Emotions sound in quiet musical ‘The Band’s Visit’
The Band’s Visit is such a quiet musical, what’s left unspoken is fraught with emotion and meaning. This gentle musical that has much to say about loneliness and longing for human connection took the Tony Awards by storm in 2018 by winning 10 of its 11 nominations. Its tour lands in Akron’s Connor Palace, where it will run through November 24.
The Band’s Visit is based on the 2007 Israeli film by the same name that was a huge hit in Israel. Starring in the current tour is award-winning Israeli actor Sasson Gabay, who originated the role of band leader Tewfiq in the film and also took over the Broadway role from Tony Shalhoub.
In this story, a visiting Egyptian ceremonial police band ends up in the wrong Israeli town through a mix-up at the border. The musicians become stuck in the remote desert village of Bet Hativka, where, over just 24 hours, the band brings the town to life in unexpected ways.
Director David Cromer, who won a Tony Award for best direction of a musical for The Band’s Visit, also directed the show Off Broadway in its transition from stage to film. The show was conceived by Cleveland Heights native and lead producer Orin Wolf, who spent years working to convince original film writer/director Eran Kolirin to allow his work to be adapted into a musical.
Cromer, 55, replaced Hal Prince as director halfway through the development process when Prince took Prince of Broadway to Broadway. Cromer spent about 18 more months with book writer Itamar Moses and composer David Yazbek further developing The Band’s Visit before the musical’s premiere Off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater in 2016.
There were many naysayers to
Wolf’s original idea to adapt the film into a musical. But he found the right creative team that believed deeply in the project, Cromer said by phone October 16 from New York, the day before he opened the Broadway drama The Sound Inside with Mary-Louise Parker and Will Hochman.
“The Band’s Visit was a really, really, really wonderful artistic and commercial and critical success but it could just as easily have been, ‘What the hell were they thinking?’” Cromer said. “It’s about purity of execution.”
He said the story is about loneliness and isolation, which are serious issues: “You can be lonely in a town, you can be lonely in a marriage, you can be lonely in a house full of people.’’
The creative team has always acknowledged that The Band’s Visit breaks the rules of the Broadway musical. It has solo after solo instead of large production numbers and there’s nothing flashy about the show.
In the barren, remote desert town of Bet Hativka, there’s a prevailing lethargy among its residents, who are waiting for something to happen in a town where nothing ever happens. As Israeli cafe owner Dina sings with self-deprecating humor in “Welcome to Nowhere,’’ it’s “blah blah blah.”
Every character in the story is involved in a love story of some sort. But when they find themselves unable to connect – separated by language, history, anxiety, misunderstanding or fear – it’s music that ultimately brings people together.
“It’s about isolation and it’s about loneliness, and in order for them to all come together, they have to be apart,’’ Cromer said of the show’s characters. “The reason to sing is because words have failed.”
BUT LIKE in the film, the musical also relies on silence.
“Silence is also a sound. Silence is also a word but it’s also music and it’s also rhythm,’’ the director said.
Composer Yazbek’s score includes a blend of Middle Eastern sounds, including Egyptian folk, Israeli klezmer and American jazz. An onstage band plays and Middle Eastern sounds include those from the darbuka drum, the riq tambourine and the oud, a pear-shaped stringed instrument.
Yazbek, who is both Lebanese and Jewish, wrote “Answer Me” first, which helped bring the rest of the score into focus.
“What does it sound like when borders dissolve? What does it sound like when everyone sings together for the first time?” he asked in a video about the show.
The whole cast finally comes together musically for about 18 seconds near the end of the show in “Answer Me,” led by the character Telephone Guy. They’re calling out in the dark with longing thoughts, which are universal, the director said.
Nobody embodies Bet Hativka’s perpetual state of waiting more than that Telephone Guy, a sentinel at the only phone booth in town who waits day in and day out for his girlfriend to call. Playing the role on tour is Michael Cefalo, a Pittsburgh native who’s a 2016 graduate of Baldwin Wallace University’s musical theater program.
Cefalo, who’s making his national tour debut, said his character, who guards that phone with his life, is possibly the only one in the story who waits in an optimistic way.
“He’s kind of the person who carries the hope through the end of the show,’’ said the actor, 24, speaking by phone from a break in Florida October 22.
Cefalo, who calls his big dark wig “a crazy, anime Jew-fro,’’ said his besotted character is just crazy enough to be waiting at the phone booth for a month, with worn-out clothes and messy hair. But Telephone Guy’s “Answer Me” is a seminal moment in the show.
“It kind of begins like a prayer and he almost gives up hope” by starting to walk away from the telephone booth during the number, Cefalo said. “It’s that moment of like just singing into the ether and ultimately I guess aiming it up to God.”
The song has a huge crescendo of voices that soon fades away.
“It’s kind of this little mirage in the desert,’’ Cefalo said. In this musical, characters speak Arabic and Hebrew but their common language is broken English. Having original film star Gabay in the lead role as the courtly yet broken band leader Tewfiq has been a treat for both the cast and creative team.
“We love the film and we were always embracing the film,’’ Cromer said. “It [the musical] was built around what we thought Sasson was [originally] playing.”
Speaking Hebrew was new for actor Cefalo, who is of Italian descent. He has enjoyed working with the show’s dialect coach, Zohar Tirosh-Polk.
“I’m pretty much immersed in Hebrew every day,’’ said Cefalo, who works with six native Hebrew speakers in the cast. They include Gabay and his son, Adam.
Adam plays the role of Papi, the Jewish teen who provides comic relief as he sings about having no idea how to woo girls in “Papi Hears the Ocean.” Cefalo said watching the relationship between father and son actors is beautiful.
This multicultural cast gathers to cook Shabbat dinners every Friday night after the show. And cast member Ronnie Malley, who is Palestinian-American, teaches Arabic classes each Friday to all who are interested.
Cromer said it took a year to cast the tour of The Band’s Visit, and the creative team has always been aggressive about finding actors who appropriately represent the Middle East.
The musical’s story brings together two groups of people who have historically hated each other: Arabs and Israelis. But politics aren’t mentioned in a story that’s simply about humans.
“One of the stories of the show is that we are all far more alike in the most basic and daily way than we are different,’’ Cromer said.