youtube omar sharif band's visit

Things you buy through our links may earn  Vox Media  a commission.

How Broadway’s Tiny Musical Made Its Big Song

The story behind The Band’s Visit ’s “Omar Sharif.”

The Band’s Visit runs 90 minutes. It doesn’t have an intermission. It doesn’t have an 11 o’clock number, partly because it doesn’t have a second act. The Broadway musical adapted from the 2007 Israeli indie film eschews flash and theatrics in favor of subtlety and silence. What it does have though is “Omar Sharif,” a quietly gorgeous number that happens almost exactly halfway through the show. Up until the song begins the audience watches as the members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra — the band — wander around a town in Israel where they’ve mistakenly landed — the visit — and are hosted by Dina, a local café owner played by Katrina Lenk . Dina has been trying, fruitlessly, to connect with the band’s leader, Tewfiq, all evening. It’s not until they find a common connection, the music of Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum and movies starring, yes, Omar Sharif, that the two are able to really communicate as Dina sings, across a cafeteria table, about her memories of listening to the radio and watching the television as a girl in Israel.

It’s a simple-seeming song with sparse but poetic lyrics — the phrase “jasmine wind” occurs a half-dozen times and somehow sounds new with each utterance — that manages to draw in the entire audience and become the show’s standout number. Vulture sat down with director David Cromer, book writer Itamar Moses, and composer-lyricist David Yazbek, and Lenk — are all nominated for Tony awards in their respective categories , added with another seven for the show’s total 11 nods — to talk about the process of translating scene into song and creating a number that is unlike anything most people, the creative team included, traditionally believe Broadway is supposed to be.

From Screen to Stage

Itamar Moses: I wrote the first draft essentially as a play. “What are the things about the movie that do sustain onstage? And what do I have to change and how?” Then Yazbek and I sat down and went through that script, page by page, one glorious afternoon, and circled potential song moments. That moment in the cafeteria scene where she talks about hearing Umm Kulthum on the radio was one of the things we circled that day.

David Yazbek: The more I do this, the more I find myself running from the stuff that seemed like the right choice the first time. But this was clearly a moment that could be musicalized.

Moses: Some of the things we’d circled we ended up saying, “I don’t actually think there’s a song there.” But that one — it just stuck.

Yazbek: Then I don’t hear from him for three months! I’ll try to make good songs out of what we’ve discussed and then I will talk to Itamar — sometimes exhaustively, just to get even a sentence that I might latch on to.

Moses: That is true. He would call me and we’d just have these long conversations where sometimes I wouldn’t even have to say much other than “No.” Maybe I’d say one or two things back, and then he’d be like, “All right, all right, that’s good! I’m gonna think about that.”

Yazbek: Yeah, then I’ll hang up because I’ll want to go write something. I don’t understand how people don’t work that way.

Moses: He did ask me to write as if there were no song and Dina just had a monologue, where she talked about how hearing this music on the radio makes her feel and seeing these movies. It’s sort of stream-of-consciousness. It mentions Cleopatra, who ended up being up in the song.

Yazbek: If he has the word Cleopatra in there, then “Boom!” That really leads right in to a potential lyric. And if we have Cleopatra … who would Omar Sharif be? Probably like a desert thief on a horse or something.

Email from Moses to Yazbek, July 29, 2014:

So here’s the first part of what she says, currently towards the end, but that we’re presumably thinking about moving up to the dinner scene: “Do you like Arab movies, Tewfiq? Omar Sharif, Faten Hamama … You know, when I was young, we used to have here on television. Arab movies, Egyptian movies. And every Friday at noon, all the street in Israel was empty because Arab movie every Friday afternoon. And me and my mother and my sister we sit and we see Egyptian movie and we cry our eyes out. We were all in love with Omar Sharif. We were all in love with love.” And perhaps she goes on to express something like: “The feelings were so big, so unashamed. Everything mattered so much. Part of an ancient culture, and ancient tradition, going back to Cleopatra and Marc Anthony, and before, ancient Pharoahs. Not like our lives in this little town where nothing important happened ever. It felt like how the world was supposed to be, how we all wanted our future to be. You hope to meet your own omar sharif, to have these big feelings with, and to take you away from your boring like. To turn you into Cleopatra. You meet a man and you want him so much to be that. Probably that’s what tricked me when I met my husband. I thought I was in a movie. But life isn’t a movie. And they don’t show arab movie so much on TV here anymore. But when I was young I could believe in love because of those movies and because of Omar Sharif.”

