band's visit answer me

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NBC Nightly News visited Broadway’s The Band's Visit and recorded a 360-degree video of the cast performing “Answer Me,” the musical’s searing 11 o’clock number. Watch the video to see Adam Kantor, who plays the Telephone Guy, kick off the song before he is joined by the rest of the cast on the rotating stage.

David Yazbek and Itamar Moses’ The Band's Visit began previews in the Ethel Barrymore Theatre October 7 ahead of a November 9 opening.

Based on the 2007 film by Eran Kolirin, the show follows an Egyptian police band, who, after a mixup at the border, find themselves in a remote village in the middle of the Israeli desert. Over the course of an evening, the band members are led into unlikely friendships with some of the locals, causing their lives to intertwine and change irreversibly.

Read: HOW BROADWAY’S KATRINA LENK MAKES BIG IMPACT IN SMALL MOMENTS IN THE BAND’S VISIT

The new musical arrives on Broadway following an acclaimed and sold-out world premiere at Off-Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company last year.

David Cromer directs a cast made up of Katrina Lenk, Tony nominees Tony Shalhoub and John Cariani , George Abud, Andrew Polk, Bill Army, Adam Kantor , Rachel Prather, Jonathan Raviv, Sharone Sayegh, Ari’el Stachel, Kristen Sieh, Etai Benson, and Alok Tewari.

Watch further highlights from the production in the video below:

• The Band's Visit

The 2008 musical by Stew and Heidi Rodewald is playing London's Young Vic.

Drew McOnie is at the helm for the U.K. run.

The revival of the Howard Ashman-Alan Menken musical continues at the Westside.

The hit jukebox musical continues at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre.

Duncan Macmillan's celebrated addiction drama returns to the West End.

The disability romantic-comedy uses text-to-speech technology to connect its leading couple.

Gabriel Vick is continuing his performance as Daniel Hillard as the London run of the musical enters its second year.

The Tony-winning hit continues at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre.

Steve Marzullo is the music director for the engagement at the Manhattan cabaret.

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Answer Me lyrics - Band's Visit

• Welcome to Nowhere
• It Is What It Is
• Beat Of Your Heart
• Omar Sharif
• Papi Hears the Ocean
• Haled's Song About Love
• Itgara'a
• Something Different
• Itzik's Lullaby
• Something Different (Reprise)
• The Concert
• Afifi (Bonus Track)

Answer Me lyrics

• Les Miserables
• Addams Family, The
• Phantom of the Opera, The
• Jesus Christ Superstar
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Answer Me Lyrics by Adam Kantor & The Band's Visit Original Broadway Company

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10-Time Tony Award®-Winning Best Musical The Band's Visit is Returning to Washington, D.C.!

10-TIME TONY AWARD ® -WINNING BEST MUSICAL   THE BAND’S VISIT IS RETURNING TO WASHINGTON, D.C.!

“A JOYOUS MUSICAL CELEBRATION. The Band’s Visit unfolds like a rare desert flower that blooms, then fades, in a single night. Its exotic beauty is BREATHTAKING.”  

– The Plain Dealer 

“A gorgeous and justly acclaimed show. The masterpiece of a score makes you realize that we can love and change.” 

– The Chicago Tribune 

(WASHINGTON)—The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is proud to announce that THE BAND’S VISIT , featuring music and lyrics by Tony ® and Drama Desk Award ® -winner David Yazbek , will be returning to Washington, D.C. from July 6–17, 2022. Tickets for the engagement are currently on sale. For more information, please visit the Kennedy Center website.

The Band’s Visit is one of four musicals in Broadway history to win the unofficial “Big Six” Tony Awards ® , which include Best Musical, Best Book, Best Score, Best Actor in a Musical, Best Actress in a Musical, and Best Direction of a Musical.

THE BAND’S VISIT tells a joyful, offbeat story of a band of musicians who arrive in a town way off the beaten path. Under the spell of the desert sky, with beautiful music perfuming the air, the band brings the town to life in unexpected ways. With a Tony ® -and Grammy ® -winning score that seduces your soul and sweeps you off your feet, performed by thrillingly talented onstage musicians, THE BAND’S VISIT rejoices in the way music makes us laugh, gives us hope, and ultimately, brings us together.  

