The Band's Visit

[+ Cash4Trash]

http://www.talkinbroadway.com/allthatchat_new/d.php?id=2378776

 

This show was done at the Atlantic this past year and has incredible buzz. Could very well be the next

"hard ticket" on Broadway.

[Cooper]

It's becoming a hard ticket to get as word of this new musical is spreading. The performance I saw was sold out.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thought Katrina Lenk & Tony Shalhoub were superb. Excellent cast.

 

One act, 95 min. Stick around after the show, you'll be entertained by the ceremonial band.

Edited October 26, 2017 by Cooper

[Cooper]

[Treehorn]

My favorite tag line..."what is the sound of Israeli sarcasm?"

 

Loved the show. It's very small, very slight, not overtly dramatic. Yet I had tears throughout.

[fos101]

Saw it last night. Loved every minute of it!

[edjames]

A hard ticket is now close to impossible!

 

Sure Tony nominee for Best Musical...

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/theater/the-bands-visit-review-broadway-tony-shalhoub.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftheater&action=click&contentCollection=theater&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

 

Review: ‘The Band’s Visit’ Is a Ravishing Musical That Whispers With Romance

 

By BEN BRANTLEY NOV. 9, 2017

 

Strangers in the night: Tony Shalhoub and Ari’el Stachel are members of an Egyptian ensemble who meet an Israeli cafe proprietor, played by Katrina Lenk, in the musical “The Band’s Visit.”

 

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.

 

One of the most ravishing musicals you will ever be seduced by opened on Thursday night at the Barrymore Theater. 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.

 

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.”

 

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. It is not a work to be punctuated with rowdy cheers and foot-stomping ovations, despite the uncanny virtuosity of Mr. Yazbek’s benchmark score.

 

That would stop the show, and you really don’t want that to happen. Directed by David Cromer with an inspired inventiveness that never calls attention to itself, “The Band’s Visit” flows with the grave and joyful insistence of life itself. All it asks is that you be quiet enough to hear the music in the murmurs, whispers and silences of human existence at its most mundane — and transcendent.

“The Band’s Visit,”and its undeniable allure is not of the hard-charging, brightly blaring sort common to box-office extravaganzas.

 

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.”

 

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. It is not a work to be punctuated with rowdy cheers and foot-stomping ovations, despite the uncanny virtuosity of Mr. Yazbek’s benchmark score.

 

That would stop the show, and you really don’t want that to happen. Directed by David Cromer with an inspired inventiveness that never calls attention to itself, “The Band’s Visit” flows with the grave and joyful insistence of life itself. All it asks is that you be quiet enough to hear the music in the murmurs, whispers and silences of human existence at its most mundane — and transcendent.

And, oh yes, be willing to have your heart broken, at least a little. Because “The Band’s Visit,” which stars a magnificent Katrina Lenk and Tony Shalhoub as would-be lovers in a not-quite paradise, is like life in that way, too.

 

There were worries that this finely detailed show, based on Eran Kolirin’s screenplay for the

of the same title, might not survive the transfer to Broadway. First staged to sold-out houses late last year at the Atlantic Theater Company, it exuded a shimmering transparency that might well have evaporated in less intimate quarters.

 

 

They register as unmistakably alien figures there, looking like refugees from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in their powder-blue uniforms. (Sarah Laux did the costumes.) And there’s not a bus out of this godforsaken hole until the next morning.

 

Just how uninteresting is Bet Hatikva? Its residents are happy to tell you, in some of the wittiest songs ever written about being bored. The “B” that begins its name might as well stand for “basically bleak and beige and blah blah blah.”

 

Leading this civic inventory is a cafe proprietor named Dina (Ms. Lenk, in a star-making performance), a wry beauty who clearly doesn’t belong here and just as clearly will never leave. Like her fellow citizens, she sees the defining condition of her life as eternal waiting, a state in which you “keep looking off out into the distance/ Even though you know the view is never gonna change.”

 

Photo

From left, Kristen Sieh, John Cariani, Alok Tewari, Andrew Polk and George Abud on violin in “The Band’s Visit.”

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. 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.

 

Connections among the Egyptian and the Israeli characters are inevitably incomplete. To begin with, they don’t share a language and must communicate in broken English. And as the stranded musicians interact with their hosts, their shared story becomes a tally of sweet nothings, of regretful might-have-beens.

 

That means that the cultural collisions and consummations that you — and they — might anticipate don’t occur. Even the frictions that emerge from uninvited Arabs on Israeli soil flicker and die like damp matches.

 

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).

 

All 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. A marvelous Mr. 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.

 

As for Ms. Lenk, seen on Broadway last season in Paula Vogel’s “Indecent,”she is the ideal avatar of this show’s paradoxical spirit, at once coolly evasive and warmly expansive, like the jasmine wind that Dina describes in the breakout ballad “Omar Sharif.”

 

Listening to Tewfiq sing in Arabic, she wonders, “Is he singing about wishing?” She goes on: “I don’t know what I feel, and I don’t know what I know/All I know is I feel something different.”

 

Mr. Yazbek’s melody matches the exquisitely uncertain certainty of the lyrics. That “something different” is the heart-clutching sensation that throbs throughout this miraculous show, as precise as it is elusive, and all the more poignant for being both.

[TruthBTold]

Sounds wonderful . I hope it tours.

[BroadwayDave]

Bought my ticket for “The Band’s Visit” showing at the Barrymore Theater. Very excited! Love the Original Broadway Cast Recording, have been listening to it for a week now.

