symphony Hall in Boston Tues-Thurs at 7:30; Fri & Sat at 8; select Sun at 7pm matinees: select Wed at 3; select Sat and Sun at 2:30 ends on December 10. 2023 EXTENDED to December 17, 2023 for tickets, call 617.266.0800 or visit The Huntington

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Thank you so much for this wonderful production. In the present day fraught situation, it was a ray of hope for all humans.

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Theater + arts, theater + arts | theater review: ‘the band’s visit’ stops in for a delightful stay in costa mesa.

Triumphs in musical theater come in many sizes. In “The Band’s Visit,” wonderfully inhabiting the Segerstrom Center for the Arts for the next couple weeks, excellence arrives in the form of atmospheric and exotic intimacy.

Where musicals mostly announce and sustain themselves with propulsion and energy, this is a tiny tale of what happens when the small Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra catches the wrong bus and is marooned overnight in a lonely Israeli desert town.

As a projected preamble modestly, and deceptively, informs us at the show’s start: “You probably didn’t hear about it. It’s not very important.”

The 2018 Tony Awards begged to disagree. This single-act show, adapted from a non-musical 2007 Israeli movie, swept 10 Tonys, including best musical, best director and — this is very important — best original score.

“The Band’s Visit,” which won 10 Tony Awards in 2018, including best musical and best original score, is on stage at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa through April 3. (Photo by Evan Zimmerman, MurphyMade)

Janet Dacal and Sasson Gabay star in “The Band’s Visit,” on stage at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts through April 3. (Photo by Evan Zimmerman, MurphyMade)

Joe Joseph plays Haled in a touring production of “The Band’s Visit” that plays at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts through April 3. (Photo by Evan Zimmerman, MurphyMade)

Janet Dacal and Sasson Gabay appear in a scene from “The Band’s Visit.” (Photo by Evan Zimmerman, MurphyMade)

Sasson Gabay plays band leader Tewfiq and Janet Dacal is cafe owner Dina in “The Band’s Vist,” playing at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts through April 3. (Photo by Evan Zimmerman, MurphyMade)

We’ll get to the performance virtues on the Costa Mesa stage, but the heart and soul of this work, which beats with plenty of each, is the intoxicating swirl of David Yazbek’s entrancing arrangements and alternately searching and sly lyrics.

Yazbek is a musical Broadway songwriting shape-shifter, having contributed to in the past, in a wide variety of styles, “The Full Monty,” “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” and “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” But those comparatively mainstream works didn’t hint at his achievements here.

The composer’s own lineage might be part of this show’s secret sauce. Though he grew up in Manhattan, Yazbek’s father is Arab and his mother half Jewish.

In younger years he spent time in the Middle East, becoming familiar with some of the unfamiliar, to our ears, instruments encountered here, including the darbouka,) an upright drum that resembles a goblet and the tambourine-like riq, as well as the expressive, short-necked oud, a stringed instrument minus frets.

Wedded together with familiar instruments like keyboards, violin and cellos, “The Band’s Visit” is a compelling swirl of numbers that propel the mildly episodic storyline. There are also brief interludes of live instrumentation in the later parts of the show that provide connective tissue among scenes and amplify the compelling, yearning themes.

While very much an ensemble piece, three characters come to the fore and the actors in those roles make the most of them.

The principal lead is Dina, the town’s cynical, blunt café mistress by day. Come evening, when she literally lets her down her hair, she’s a desert sabra, that term describing native Israelis  named for the emotionally prickly pear cactus concealing an inner, welcoming tenderness.

Playing her here, actress Janet Dacal is both vinegar and vulnerable. She also gets Yazbek’s most compelling earworm ballad, the soaring “Omar Sharif,” and her reading of it resonates far across the footlights.

In Tewfiq, the leader of the itinerant Egyptian band, this touring production is graced by the presence of Israeli-acting royalty in Sasson Gabay. A veteran actor of 40 years, Gabay filled the same role in the original 2007 film. Plus, for those lucky or astute enough to see the compelling Netfflix streamer “Shtisel,” about Orthodox Jewish life in modern-day Jerusalem, Gabay was bracing as the hard-bitten uncle.

In this work, his Tewfiq is like another kind of desert bloom, one slow to unfurl emotionally, but quietly impactful when his sad, defining truth emerges.

A third character named Haled, a member of the band with outsize musical ambitions and a desire to reach out to any female he trips across in the desert, is the straw stirring the plot through much of the show. He is played here with an engaging, sweet-lothario grin by Joe Joseph, who earned this role as an understudy in the original Broadway production.

A fear I had coming into this evening was how well the jewel that is “The Band’s Visit” might shine in a bigger venue like Segerstrom Hall. But at early points in the story’s telling — with less music and pauses in the pacing of dialogue to establish the work’s muted themes of longing and hope — I was relieved that the audience didn’t resort to coughing and throat-clearing to break up the silence, always a tell-tale sign of a disengaged crowd.

Instead, there was general quiet, punctuated at first by laughs at the wry, blunt verbal exchanges on stage and then falling under the spell of Yazbek’s extraordinary music.

A happy footnote: next in line at what is turning out to be a stellar Segerstrom Broadway season, is the criminally under-appreciated musical version of “Tootsie.”

The wildly different, but again quite enjoyable, pop-rock score for “Tootsie” is also from David Yazbek.

