The Band’s Visit is a musical for our times. Fragile, poetic, ordinary, overwhelmingly charming but brutally honest, it beguiles and soothes. Complete strangers with nothing much in common but being alive, find points of harmony, make music, literally and figuratively. Acceptance and hope abide as racial and cultural barriers are peeled away. David Yazbek’s score is melodic and raw, sensuous and frisky. David Cromer’s insightful direction allows the fears, passions and simple joys of ordinary lives to be celebrated and better understood. An understated triumph.
David Yazbeck has provided the score for three Broadway musicals - The Full Monty, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The Band’s Visit is a musical in a very different key from those, but one that gives Yazbeck a chance to riff on well treasured melodies as well as provide some scorching new material.
In simple terms, the Broadway musical is testing its boundaries in 2016. Between Dear Evan Hansen, Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 and The Band’s Visit, the essence of musical theatre is extended, developed and enhanced. Scores are exacting, touching and exciting; books are remarkable, intriguing and fascinating.
The Band’s Visit, however, is a supreme triumph. It is not an epic event, it is not hyper-energised, and it does not feature as cast of exciting “with it” performers. Rather, it is story telling at its most complex and most sublime, music at its most insinuating and enchanting, and features performances which are utterly truthful, utterly beguiling and utterly wonderful.
Yazbeck’s score is ravishing and heartfelt, every note adding to a complex and melodic sense of the lives led by the characters encountered. Welcome To Nowhere, It Is What It Is, Omar Sharif, Papa Hears The Ocean, Something Different, Itzik’s Lullaby and the astonishing Answer Me - each is played and sung in the key of humanity, with chords that strike into the heart, grace notes that are nostalgic and insightful, and moments of dissonance that leave an ineffable harmonic sadness, the zephyrs of lost opportunity, echoing in their wake. Yazbeck uses exotic melodies, harmonies and rhythms, immersing the air in the sense of Israel and Egypt.
The Band’s Visit has a simple story, impeccably told. David Cromer’s direction is exact and transports the audience directly into the moment when two cultures collide and strangers offer and receive kindness and understanding from strangers; more than that though, strangers who might have been expected to be hostile to each other.
Itamar Moses, whose book is based upon a screenplay by Eran Kolirin, wastes no words. The definitive ordinariness and awkwardness of the dialogue and situation is arresting and speaks to everyone everywhere. There is a sensuous radiance to the stories of the people of Beit Hatikva, a tiny village sweltering in the Negev Desert. Cromer ensures that each character is real, flawed and, ultimately, hopeful.
The Band, led by Tewfig, all decked out in baby boy blue uniforms, is due to play at the Arab Cultural Center in Petah Tikva. Tewfig is concerned that the Band’s masters are losing faith in the Band, so the trip is very important. Through a quirk in pronunciation (Arabic has no p sound so p is often pronounced b) the all-Egyptian Band finds itself stranded, near penniless, in Beit Hatikva, a place where the inhabitants say there is no culture.
Dina, who runs the corner cafe, is amused by the arrival of the desperate, lost musicians, but their honesty and humble demeanour touches her and she rounds up the townsfolk so that billets can be found for the musicians. Grateful and slightly shell-shocked, the band members divide and settle into the foreign environments. Mostly, the story focuses on how the sleepovers reveal the truths, fears and hopes of both the strangers who need help and the villagers who offer it without much hesitation.
Katrina Lenk is mesmerisimg as Dina, faultless in her portrayal of a life more lost than lived. Her singing is phenomenally good, and, particularly in Omar Sharif, she aches with the ecstacy of remembered happiness, shared simple joys and the what could have been musings that haunt us all. When she sings of “A jasmine wind from the west”, you can smell the jasmine, taste the honey in her ears, and smell the spice in her mouth.
Dina has never been out of her village, but old movies have shown her the world and promised her romance and excitement. Lenk communicates all that effortlessly, making Dina an unforgettable character from the musical theatre repertoire.
Although, in many ways, the scenario lends itself to expected cliches and denouements, happily none play out. It looks like they might, because several are set up, but there is real shock - and valuable rewards - in The Band’s Visit taking the different, more realistic path. No cliche endings here - just raw humanity, exulatant, mystifying and unsettling. Glorious.
Key to that is Lenk’s attractive (in every sense) Dina and her compelling and slightly compelled connection with Tony Shalhoub’s awkward, fish-out-of-water, conductor Tewfiq. Shalhoub is superb, Lenk’s equal in every way, except vocally. But the role doesn’t require a singer really and Shalhoub hits all the notes he is required to hit with a dedication and style that reflects his character’s musicianship.
The rest of the company are outstanding. Itzik (John Cariani) and Iris (Kristen Sieh), a portrait of unhappy youthful parenthood, bound together by a child they adore, live with her father, Avrum (Andrew Polk), in barely disguised irritation.
Haled (Ari’el Stachel), the one who likes blowing his own trumpet and throws out cheesy pick-up lines to ladies to usually well-received effect, becomes a kind of Egyptian Cyrano to Papi (Daniel David Stewart), the sort-of-scared-of-girls local lad. Stewart’s rendition of Papi Hears The Ocean is a showstopper; Cariani’s exquisite singing in Itzik’s Lullaby provides an honest insight into the sad marriage.
Camal, (George Abud) is the Band’s violinist and he provides a gloriously lugubrious and slightly sardonic contribution as the most observant of the musicians; and there is a standout turn from Erik Liberman, the hapless love-struck Israeli man who silently watches the public telephone in the street, desperate for it to ring, for his love to call. Answer Me, led by Liberman, is a howl from the heart.
Scott Pask’s set design, utilising a revolve masterfully, provides a perfect, intrinsically melancholy backdrop for this intimate musical meeting of minds. Nothing is flashy, but everything feels precisely right, tantalisingly on the edge of despair. Sarah Laux’ costumes brighten the environment, but not too much, and Tyler Micoleau uses a lighting design that permits shadows to creep and swallow light, and for the radiance of happiness to shine brightly when it can.
The creative team deliver entirely on Cromer’s vision of Beit Hatikva: an ordinary place where magic can happen, where dreams can be shattered or fulfilled, but where life goes on in all its complex simplicity.
The Band’s Visit is a stunning achievement. It is timely too - it’s about tolerance, acceptance, individuality and love. It’s the kind of musical Trump’s America needs to remember: one about the politics of humanity.