San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Composer and his collaborators found way to bring delicate movie story to stage
In the Negev desert of Israel, a beautiful woman yearns for connection and finds it with a stiff-shouldered Egyptian musician. The man is stranded in her tiny village with his touring eightmember military band, and during the space of one night the mismatched pair bridge a cultural divide through music.
That’s the premise of “The Band’s Visit,” the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, based on the 2007 Israeli film of the same name, that opened Tuesday, Jan. 11, at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco. Quiet and nuanced, with no bombast, spectacle or power ballads, “The Band’s Visit” is an anti-musical of sorts — which is exactly why composer David Yazbek was drawn to the material but doubtful that a work so delicate could thrive on Broadway.
“I had to be convinced,” Yazbek told The Chronicle in a recent phone interview. “My main question was whether there was an audience for the kind of genuine Arabic music I wanted to write — even though there are also many Western elements — and whether a musical could support the kind of spiritual depth I found in the story and characters.”
As it happened, “The Band’s Visit” got rave reviews when it premiered off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company in December 2016 and again when it transferred to Broadway in November 2017. “‘The Band’s Visit’ flows with the grave and joyful insistence of life itself,” a New York Times critic wrote. “Its undeniable allure is not of the hard-charging, brightly blaring sort common to box-office extravaganzas.”
The show went on to win 10 Tony Awards, including best musical, best book, best actor and actress in a musical, and best direction of a musical.
Yazbek, who also wrote music and lyrics for “The Full Monty,” “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Tootsie,” won a Tony for best score.
Yazbek’s initial apprehensions about “The Band’s Visit” were assuaged when he met with Itamar Moses, a Berkeley High graduate and author of the show’s book, and director David Cromer, who “leaned into the quieter aspect” of the work.
“I instinctively understood that the only way to do it right,” Yazbek said, “was to understand that this was not about manipulation or loud dancing or stomping.”
Case in point: “Omar Sharif,” the gentle, mesmerizing ballad that has become the show’s signature song. It occurs when cafe proprietor Dina, lonely and stifled in her tiny desert town, meets an Egyptian bandleader, Tewfiq. In the BroadwaySF touring production at the Golden Gate, Dina is played by Janet Dacal (“In the Heights”) and Tewfiq by Sasson Gabay, the veteran Israeli actor who starred in the 2007 film.
Dina asks Tewfiq what kind of music he plays. “We play classical Arabic music,” he replies.
“What, like Umm Kulthum?” she asks.
“You like Umm Kulthum?” he says, surprised that she would know and appreciate Egypt’s foremost singer and national symbol.
“Don’t tell me what I like!” she says. And then, in song, Dina conjures a childhood memory of hearing Kulthum on the radio and watching Egyptian film star Omar Sharif on Israeli television.
“Umm Kulthum and Omar Sharif Came floating on the jasmine wind From the west, from the south Honey in my ear, spice in my mouth Dark and thrilling
Strange and sweet”
In the Middle East, Kulthum and Sharif were titans of their time. Kulthum “was bigger than Sinatra,” Yazbek recalled, idolized in the way Edith Piaf was in France and Judy Garland in the United States. When Kulthum died in 1975, 4 million Egyptians flooded the streets of Cairo and Tahrir
Square to mourn her passing. Sharif, born Michael Yusef Dimitri Shalhoub, starred in Egyptian movies in the 1950s and became an international star with “Lawrence of Arabia” in 1962. In the song that bears his name, Dina describes him as “cool to the marrow, pharaoh of romance.”
Why does the song register so strongly with audiences?
“It’s magical,” Dacal said. “It’s such an insight into my character, her vulnerability and the way she thinks. In the song, Dina’s reminiscing about a memory, which opens up the communication with Tewfiq. It’s beautiful that music and art and film allow that connection to happen.”
Yazbek proudly proclaimed “Omar Sharif ” one of his best songs, adding, “It’s very evocative, informed by taste and smell. The visual is secondary. Dina closes her eyes when she starts to sing, and I think that’s the secret. It’s deeper than something purely visual.”
Yazbek, 60, grew up in Manhattan with a half-Jewish, half-Sicilian mother and a Lebanese American father who was raised Catholic. “We went to the Unitarian Church,” he said. “That was the compromise.”
From an early age, he said he was “deeply interested in all kinds of music” and his introduction to Kulthum happened “by accident.”
“I went to Lebanon on a trip with my father and literally heard her in the cab ride from the airport,” he recalled. “I was 7.”
In the late 1980s, during the world music boom, Yazbek got into classical Arabic music, modern Middle Eastern music and klezmer, the Yiddish folk music of Eastern Europe. As he prepared “The Band’s Visit,” he listened more intensively, allowing it to “soak in and get in my bones,” he said, “so I could write without worrying about it.”
He toured Israel in the summer of 2017 with Moses, several musicians and Katrina Lenk, the actress who originated the role of Dina and is currently on Broadway in Stephen Sondheim’s “Company.” They stopped in a small desert town in southern Israel, for a “little mini-concert, which was really interesting,” Yazbek said. He had written 70% of the “The Band’s Visit” score by that time, but found new inspiration there.
“We played, and some of the young people who were musicians in the town played for us. It was a great bonding experience and learning experience,” Yazbek said. Even in the van while driving from town to town, “they were playing music every minute.”
There was a violin; an oud, a pearshaped instrument similar to a lute; a similar to a tambourine; and
large goblet-shaped drums that fit under the arm. At one point, Yazbek said, he began playing the oud, and “it turned into one of the instrumentals that the band plays in the show. So in that sense the desert soaked in and this number came out. It was very magical.”