Email from Yazbek to Moses, July 29, 2014:

This is great. Thank you. It’s going to be a great song.

An Un-Broadway Broadway Number

Cromer: The very first words are “Umm Kulthum and Omar Sharif.” So that …

Yazbek: That gets you somewhere!

Cromer: All you hear for the first couple of moments in the song are these strange, beautiful words — I mean, the name of Omar Sharif is more familiar to a Western audience than her name, but “Umm Kulthum.”

Katrina Lenk: I had forgotten this because I’m so used to knowing who Umm Kulthum is now — that this might be a name most people don’t know.

Yazbek: It’s a more Western song than you’d think. It’s certainly not the kind of music that you hear in a Broadway show — most musical theater just breathes its own air, and then the air gets stale. When I did the demo I orchestrated it in a certain way and used Arabic instruments right from the start. If you’re writing for an oud, then there are certain things that are gonna happen — it’s a fretless instrument, so those chord progressions might be something you’d hear a contemporary Israeli or Arabic songwriter using.

I have memories of being a kid and going to Lebanon as a 7- or 8-year-old and watching television on a small black-and-white television at my grandfather’s house up in the mountains — I had never seen Star Trek before, and you could only see half the screen because there were three languages of translations on the screen. That sort of made me feel like I was walking in Dina’s shoes, even though she was in Israel and in the desert. There was something about all of that it suggested, I believe, this chord movement. The two first chords and maybe the next two — those four.

Lenk: There was a general exploration we did as a cast about how to make this song seem natural and effortless, how much accent to use, whether to use vibrato or not. When there’s less vibrato it seems more like talking than singing, so it seems more conversational and immediately accessible. Also, there’s not a lot of vibrato used in Arabic classical music — the singers do ornamentation and melismas and things, but not vibrato the way that we use it. Which makes the song sound less Western.

Yazbek: I mean, as soon as you hear that song in long notes, you’re like, you’re somewhere else, even though you don’t know where it is. It’s a waltz, too. It’s in three.

Lenk: In listening to Umm Kulthum songs and classical Arabic music and klezmer and all the other influences that Yazbek had intuitively sort of worked into the music, you wind up stylistically referring to things that you’re not even aware that you’re referring to.

Yazbek: At one point somebody said something like, “These songs are too poetic!” Do you remember that?

Cromer: Yeah! Ha!

Moses: I must have blocked it out.

Yazbek: And I’m like, “Did you see the movie? Are you reading what Itamar’s writing?” I don’t know why the term “lemon leaf” came up but that was probably the first of those kinds of terms, and I was just like, “Oh.” That and the jasmine thing. I know that I smelled jasmine in Lebanon, around my grandfather’s house, and I remember that because there was a lot of bees and I was afraid of bees.

Cromer: Once we think about it for a couple of years we can then explain — we can then pretend this is what we meant. Because after a couple of years, if something is well thought of you can say, “What I did, totally …”

Yazbek: You can do that to make yourself seem smarter than you are. Or you can do that because you’re getting paid to do a master class. But the truth is a lot of it is about a frame of reference, taste, experience.

Cromer: Instinct.

Yazbek:  I wrote the bridge kind of late in the process. The bridge is the part where she starts singing, “And the living room becomes a garden.” It’s possible that that was something you wrote to me or said to me …

Moses: There’s this rule, you want songs to be active. But people sometimes think that means like, “They’ll sing a song while they rob a bank!” Action can be all kinds of things. So we’re like, “They’re sitting at a table in a cafeteria, what’s the event of the song?” And we did at some point have a conversation about how maybe the event of the song is that it somehow makes this ugly cafeteria, under fluorescent light, beautiful. The lyric of the bridge might have come out of that.

Lenk: We talked for a while about, should it be a TV set or a radio. I just am so in love with the idea of the TV set, which — just the word, the two words, “TV set,” are immediately relatable. It’s such a boxy sounding word. It’s so pedantic. “And then that TV set then becomes a fountain”… the lyrics get me every time at how a kid’s imagination can turn something that’s so mundane into something gorgeous and thrilling.

The Song That Almost Wasn’t and the Staging That Almost Was

Yazbek: There was going to be a song [at this point] for [ Tony Shalhoub’s character ] Tewfiq.

Moses: We’re in scene seven and he hasn’t sung yet!

Yazbek: Dina goes to the jukebox, puts in her coin, and Arabic music starts playing, and she sort of starts dancing to it. And “Omar Sharif” was the first idea, but someone was suggesting, like, “No, no, no! We want to hear Tewfiq. He’s falling in love with her.”