Award-winning Israeli film actor Sasson Gabay will reprise the role of Tewfiq , the role he created in the 2007 film of THE BAND’S VISIT and has played on Broadway and in more than 17 cities on the First National Tour. Joining him to lead the company is the critically acclaimed actress Janet Dacal ( Prince of Broadway, Wonderland, In The Heights ) in the role of Dina .

The cast will also include Ali Louis Bourzgui as Haled , Clay Singer as Itzik , Yoni Avi Battat as Camal , Coby Getzug as Papi , Joshua Grosso as Telephone Guy , Kendal Hartse as Iris , David Studwell as Avrum , Billy Cohen as Zelger , Layan Elwazani as Julia , Marc Ginsburg as Sammy , Ariel Reich as Anna , and James Rana as Simon along with Ramin Doostdar, Loren Lester, Dana Saleh Omar, Nick Sacks, and Hannah Shankman.

THE BAND’S VISIT world premiere opened to critical acclaim at the Atlantic Theater Company in December 2016, and opened at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore theatre in November 2017. It went on to play 589 regular performance and 36 previews, breaking the all-time box office record at Broadway’s Barrymore Theatre twice and winning 10 Tony Awards ® before closing in April 2019. The production was featured in over 20 “Best Of The Year” lists including The New York Times, Time Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. The First National Tour launched in June 2019 and played 17 cities before the touring entertainment industry was halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

With music and lyrics by Tony Award ® -winner David Yazbek , and a book by Tony Award ® -winner Itamar Moses, THE BAND’S VISIT won “Best Musical” awards from the Tony Awards ® , Drama League, New York Drama Critics’ Circle, the Outer Critics Circle, the Lucille Lortel and the Obies. It is based on the screenplay by Eran Kolirin , and is directed by Tony Award ® -winner David Cromer .

The creative team also includes Patrick McCollum (Choreography), Tony Award ® -winner Scott Pask (Set Design), Sarah Laux (Costume Design), Tony Award ® -winner Tyler Micoleau (Lighting Design), Tony Award ® -winner Kai Harada (Sound Design), Charles G. LaPointe (Hair Designer), Tony Award ® -winner Jamshied Sharifi (Orchestrations), Andrea Grody (Music Supervisor & Additional Arrangements), Dean Sharenow (Music Supervisor & Music Coordinator) and Adrian Ries (Music Director).

THE BAND’S VISIT is produced on tour 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, FilmNation Entertainment, Roy Furman, FVSL Theatricals, Hendel-Karmazin, HoriPro Inc., IPN, JAM Theatricals, The John Gore Organization, Koenigsberg-Krauss, David Mirvish, James L. Nederlander, Al Nocciolino, Once Upon A Time Productions, Susan Rose and Paul Shiverick. The Executive Producers for THE BAND’S VISIT are Allan Williams and Charlie Stone .

THE BAND’S VISIT original Broadway cast album received the 2019 Grammy Award ® for Best Musical Theater Album. The musical is also the recipient of a 2019 Daytime Emmy Award® for a performance of “Answer Me” on NBC’s Today .

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The Band's Visit

“ 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. ”  Winner of 10 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Original Score,  The Band's Visit  is an intimate musical about the brief yet lasting connections we make in our lives.

The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra arrives in Israel to play a concert. After a mix-up at the border, they are sent to Bet Hatikva, a remote village in the middle of the desert. For the residents of Bet Hatikva, life is aimless and monotonous. With no bus until morning and no hotel in sight, the unexpected travelers from the orchestra are taken in by the locals. Under the spell of the desert sky, their lives become intertwined in the most unexpected ways.

With a haunting score by David Yazbek ( Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Full Monty ) and contemplative book by Itamar Moses ( Boardwalk Empire ,  The Fortress of Solitude ),  The Band's Visit  is a carefully crafted gem of a musical.

Show Essentials

Welcome to Nowhere

It is what it is, the beat of your heart, omar sharif, papi hears the ocean, haled's song about love, itgara'a, something different, itzik's lullaby, something different (reprise), the concert, cost estimator.

Estimate the approximate cost of your licensing fees by providing a few details about your production.

