‘The Band’s Visit’ brings diverse groups together in fellowship
The residents of a small Israeli desert town welcome some unexpected visitors when the Egyptian Police Band gets misdirected to the wrong town in the multiTony Award-winning musical “The Band’s Visit.” Zi Alikhan directs the Itamar Moses (book) and David Yazbek (music and lyrics) show through March 17 for Writers Theatre. Music supervision is by Andra Velis Simon.
Performances are 3 and 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 3 and
7:30 p.m. Saturdays, and 2 and 6 p.m. Sundays. There is no show Feb. 16.
“It’s a really beautiful play,” said Alikhan, who has a close connection to the history of “The Band’s Visit,” as the associate director on the first national tour of the original Broadway production.
“This play is so deceptively simple because it is so steeped in human conversation,” Alikhan said. “But it contains volumes and volumes and volumes of the unspoken narratives of our lives as human beings. And it contains the DNA of all of our lost hopes and lost dreams. What this play offers is a bit of insight into the fact that maybe we do share more than ways that we differentiate.”
“This has been on my radar since the Broadway production,” said Rom Barkhordar, who plays Tewfiq, the leader of the Egyptian Police Band. He related that he was up for the same role for the Broadway production and the national touring production of the show but didn’t get cast.
When he learned about the Writers Theatre production, Barkhordar decided, “This is something that I have to play,” he said. “It’s one of those shows that hits on all cylinders. The music is fantastic. The subject matter is deceptively simple and beautiful. The characters are so lush. It gives everybody an opportunity to shine.”
There are some challenges for Barkhordar, though. He doesn’t usually perform in musicals and this one requires him to sing a song — in Arabic. Also, Barkhordar had to learn how to conduct.
His character, Tewfiq, is a widower. “The only thing he has left in his life is this band that he knows is quickly going out of fashion,” Barkhordar said. “He’s desperate to keep his job going.”
The fact that his band winds up in the wrong town on their Middle East concert tour is a great embarrassment for him. “Then he starts developing this strange little friendship with this much younger Israeli woman and she sort of brings him out of his shell,” the actor said.
That woman, Dina, is played by Sophie Madorsky, who was asked to audition to be a “swing” for the actor who was playing this role in the Broadway production in 2018, the year Madorsky graduated from college. She got close but wasn’t cast.
“It’s such a special piece because it brings in Jews and Arabs but not in a way that is typically portrayed in theater stories,”
Madorsky said. “It’s not emphasizing their differences. It’s emphasizing these really small mundane molecular moments of connection.”
The actor described Dina as “a woman who has been weighed down by her own disbelief in her abilities. She is sort of resigned to her life just being the passage of time without passion or forward drive and vision.”
Despite that, she has a lot of humor, the actor said.
“Dina sees Tewfiq as a person who could bring her out of her life and into this place she fantasized about herself being, which is a dancer in a big city with a lot of people and bright opportunities. He opens that door for her.”
This is a co-production with TheatreSquared in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which hosted the first regional premiere of the musical last fall, also under Alikhan’s direction.
Alikhan said, “We really hope that audiences in Glencoe and in the suburbs and in Chicago will come and see a very people-centered, heart-driven new version of ‘The Band’s Visit.’ ”
The show offers a lesson that is needed more than ever now. “It is about how two very distinct and different cultures can find common ground through the language of music,” Barkhordar said.