 

Will be seeing the show May 30th along with “Hello, Dolly!” on my first ever trip to Broadway.

[kenomora]

Bought my ticket for “The Band’s Visit” showing at the Barrymore Theater. Very excited! Love the Original Broadway Cast Recording, have been listening to it for a week now.

 

Will be seeing the show May 30th along with “Hello, Dolly!” on my first ever trip to Broadway.

Awesome shows fit for your first ever trip to Broadway. Have tons of fun!

 

I wish I could see the Band's Visit now. Katrina Lenk is so magical.

[BroadwayDave]

Awesome shows fit for your first ever trip to Broadway. Have tons of fun!

 

I wish I could see the Band's Visit now. Katrina Lenk is so magical.

 

Thanks! Really looking forward to it! Still trying to decide whether to add a second show for my return trip in August to see Bette Midler in “Hello, Dolly!” The only one that fits time-wise is “Once On This Island”. Not overly fascinated with it, but it seems to get great reviews.

[edjames]

I liked it, but I wasn't overwhelmed. Tony Shaloub has moved on to film his TV show, his role is now filled by actor, Dariush Kashani.

Katrina Lenk's performance is mesmerizing. She has an earthy sexual aura and you cannot help but focus on every moment of her performance.

The music is good. Best musical? I don't know. Still, an enjoyable piece of theater.

[BroadwayDave]

Another performance I saw last week in NYC. Wrote this long review...

 

THE BAND’S VISIT (spoilers ahead):

 

I was seated in the very front row Orchestra AA109. The stage is right there. In your face. To give you an idea, I’m approximately (though shrinking every year) 5’10” tall, and when I was seated the stage was equal in height to the top of my head. So, yes, you’re (I was) basically looking up the entire show, although at varying angles depending on how close the cast got to the very front of the stage. And you’re so close you can see them spit when they’re yelling at each other. At times there was action going on both sides of the stage and you’re (I was) getting whiplash. And when they’re mid-stage, you see basically from the ankles or mid-shin and up.

 

Most know it’s a one act musical, 90 minutes, no intermission.

 

As for the show itself, I had been listening to the OBCR for about two months, and knew all the songs. Seeing it play out on stage, and witnessing how the songs were injected into the action, was fascinating.

 

Katrina Lenk (Dina) was literally the center of attention anytime she was on stage. Sure you looked at the cast member replying to her, or whoever she’s having the conversation with, but she is mesmerizing and all you could do was look at her. The entire cast worked brilliantly as an ensemble.

 

My favorites, other than Katrina Lenk, were Etai Benson who I’d seen before in the National Tour of “An American in Paris, and Adam Kantor (he played Mark Cohen in the closing cast of Rent, and I had watched him on YouTube). Etai played Papi, Adam played Telephone Guy. For a good part of the show Telephone Guy just stood nearly motionless in front of the pay phone, wherever it was onstage. Just staring. At the phone. A thankless part of the show until the end, when he got “the call” and the entire cast joined in to sing “Answer Me”. And my God, what a stunning song. It’s my favorite of the OBCR.

 

Other favorite songs were:

 

“Omar Sharif”, with Dina so very deeply sharing her love and passion of Egyptian music (Umm Kulthum) and movies (Omar Sharif), her arms elegantly and sensually caressing the air;

 

“Papi Hears the Ocean” (cute and funny) with “Haley’s Song About Love” (brilliantly sung), with most the entire disco/nightclub scene just as cute as it could be. Every time Papi’s date would skate by his eyes got as big as saucers in fear of having to interact with his crush;

 

“The Park”, “Itgara’a”, and “Something Different”, where Dina and Tewfiq get to know more about each other’s lives. Being so close to the stage I could sense their was an actual attraction from Dina, but Tewfiq stayed aloof. They shared quite a few laughs, and deep emotional stories, and there was a connection, but I still felt Tewfiq wasn’t yet there. The scene where he shows her what it’s like to conduct music, truly beautiful.

 

and “Welcome to Nowhere”, with Dina, all hand-on-hip and in charge, but “indifferent” to the non-Petah Tikvah and how boring it all is, Papi rubbing his face like he’d just had about enough of the town, then bouncing up and down to the beat of the song, and Itzik (played by John Cariani) really getting into the song bouncing up and down in his seat.

 

Speaking of Itzik, I think one of the most heartfelt, gut wrenching scenes came from his wife Iris after they had both been fighting and arguing and her been just being “done” and disgusted with their relationship the whole show. After Simon (Tewfiq’s second in command, who had been staying at their house) lulled the crying baby back to sleep, Itzik and Iris have one last knock down drag out fight, then she just breaks down in the most amazing crying I’d ever witnessed. You could truly feel her absolute pain. And the way Itzik held on to her as she battled his embrace, and they collapsed to the floor together, her just sobbing. It was heartbreaking.

 

The production and scenery are basic and simple, and the main scenes rotate on a turntable with perfection between locations. There’s projections of clouds and moon in some scenes, and its subtle without being distracting. And when Telephone Guy gets “the call” the translation is projected onto the main structure in the middle of the stage for all to see.

 

This story of how different people from different cultures and countries came together, helped each other, and fell in love, then went their own way, was also simple.

 

But it is a stunning achievement in how simple can be overwhelmingly beautiful, funny, heartbreaking, and how they connected with each through a shared loved of music.