Shalhoub (“Monk”) has only grown in the role of a man who carries his dignity and private grief with the stiffness of someone transporting perilously fragile cargo.Īs for Ms. The show is carefully veined with images of incompleteness: a forever unlit cigarette in the mouth of a violinist (George Abud) a clarinet concerto that has never been completed by its composer (Alok Tewari) a public telephone that never rings, guarded by a local (Adam Kantor) waiting for a call from his girlfriend and a pickup line that’s dangled like an unbaited hook by the band’s aspiring Lothario (Ari’el Stachel, whose smooth jazz vocals dazzle in the style of his character’s idol, Chet Baker).Īll the cast members - who also include a deeply affecting John Cariani, Kristen Sieh, Etai Benson and Andrew Polk - forge precisely individualized characters, lonely people who have all known loss, with everything and nothing in common. Even the frictions that emerge from uninvited Arabs on Israeli soil flicker and die like damp matches. That means that the cultural collisions and consummations that you - and they - might anticipate don’t occur. And as the stranded musicians interact with their hosts, their shared story becomes a tally of sweet nothings, of regretful might-have-beens.
To begin with, they don’t share a language and must communicate in broken English. But Tyler Micoleau’s lighting, and the whispers of projections by Maya Ciarrocchi, evoke the subliminal changes of perspective stirred by the arrival of strangers.Ĭonnections among the Egyptian and the Israeli characters are inevitably incomplete. Scott Pask’s revolving set, so fitting for a world in which life seems to spin in an endless circle, captures the sameness of the view. The “B” that begins its name might as well stand for “basically bleak and beige and blah blah blah.” Just how uninteresting is Bet Hatikva? Its residents are happy to tell you, in some of the wittiest songs ever written about being bored. (Sarah Laux did the costumes.) And there’s not a bus out of this godforsaken hole until the next morning. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in their powder-blue uniforms. They register as unmistakably alien figures there, looking like refugees from Sgt. Thanks to some understandable confusion at the ticket counter, they wind up instead in the flyblown backwater of Bet Hatikva. Shalhoub), board a bus in 1996 for an engagement at the Arab Cultural Center in the city of Petah Tikva. The story is sprung when the members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Band, led by their straight-backed conductor, Tewfiq (Mr. It finds ecstasy in ennui eroticism among people who rarely make physical contact and a sense of profound eventfulness in a plot in which, all told, very little happens.
Such assurance is all the more impressive when you consider that “The Band’s Visit” is built on delicately balanced contradictions. Cromer’s production now moves wire to wire with a thoroughbred’s confidence. Though the lives it depicts are governed by a caution born of chronic disappointment, Mr. That is, to say the least, no longer a problem. It is not a work to be punctuated with rowdy cheers and foot-stomping ovations, despite the uncanny virtuosity of Mr. With songs by David Yazbek and a script by Itamar Moses, “The Band’s Visit” is a Broadway rarity seldom found these days outside of the canon of Stephen Sondheim: an honest-to-God musical for grown-ups. Instead, this portrait of a single night in a tiny Israeli desert town confirms a lyric that arrives, like nearly everything in this remarkable show, on a breath of reluctantly romantic hope: “Nothing is as beautiful as something you don’t expect.” It is called “The Band’s Visit,” and its undeniable allure is not of the hard-charging, brightly blaring sort common to box-office extravaganzas. One of the most ravishing musicals you will ever be seduced by opened on Thursday night at the Barrymore Theater. Breaking news for Broadway theatergoers, even - or perhaps especially - those who thought they were past the age of infatuation: It is time to fall in love again.
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