A montage of the Broadway production of The Band's Visit.

The Broadway cast of The Band's Visit performs an NPR Tiny Desk Concert

Composer David Yazbek performs his work from The Band's Visit and discusses the show

A clip of Katrina Lenk performing "Omar Sharif" from her Tony-winning performance in The Band's Visit

A collection of moments from the Broadway production of The Band's Visit.

Recording "Welcome to Nowhere" for The Band's Visit cast album

Questions & Answers

Licensing the band's visit.

I'm a member of a college theater group, and I'm looking towards staging The Band's Visit in April 2021. Would it be available for licensing by September 2020? Thanks!

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Answer Me From The Band's Visit [Musical] - Digital Sheet Music

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Despicable Me 4

Gru, Lucy, Margo, Edith, and Agnes welcome a new member to the family, Gru Jr., who is intent on tormenting his dad. Gru faces a new nemesis in Maxime Le Mal and his girlfriend Valentina, an... Read all Gru, Lucy, Margo, Edith, and Agnes welcome a new member to the family, Gru Jr., who is intent on tormenting his dad. Gru faces a new nemesis in Maxime Le Mal and his girlfriend Valentina, and the family is forced to go on the run. Gru, Lucy, Margo, Edith, and Agnes welcome a new member to the family, Gru Jr., who is intent on tormenting his dad. Gru faces a new nemesis in Maxime Le Mal and his girlfriend Valentina, and the family is forced to go on the run.

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I was terrified i was a pedophile —here’s what was actually wrong with me.

Thanks for contacting us. We've received your submission.

There was a time in my life when I was petrified that I already was, or would become, a pedophile.

I also feared being a murderer or incestuous and ruminated on those possibilities, searching for answers – for some sort of confirmation that the thoughts were real or not.

This hellish mental landscape took me captive for years in my early 20s, without a single other soul knowing, and the repetitive intrusive thoughts were so ‘outside of me’ that I questioned whether I was developing schizophrenia.

It never occurred to me that what I was dealing with was Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), because I understood OCD to be repetitive physical rituals related to hygiene or organization – the stereotype.

Mental health misconceptions, resulting from a lack of awareness and education, are the reason I went so long without diagnosis and treatment.

I know, if I’d had a simple understanding of ‘intrusive thoughts’, OCD wouldn’t have been able to shame me into the silence it did; I would have reached out for support before those negative neural pathways were so deeply ingrained.

Stuff the algebra – every person walking this earth should know what intrusive thoughts are. We have to live with our thoughts – thousands of them every single day.

We need to be able to identify when our minds are starting to betray us, early on in the piece, and not when it’s out of hand or too late.

Early intervention is key, and dependent upon an individual being able to recognise signs and symptoms.

It was only after I randomly (and fortunately) listened to a mental health podcast, where a narrator shared his lived experience with OCD, that I realized what I was experiencing, booked in with a psychologist, and got my life back.

Sitting in the therapy chair soon after, I got an education on intrusive thoughts and OCD, learning about its many different subtypes that can center around doing harm to others, relationships (often concerning a partner’s fidelity), religion, sexual orientation, to name just a few.

I learned that everyone in the world has intrusive thoughts to some degree, but someone with OCD gives power to those thoughts.

OCD types fixate on them, worry about their significance, become ashamed of them. OCD mostly involves irrational anxieties. For example, ‘what if this violent thought means I’ll kill someone?’

We focused on my compulsions, which were mostly mental – arguing with the thoughts, seeking reassurance, searching for answers.

Of course therein lies one of the most dangerous misconceptions regarding OCD, that compulsions are always physical, external behaviours, when in actuality they can be mental, internal, hidden from the world.

I gained an arsenal of knowledge and weapons to help me combat my OCD, learning how to ‘let the thoughts come and let them go’, drifting past me like the wind, trying not to give them the emotional response that I had been.

It sounds simple but it took a lot of time and work; it didn’t happen overnight but I did slowly get better, and today, I can proudly say that I no longer meet the diagnostic criteria for OCD.

Not to say I no longer experience intrusive thoughts, but rather the disorder doesn’t consume my time, cause a level of distress, or impair my life in the way it once did.

