The Band's Visit is one of only four musicals in Broadway history to win the unofficial "Big Six" Tony Awards: Best Musical, Best Book, Best Score, Best Actor in a Musical, Best Actress in a Musical, and Best Direction of a Musical. It won the 2019 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album.
As the performance opens, we see a sign that reads: “One time an Egyptian band visited Israel. You probably didn’t hear about it because I wasn’t important.”
But to everyone at the Dolby Theatre on opening night, it was the most important thing. It was everything.
The play with music (from an astonishingly talented small orchestra and cast) is “The Band’s Visit”—the musical that stole Broadway’s heart and took home 10 Tony Awards. It took a break due to Covid, but now this marvelous, magical, melancholy production is here in Los Angeles at The Dolby through December 19th, and will then migrate to the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in the Spring.
The story line: In 1996, a ceremonial police orchestra from Egpyt is invited to play a concert at a cultural center in Israel, but when they arrive they take an airport bus to the wrong town and become stranded for the night. What unfolds is some of the best theatre you’ll ever witness.
The cast is led by Sasson Gabay as the band’s conductor, Tewfiq, reprising the role he played in the 2007 movie “The Band’s Visit” and the role he inherited from Tony Shaloub on Broadway. He’s a delight as he riffs with L.A.’s own Janet Dacal (Dina) the café owner who against all odds invites the band to stay for dinner and then to stay the night at the homes of various friends.
This is an evening full of longing, loving, and lingering thought...a play in which the smallest gestures are the most powerful. It’s also laced through with gentle, irresistible humor.
None of the characters ask us or beg us to love them…and we only get to know each of them a little…but it’s more than enough to make us feel for each of them and to want to know their stories.
I was so glad there was no intermission, so the slow, subtle burn could just continue to smolder with nothing to break the spell. The silences and the musical interludes from the band members spoke as loudly as any uttered by this divine cast.
Truly, I have never been so moved by a song in a live theatre setting as I was by the Chet-Bakeresque jazz vignette sung by Haled (Joe Joseph) in the roller disco scene. It’s just called “Haled’s Song About Love” but it’s so much more than that.
I’ll be returning to see the show again just for that, and to hear “Answer Me”, the ethereal ballad sung by the “Telephone Guy” (Joshua Grosso) near the end of the play.
This haunting musical play is honey in your ear, spice in your mouth; it’s Omar Sharif riding into your dreams on a jasmine wind… and there is no better holiday gift you can find than to open your heart and take someone you love to see it.
It’s the most important thing.
-Deborah Howell