Cromer: There is conventional wisdom that says, “Well, she’s singing quite a bit. And we had to spread the wealth.” This is what you’re supposed to do in a show. And that’s always dangerous thinking.

Yazbek: Our every instinct that we both had was like, “Oh, you know, okay [we’ll give him a song].” And I wrote a song. It’s not a bad song, but it’s so much more powerful to see him fall in love as she’s singing about her childhood.

Cromer: And “ Omar Sharif” was cut. That was before I was on the show.

Yazbek: It was gone for a long time, at least six months. I was thinking this might be one of the best songs I’ve ever written. But the one thing I know about doing this stuff is collaborating — if everyone is serving the story and the show, then you’re gonna have more chances of artistic and even financial success. I wanted to look into myself and say, “Okay, this is tough, but you can do it.”

Cromer: Meaning cut the song.

Yazbek : But it was against every instinct I had.

Moses: Cromer came in, and said, “Well, I want to understand this. I want to understand how we got to this point. Show me songs that were cut.”

Cromer: David called me and said, “Listen, we cut a song from the scene in the cafeteria. I feel very strongly about it. I really, really want to put it back in the show.”

Yazbek : Ha — I don’t remember that.

Cromer : Oh, I remember. I had a rough patch on this song, because I wanted so much for it visually. We spent a lot of money on a little piece of technology for it — a very small turntable under their table that rotated very slowly so that you could see around them. Lights moved. There was beautiful choreography that Patrick [McCollum] created. It was, on paper, a perfectly good idea, and we worked it, and worked it, and worked it, and it was almost right. But it wasn’t, and I had to kill it. I’ll forgive myself by saying it was in service of the lift of the song.

Yazbek: I’ve seen Katrina sing that song in Barnes & Noble on their little stage. I’ve seen her sing it with my band in a cabaret setting. I’ve sung it in clubs and the lyrics take you to the place you need to go. And sometimes, if an audience is engaged enough, the words are gonna take them where you want them to go. It turns out you don’t really need stage magic to help.

Lenk: Just hearing the words without the music can kind of give you a sense of the emotional space of the character.

Creating Beauty in a Cafeteria

Cromer: The scene is as much part of the song as anything. She is attempting to find something to talk about with him. She’s trying. He’s desperately uncomfortable. She wants to talk. So she’s working to draw him out, and they happen to accidentally land on, in conversation, a topic where they have a shared interest. I love a scene with fluorescent lights, where people are eating a sandwich.

Yazbek: In the conversation, she wouldn’t be waxing so poetically. But because of what she’s remembering, and because of the stuff that’s bubbling maybe below the surface of the conversation, you get away with the song. More than get away with it. You set the rules for the show. It’s the first song, I think, that really sets the rules for the show.

Lenk: I take a big bite of a sandwich right before the song, and sometimes there’ll be like a little cucumber seed that decides to come out in the middle of a big note. It’s usually not a problem, but now and then, oh boy — my eyes might start watering, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is the moment when I just start coughing.’ There’s a war between me and some cucumber happening.

Cromer:  At the end of the song, Tewfiq does something he’s never done for the entire show up to that point, about 45 minutes. He instigates conversation. He says, “Not everyone feels like you.”

Yazbek: It’s a connection. If I’m sitting in that chair at that table, I’m falling in love with her.

Cromer: The thing that we take some pride in is that she just stays in the chair.

Lenk: It’s really an unusual thing to just sing a whole song while you’re sitting. We tried all sorts of different things choreographically — getting up from the table, fancier things, more elaborate things, and it always seemed too much.  It instantly makes you feel relaxed when you’re sitting. Also, in heels, it’s hard to sometimes feel grounded.

Cromer: We always wanted the thing to flow. That song certainly floats by its very nature. Floating, drifting, wind, jasmine, all the breeze, all of this aroma, all of this stuff. And then, in a wonderful coincidence, Katrina — she has a background in dance, just moves like that. You don’t need much beyond her just staying in the chair. I mean, there is gorgeous light by Tyler Micoleau, there was beautiful design by Scott Pask, there was beautiful projections by Maya [Ciarrocchi], choreography by Patrick. But it was — everyone’s ego was in the backseat to the song. So you’re almost not meant to see it. You’re only meant to feel it.

Lenk: Yazbek and Cromer were very respectful of me finding those things out and discovering things in rehearsal.

Cromer: In rehearsals, the actors were doing a movement discipline we called Gaga that may have reawakened a lot of that movement in her.