My whole-hearted advice would be to make like the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra and jump on the first bus available for this one, too.

‘The Band’s Visit’

Rating: 3 1/2 stars (out of 4)

When: Through April 3; 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m., Sundays

Where: Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa

Tickets: $26-$130

Information: 949-556-2787; www.scfta.org

COVID-19 protocols: Attendees are required to show proof of full vaccination and photo I.D. to enter the theater. Any ticket holders (including those under age 12) without proof of full vaccination must present a negative COVID-19 test (PCR taken within 48 hours or antigen taken within 6 hours) of the performance. At-home test results are not accepted. Regardless of vaccination status, masks must be worn inside the building.

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Review: THE BAND'S VISIT at Writers Theatre

The Tony-winning musical runs through March 17.

About halfway through the 2017 musical THE BAND'S VISIT, an Israeli cafe owner named Dina listens to the singing of an Egyptian policeman as the two sit in the ruins of a park in the middle of the desert. Dina, who does not speak Arabic, cannot understand the literal meaning of the man's song but feels as though she comprehends it emotionally, asking herself, "What's he saying? Is he praying? And why does it get to me?" In other words, how is it that a life so different from hers can have the power to touch her in such a profound way? Thankfully, this question receives its enthusiastic answer in a gorgeously lyrical and profoundly moving new production at Writers Theatre in Glencoe, now running through March 17.

Winner of ten 2018 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, THE BAND'S VISIT tells the story of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, which has been invited to give a concert in the culturally rich Israeli city of Petah Tikvah. But due to a linguistic mix-up (Arabic does not use "p" sounds), the band ends up in the virtually desolate town of Bet Hatikvah. Stuck with their instruments until the next bus out of town, the conductor Tewfiq ( Rom Barkhordar ) and his colleagues must spend the night with Dina (Sophie Madorsky) and her fellow villagers. What follows is less a plot in the traditional sense and more of a character study of how people from different and historically conflicted walks of life can impact one another in subtle yet substantial ways. 

Director Zi Alikhan has gifted Chicago audiences with a production of THE BAND'S VISIT whose talent and creative execution equal---and may even exceed---those of the Broadway and touring productions. Writers Theatre's relatively smaller size lends itself to the intimacy necessary for the characters to connect with one another as well as for the audience to connect with the characters. Alikhan and choreographer Sebastiani Romagnolo move their performers through the playing area in ways that feel natural while also creating evocative portraits of conflict and resolution in progress (scenic designer Afsoon Pajoufar conjures wonders using little more than a shipping container, a dilapidated billboard, and some diner chairs). It's not uncommon for actors to brush past the leg of an audience member or waft through the aisles. But the effect of such movements always feels immersive, bringing us into an unexpectedly refreshing oasis without breaking the fourth wall.

Even more impressively, in a creative choice that will remind audiences of Writers Theatre's 2023 hit musical ONCE, most of the performers play their own instruments while effortlessly singing through David Yazbek 's deceptively challenging score. With the help of sound designer Willow James , music directors Andra Velis Simon and Jason Burrow ensure that all the show's parts---vocal and instrumental---seamlessly blend together while also being crisp and clear enough to stand on their own. In the show's penultimate number, "Answer Me" (captivatingly led by Harper Caruso), the cast scatters throughout the audience and hits a chord so richly textured with pained hope that it can't help but bring a tear to the eye.

While the musical does its best to give equal stage time to the various villagers and musicians, Tewfiq and Dina are the undeniable leads of the piece due to the charisma of the performers who bring them to life. Barkhordar has a commanding voice with an impressive range that leaves viewers hanging on his every word. In one particularly memorable scene, his shouts thunder through the air before fading into whispered confessions that express the heartbreak and warmth lying under his coldly militaristic exterior. His gruff formality finds its complement in Madorsky's witty cynicism but its match in her pained existentialism. Her solos " Omar Sharif " and "Something Different" show off her keen sense of dynamics, her whispered mutterings carrying the same weight as her defiant belts. 

While the entire ensemble deserves praise for their individual talents and collaborative cohesion, several performers deserve to be recognized for their stand-out performances. As the shy nebbish Papi, Sam Linda delights as he hilariously laments his failures with women while rollerblading through increasingly intricate configurations of other skaters. Armand Akbari charms as the jazz-loving trumpet player Haled (with the crooning skills to match), as does Michael Joseph Mitchell (Avrum) as a free-spirited widower recalling the night he first danced with his wife. As Itzik and his wife Iris, Dave Honigman and Dana Saleh Omar effectively capture the fear, regret, and confusion that plague all new parents. Their eventual reconciliation just as dawn arrives provides the musical with a satisfying---if tenuous---resolution. But to end the show with any greater degree of certainty would be to abandon the verisimilitude that drives it in the first place.

I must admit that I was hesitant to revisit this show since I last saw it in 2020. Given that the conflict in the Middle East has reached even more horrifying heights since October, the musical's message of hope and connection developing in spite of cultural and political differences feels quaintly naive, if not unrealistic. And yet, Writers Theatre's production of THE BAND'S VISIT feels so refreshingly human that one can't help but get swept up in its beauty. One can't help but wonder if empathy and understanding really could help us reach one another across unfathomable divides. Perhaps the music speaks to us, even if we haven't yet learned the words.

Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow

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