Musical stirs hearts with quiet assurance
Lonesome melodies and weighty pauses make major impact in ‘The Band’s Visit’
Many musicals operate via overstimulation, the Pop Rocks of theater. Others have all the subtlety of a steamroller.
Not “The Band’s Visit,” which wafts in on an open desert highway. Here, life is lived at the pace that most of us recognize but that dramatists often overlook.
This show, with a book by Berkeley native Itamar Moses, makes itself at home in the wait for a welcome wagon or bus or phone call or second chance that never comes. It hunkers down in the agonizing gap between an overhasty remark or motion and something, anything, coming to the rescue.
Such is the quiet assurance of the Tony-winning show, which opened Wednesday, Jan. 12, at BroadwaySF’s Golden Gate Theatre; it almost makes other musicals look insecure.
There they are, Egypt’s Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, in their powder-blue uniforms (Sarah Laux did the snappy costumes) with their oblong, curvaceous instrument cases, and no one’s coming to meet them at this sparsely populated Israeli bus station. It’s the wrong town, so “Welcome to nowhere,” sing Dina (Janet Dacal) and her crew.
Yet the band, led by Tewfiq (Sasson Gabay, who also played the part in the 2007 film on which the musical is based), must be accommodated, which means a sudden and intimate immersion into foreigners’ lives — a couple on the brink of breaking up, a young man who loses the ability to hear (let alone speak) around women, another young man who stands sentinel at a pay phone all night every night in flagging hope that his girlfriend might finally call.
And then there’s Dina herself, whose skillful imagination and sometimes tremulous, sometimes self-destructive impulses will not be contained by her humdrum life. Here is where David Yazbek’s music flies to the stars, back in time and deep within the forbidden parts of ourselves all at once.
In the song “Omar Sharif,” Dina is sharing with Tewfiq what it felt like when she was a girl watching Egyptian movie stars, whose world seemed to give her living room new scents and vistas and tastes. Yazbek’s hypnotic melody, one of recent
years’ most gorgeous entrants into the musical theater canon, wends its way into memory, circling and bobbing around its slippery subject. The song knows that Dina can never truly access scenes of Umm Kulthum and Sharif nor recover the childhood self who first became enchanted by them, but “Omar Sharif” nonetheless exudes a rueful confidence in its own incantatory power.
The show, directed by David Cromer, believes in the force of a lonesome melody — how a humble air on the clarinet can lull a squalling infant and soften its squabbling parents, how a remembered strain can summon a lost partner and suggest a yearning, however inchoate, for something new. It believes that no matter how small we seem, arias burn inside us.
Tyler Micoleau’s lighting design is an equal part of this orchestra, finding a sickly yellow for a solitary streetlight that bleeds into dawn or the unnatural red of a violent desert afternoon sun.
If not every singer is of uniform quality, a standout is Joe Joseph as the waggish trumpeter Haled. At one point, Haled is in a skating rink, advising Papi (Coby Getzug) on how to melt his frosty persona and talk to girls, and somehow Joseph’s voice takes on the qualities of the scene — the easy, frictionless feel of a skater’s glide, the incandescent, breathy tenderness that makes a puddle from ice.
Just as there are no kick lines or sequins in “The Band’s Visit,” there is no fairy-tale ending here. It asserts that a story is still worthy of telling even if it doesn’t hit a drama’s standard lows and highs. A wisp can have a mountain’s weight.