Mental health disorders are treatable, and that’s why unnecessary suffering devastates and frustrates me.

According to the World Health Organization, more than 700,000 people die due to suicide every year. The organization also notes that one of the barriers to effective care is the social stigma associated with mental disorders.

I told only a few people about my OCD diagnosis for this reason and until just recently, most of my family and friends had no idea of what I went through.

I “came out” of the mental health closet in brazen fashion, publishing a tell-all memoir about my OCD experience, leaving most of my loved ones in shock.

It was easier for me to put my experience on the page than to look people in the eye and try to say, “I had thoughts telling me I was a pedophile”.

Hitting publish was traumatizing. It triggered an OCD flare. But it was like a giant band-aid being ripped off. A f**k you to the stigma. Flipping the bird to shame.

Setting my story free so that maybe people will stop trivializing OCD and making jokes about being ‘a bit OCD’ if they like things neat and tidy.

Because generalized mental health posters and slogans aren’t enough. As a society, we need to know what mental health illnesses really look like. And it ain’t pretty. It’s confronting. But the only way out is through.

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A Year on Ozempic Taught Me We’re Thinking About Obesity All Wrong

By Johann Hari

Mr. Hari is a British journalist and the author of “Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits — and Disturbing Risks — of the New Weight Loss Drugs.”

Ever since I was a teenager, I have dreamed of shedding a lot of weight. So when I shrank from 203 pounds to 161 in a year, I was baffled by my feelings. I was taking Ozempic, and I was haunted by the sense that I was cheating and doing something immoral.

I’m not the only one. In the United States (where I now split my time), over 70 percent of people are overweight or obese, and according to one poll, 47 percent of respondents said they were willing to pay to take the new weight-loss drugs. It’s not hard to see why. They cause users to lose an average of 10 to 20 percent of their body weight, and clinical trials suggest that the next generation of drugs (probably available soon) leads to a 24 percent loss, on average. Yet as more and more people take drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, we get more confused as a culture, bombarding anyone in the public eye who takes them with brutal shaming.

This is happening because we are trapped in a set of old stories about what obesity is and the morally acceptable ways to overcome it. But the fact that so many of us are turning to the new weight-loss drugs can be an opportunity to find a way out of that trap of shame and stigma — and to a more truthful story.

In my lifetime, obesity has exploded, from being rare to almost being the norm. I was born in 1979, and by the time I was 21, obesity rates in the United States had more than doubled . They have skyrocketed since. The obvious question is, why? And how do these new weight-loss drugs work? The answer to both lies in one word: satiety. It’s a concept that we don’t use much in everyday life but that we’ve all experienced at some point. It describes the sensation of having had enough and not wanting any more.

The primary reason we have gained weight at a pace unprecedented in human history is that our diets have radically changed in ways that have deeply undermined our ability to feel sated. My father grew up in a village in the Swiss mountains, where he ate fresh, whole foods that had been cooked from scratch and prepared on the day they were eaten. But in the 30 years between his childhood and mine, in the suburbs of London, the nature of food transformed across the Western world. He was horrified to see that almost everything I ate was reheated and heavily processed. The evidence is clear that the kind of food my father grew up eating quickly makes you feel full. But the kind of food I grew up eating, much of which is made in factories, often with artificial chemicals, left me feeling empty and as if I had a hole in my stomach. In a recent study of what American children eat, ultraprocessed food was found to make up 67 percent of their daily diet. This kind of food makes you want to eat more and more. Satiety comes late, if at all.

One scientific experiment — which I have nicknamed Cheesecake Park — seemed to me to crystallize this effect. Paul Kenny, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, grew up in Ireland. After he moved in 2000 to the United States, when he was in his 20s, he gained 30 pounds in two years. He began to wonder if the American diet has some kind of strange effect on our brains and our cravings, so he designed an experiment to test it. He and his colleague Paul Johnson raised a group of rats in a cage and gave them an abundant supply of healthy, balanced rat chow made out of the kind of food rats had been eating for a very long time. The rats would eat it when they were hungry, and then they seemed to feel sated and stopped. They did not become fat.

