“The Band’s Visit” Translates Those Muted, Indie-Film Longings to Broadway

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Who knew that hospitality had such dramatic potential? The surprise hit on Broadway last season was “Come from Away,” a musical about the thousands of airline passengers who were stranded in the tiny town of Gander, Newfoundland, on 9/11. The show’s uplifting message, in these xenophobic times, is that people can just get along—though it helps if half of them are folksy Canadians. “The Band’s Visit,” which has just opened at the Ethel Barrymore, after premièring at the Atlantic Theatre Company, is also about a group of foreigners crashing for the night in a dead-end town, but it is set in Israel, and the hospitality is considerably more stone-faced.

Based on an Israeli film of the same name, from 2007, the musical has a wisp of a plot. The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, outfitted in nifty powder-blue uniforms and conducted by Tewfiq (Tony Shalhoub), is on its way to a gig in the Israeli city of Petah Tikva, a place cosmopolitan enough that it has an Arab Cultural Center. After a mixup at the train station, the musicians wind up in the less lively Bet Hatikva, in the middle of the Negev Desert. Imagine getting booked at Carnegie Hall and winding up in Manhattan, Kansas, and you start to see their dilemma. At a dinky café that appears to be the only game in town (apart from a uniquely pitiful roller disco), three locals spell things out:

Stick a pin in a map of the desert.
Build a road to the middle of the desert.
Pour cement on the spot in the desert.
That’s Bet Hatikva.

As “welcome to our town!” numbers go, it’s a far cry from “You really ought to give Iowa a try,” from “The Music Man.” Give credit to David Yazbek, who wrote the beguiling music and lyrics (the spare and shrewd book is by Itamar Moses), for setting overwhelming boredom to a catchy tune. The director, David Cromer, supplies similarly deadpan stage business, as one of the customers spins a lazy Susan on a café table, then spins it the other way, as if showing off the only tourist attraction in sight. Needless to say, there is no Arab Cultural Center in Bet Hatikva.

There isn’t a bus out until the next day, so the townsfolk agree to put up the Egyptians for the night, splitting them up among several households. Tewfiq and his trumpet player, Haled (Ari’el Stachel), wind up with Dina, the café’s proprietress. Dina has a dry stare and a drier wit, and she’s immune to Haled’s go-to pickup line, “Do you like Chet Baker?” (Her answer: “No.”) That Dina should become our portal into Bet Hatikva’s undercurrent of longing would seem unlikely, if not for the fact that she’s played by Katrina Lenk, the musical’s not-so-secret weapon. Lenk, a standout in Paula Vogel’s “Indecent,” bears a passing resemblance to Angelina Jolie, without a drop of the self-seriousness, and conveys a sense of conviction that seems utterly Israeli, even though Lenk is from Illinois. She decisively takes over the musical six songs in, when Dina brings Tewfiq to a fluorescent-lit cafeteria and they get to talking about his home country. At the mention of Oum Kalthoum, the Egyptian chanteuse, Dina gets a faraway look in her eyes. She recounts, in song, her girlhood memories of Kalthoum’s voice coming through her mother’s radio, and of Omar Sharif’s image on the TV screen:

Dark and thrilling, strange and sweet,
Cleopatra and a handsome thief.
And they floated in
On a jasmine wind,
Oum Kalthoum and Omar Sharif.

Lenk is not unlike a fragrant breeze herself as she sings this song, infusing the previously stoic atmosphere of the show with a gust of warmth. She’s a radiant presence. Shalhoub, meanwhile, is a marvel of restraint, speaking volumes with what few English words Tewfiq knows. (Recall what he and Stanley Tucci pulled off with no words and a frittata, at the end of “Big Night.”) Dina and Tewfiq have more than music in common—both were once married, and still nurse wounds—but music is what loosens them up just enough to see each other as something more than acquaintances by necessity.

You may wonder, at this point, if there’s a metaphor lurking behind this bond between Arab and Jew, but, thankfully, the musical doesn’t go there. Last season’s Tony winner for Best Play, J. T. Rogers’s “Oslo,” gave the impression that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be solved if only both sides could be plied with enough herring. If “The Band’s Visit” has political undertones, they’re buried deep enough to be imperceptible. Instead, we get the glorious nothingness of an uneventful night in the middle of nowhere. As Tewfiq and Dina get to know each other, Haled teaches the town doofus how to flirt, while another band member helps lull a baby to sleep. Out on the street, a loner identified only as Telephone Guy (Adam Kantor) waits all night at a pay phone, hoping that his girlfriend might call. In the morning, the musicians leave.

Such minimalist material requires tremendous trust and patience, and Cromer, who burst onto the New York theatre scene in 2009, with his inspired staging of “Our Town,” has both, letting the story’s emotional music find its way to the surface. Plot-wise, “The Band’s Visit” is a show about nothing, but it fills the stage with feeling—the muted kind that dwells in missed connections and half-remembered tunes. Its theatrical cousin, more than “Come from Away,” may be “Once,” which won the 2012 Tony for Best Musical. Both shows started downtown, both feature actor-instrumentalists, and both are based on low-budget films in which two strangers meet by chance, commune through music, and then part ways, their mutual affection left unspoken. It takes extraordinary skill to open films like those up to the Broadway stage without spoiling their reticence. “The Band’s Visit” doesn’t quite shake its cinematic roots—you can still sense the understated quirkiness of an indie film—but it succeeds on the strength of its cast and creators, who know exactly what, and when, to hold back. We’re left wondering what significance the orchestra’s time in Bet Hatikva will have for the characters, but one thing is certain: they’d never fess up to it. “Once, not long ago, a group of musicians came to Israel, from Egypt,” Dina says after the band departs, retreating back to her café and her poker face. “You probably didn’t hear about it. It wasn’t very important.”

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