‘The Band’s Visit’: Partnership off to a great start

By Rich Fahey

BOSTON – There was a time when winning a Tony Award for Best Musical required a plunging chandelier or a sprawling historical story told over several decades.

But times and tastes change.  Today a musical can be the best in class by presenting scenes of simple pleasures, human interactions that make subtle – or in some cases major — changes in lives.

The times we live in have made a musical such as “The Band’s Visit” almost a necessity. The show debuted in 2016 and won the 2017 Tony Award for Best Musical,  and is now being presented at the Huntington Theatre in a co-production between The Huntington and the SpeakEasy Stage Company, artfully directed by SpeakEasy’s artistic director, Paul Daigneault.

The book by Itamar Moses is based on the screenplay by Eram Kolirin  for the  2007 Israeli film about an unlikely encounter between a group of Egyptian musicians and the residents of a small Israeli town.  Relationships will, against all odds, be formed, and differences between cultures will be bridged, if only for a few fleeting hours.

The Tony and Grammy Award- winning score David Yazbeck is the soul of the piece, and the music is performed by two groups of musicians – those playing members of the band  who are performing on stage and those off-stage musicians led by music director Jose Delgado.

They are all quite wonderful, none more so than Mac Ritchey on the Middle Eastern oud, and the electric and acoustic guitar.

Yazbeck, in program notes, describes in detail the various influences during his lifetime that contributed to his score, including legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kuthum and jazz musician and vocalist Chet Baker.  

In 1996, A group of men wearing identical powder blue uniforms enter a bus station waiting room in Tel Aviv. The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra is on its way to an Arab cultural center in the city of Petah Tivkah but when Haled (Kareen Elsamedicy), the band’s ladies’ man,  is distracted at the ticket window, the band ends up with tickets for Bet Hatikvah in Israel’s Negev Desert. It is a town basically at the end of the world, where nothing ever happens.

The residents are bemoaning their dreary lives (“Waiting”) when a bus suddenly drops the band members in their midst.

The leader of the band, an older man named Tewfiq (Brian Thomas Abraham) seeks directions to the Arab cultural center from puzzled café workers Itzik (Jared Troilo) and Papi (Jesse Garlick), but café owner Dina (a wonderful Jennifer Apple) steps in to inform them they have been sent to the wrong town.

There is no bus that can rescue them until the next day, and the residents – led by   Dina– do their best to feed and shelter the band members.

Dina offers to shelter Tewfiq and Haled.  Tewfiq is courteous but reserved, encased in a sturdy emotional shell after his wife’s death three years earlier, the result of family tragedy involving their son, which Tewfiq has blamed on himself.

Dina’s husband is long gone, and she has found occasional refuge in a married man named Sammy  (Zaven Ovian), who later inserts himself between Dina and Tewfiq as they are trying to enjoy a meal.

The late Egyptian actor Omar Sharif becomes a source of bonding for the couple, and they share their memories to Yazbeck’s lovely number “Omar Sharif.”  

They later repair to a “park” – aka one lonely bench — where Tewfiq begins to let his guard down and the two find more common ground. “Something Different,” one of Yazbeck’s loveliest tunes, has Dina explaining their growing friendship: “Nothing is as beautiful as something you don’t expect.”

Band members Simon (James Rana), a clarinetist with an unfinished concerto, and Camal (Andrew Mayer), a violinist, find awkward refuge with Itzik and his despairing wife Iris (Marianna), who share the home with their young child and, on this evening, with visiting father-in-law Avrum (Robert Saoud). Itzik has been “between jobs” seemingly forever and Iris is “celebrating” her birthday in silence in a marriage that seems to be crumbling before all. At one point, she declares herself “no longer in love” with Itzik and storms out.

Later, the two musicians find a way to provide comfort to the distraught couple. Simon performs a finally finished clarinet concerto that quiets a crying baby and Camal provides accompaniment as Itzik serenades his young child in “Itzik’s Lullaby.” The couple will eventually tearfully reunite.

Gradually, we theater-goers bond with the quirky characters. There is the mournful Telephone Guy (Noah Kiesserman), who waits faithfully by the only pay phone in town for his girlfriend – who has not communicated with him for a month – to call.

The shy waiter Papi, on an awkward double date, gets romantic advice at the roller disco that gives him the courage to connect with fellow skater Julia (Josephine Moshiri Elwood).

It all happens in the course of a warm evening before the musicians regroup in the morning to go on their way.

Daniel Pelzig’s choreography captures both the sleepy rhythms of everyday life in the town and the occasional joyful movement, amplified by Yazbeck’s score.

Some of director Daigneault’s best work, as he  referenced in program notes, has come when he took large musicals such as “Big Fish” and “Fun Home” and distilled them to their core so SpeakEasy could stage them in the intimate Calderwood Pavilion.  The challenge this time, he noted, was not to lose that core in the larger space. Check and double check.  He can proudly add this show to his resume as the partnership between The Huntington, a nationally renowned, Tony-winning regional theater, and SpeakEasy Stage, a shining light as a mid-level regional theater, has gotten off to a sparkling start.

At the beginning of “The Band’s Visit,” a phrase is projected onto a screen, to be repeated by Dina at the end 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.”

It is, of course, the antithesis of what the story and the playwright are saying: It is of vital importance we find a way to bridge our differences and relate to each other as human beings. If we don’t, civilization itself is in trouble.

The Huntington and SpeakEasy Stage Company co-production of “The Band’s Visit.” Book by Itamar Moses, based on the screenplay by Eran Kolirin. Music and lyrics by David Yazbeck. Directed by Paul Daigneault. Choreography by Deniel Pelzig. Music direction by Jose Delgado. Scenic design by Wilson Chin and Jimmy Stubbs. Costume design by Miranda Kau Giurleo. Lighting design by Ahja M. Jackson. Sound design by Joshua Milliken. At the Huntington Theatre through Dec. 17. Huntingtontheatre.org