But then Dr. Kenny and his colleague exposed the rats to an American diet: fried bacon, Snickers bars, cheesecake and other treats. They went crazy for it. The rats would hurl themselves into the cheesecake, gorge themselves and emerge with their faces and whiskers totally slicked with it. They quickly lost almost all interest in the healthy food, and the restraint they used to show around healthy food disappeared. Within six weeks, their obesity rates soared.

After this change, Dr. Kenny and his colleague tweaked the experiment again (in a way that seems cruel to me, a former KFC addict). They took all the processed food away and gave the rats their old healthy diet. Dr. Kenny was confident that they would eat more of it, proving that processed food had expanded their appetites. But something stranger happened. It was as though the rats no longer recognized healthy food as food at all, and they barely ate it. Only when they were starving did they reluctantly start to consume it again.

Though Dr. Kenny’s study was in rats, we can see forms of this behavior everywhere. We are all living in Cheesecake Park — and the satiety-stealing effect of industrially assembled food is evidently what has created the need for these medications. Drugs like Ozempic work precisely by making us feel full. Carel le Roux, a scientist whose research was important to the development of these drugs, says they boost what he and others once called “satiety hormones.”

Once you understand this context, it becomes clear that processed and ultraprocessed food create a raging hole of hunger, and these treatments can repair that hole. Michael Lowe, a professor of psychology at Drexel University who has studied hunger for 40 years, told me the drugs are “an artificial solution to an artificial problem.”

Yet we have reacted to this crisis largely caused by the food industry as if it were caused only by individual moral dereliction. I felt like a failure for being fat and was furious with myself for it. Why do we turn our anger inward and not outward at the main cause of the crisis? And by extension, why do we seek to shame people taking Ozempic but not those who, say, take drugs to lower their blood pressure?

The answer, I think, lies in two very old notions. The first is the belief that obesity is a sin. When Pope Gregory I laid out the seven deadly sins in the sixth century, one of them was gluttony, usually illustrated with grotesque-seeming images of overweight people. Sin requires punishment before you can get to redemption. Think about the competition show “The Biggest Loser,” on which obese people starve and perform extreme forms of exercise in visible agony in order to demonstrate their repentance.

The second idea is that we are all in a competition when it comes to weight. Ours is a society full of people fighting against the forces in our food that are making us fatter. It is often painful to do this: You have to tolerate hunger or engage in extreme forms of exercise. It feels like a contest in which each thin person creates additional pressure on others to do the same. Looked at in this way, people on Ozempic can resemble athletes like the cyclist Lance Armstrong who used performance-enhancing drugs. Those who manage their weight without drugs might think, “I worked hard for this, and you get it for as little as a weekly jab?”

We can’t find our way to a sane, nontoxic conversation about obesity or Ozempic until we bring these rarely spoken thoughts into the open and reckon with them. You’re not a sinner for gaining weight. You’re a typical product of a dysfunctional environment that makes it very hard to feel full. If you are angry about these drugs, remember the competition isn’t between you and your neighbor who’s on weight-loss drugs. It’s between you and a food industry constantly designing new ways to undermine your satiety. If anyone is the cheat here, it’s that industry. We should be united in a struggle against it and its products, not against desperate people trying to find a way out of this trap.

There are extraordinary benefits as well as disturbing risks associated with weight-loss drugs. Reducing or reversing obesity hugely boosts health, on average: We know from years of studying bariatric surgery that it slashes the risks of cancer, heart disease and diabetes-related death. Early indications are that the new anti-obesity drugs are moving people in a similar radically healthier direction, massively reducing the risk of heart attack or stroke. But these drugs may increase the risk for thyroid cancer. I am worried they diminish muscle mass and fear they may supercharge eating disorders. This is a complex picture in which the evidence has to be weighed very carefully.

But we can’t do that if we remain lost in stories inherited from premodern popes or in a senseless competition that leaves us all, in the end, losers. Do we want these weight loss drugs to be another opportunity to tear one another down? Or do we want to realize that the food industry has profoundly altered the appetites of us all — leaving us trapped in the same cage, scrambling to find a way out?

Johann Hari is a British journalist and the author of “Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits — and Disturbing Risks — of the New Weight Loss Drugs,” among other books.

Source photographs by seamartini, The Washington Post, and Zana Munteanu via Getty Images.

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