Lenk: It’s not like Lady Gaga — it’s an Israeli dance philosophy and a movement language philosophy, so it’s a way of communicating a sense rather than a shape.  Like there’s feathers under your skin or you’re moving your hand from your back rather than from your hand. There’s all these very specific sensory tasks.

Cromer: There’s a section of the song where her floating arm is so lovely [that] we wanted to make a whole moment out of her hand being the leaf drifting on the wind. Just for a second. In this quite big theater.

Yazbek: And that’s something that you could literally see falling in love with: a hand gesture.

Cromer: Something I discovered later, once we were in previews, is that “Omar Sharif” almost exactly at the middle point of the show. And they’re sitting center stage, downstage, in the middle of the stage, in the middle of their time together and she sings this song. So it became to me the heart of the thing.

Moses: In a way the song is the centerpiece of the whole show, and the scene is the gesture. It’s like a fractal, and you zoom in smaller and smaller. The DNA of the whole show is somehow in “Omar Sharif.”

Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

• vulture homepage lede
• the band’s visit
• tony awards

Most Viewed Stories

• Cinematrix No. 32: April 9, 2024
• Curb Your Enthusiasm Finale Recap: A Free Man
• David Krumholtz’s True Hollywood Stories
• Saturday Night Live Recap: Kristen Wiig Brings Her Friends
• 9-1-1 ’s Oliver Stark Doesn’t Care If You Have a Problem with Buck’s Gay Kiss
• What Quiet on Set Leaves Out Is Just As Damning

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

Advertisement

Supported by

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

• Share full article

By Ben Brantley

• Nov. 9, 2017

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.

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 2007 film 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.

Yet “The Band’s Visit” — which follows the modest adventures of a touring Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli village significant only for its insignificance — more than holds its own on a larger stage. Its impeccably coordinated creative team has magnified and polished its assets to a high sheen that never feels synthetic.

This show was always close to perfect musically. (Mr. Yazbek’s quietly simmering score, which inflects Broadway balladry and character songs with a haunting Middle Eastern accent, felt as essential as oxygen.) But it felt a shade less persuasive in its connective spoken scenes.

That is, to say the least, no longer a problem. Though the lives it depicts are governed by a caution born of chronic disappointment, Mr. Cromer’s production now moves wire to wire with a thoroughbred’s confidence.

Such assurance is all the more impressive when you consider that “The Band’s Visit” is built on delicately balanced contradictions. 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.

The story is sprung when the members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Band, led by their straight-backed conductor, Tewfiq (Mr. Shalhoub), board a bus in 1996 for an engagement at the Arab Cultural Center in the city of Petah Tikva. Thanks to some understandable confusion at the ticket counter, they wind up instead in the flyblown backwater of Bet Hatikva.

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.”

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.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

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

By Michael Schulman

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.”

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Rivka Galchen

In moving musical ‘The Band’s Visit,’ strangers from distinct Mideast cultures find harmony

Magnificent writers theatre production of the tony-winning show pulls you in to the characters’ world and you don’t want to leave..

Café owner Dina (Sophie Madorsky, with Rom Barkhordar and Armand Akbari) is among the people in a remote Israeli town showing hospitality to stranded Egyptian musicians in “The Band’s Visit.”

Michael Brosilow

Quirky, character-driven, self-declared at the start as being not “very important,” the 2018 Tony-winning best musical “The Band’s Visit” has always been a modest, heartwarming show, a pixelated slice-of-life about the ways humans feel connected with each other. It’s mostly about love, but also about how music and movies help bring people together.

I enjoyed the piece immensely on Broadway, where it was directed by David Cromer, a longtime Chicago artist now on the A-plus-list in New York. He won the directing Tony for his work on this show.

But I was far more deeply moved by this intimate, intensely engaging production at Writers Theater, directed by Zi Alikhan. Alikhan worked under Cromer on the national tour of the “The Band’s Visit,” and has an impressive, mostly regional-theater resume. He’s making an extremely memorable mark in his Chicago debut.

This offbeat musical from composer David Yazbeck (“The Full Monty,” “Tootsie”) and writer Itamar Moses, based on a 2007 Israeli film, tells the story of a small Egyptian orchestra invited to perform at the Arab cultural center in the real-life Israeli city of Petah Tikvah. Instead, the musicians accidentally, and understandably, find themselves in Bet Hatikvah, a fictional, remote desert town. Stranded awaiting the rare bus, and in a town too tiny for a hotel, they must rely on the hospitality of locals who aren’t used to visitors, let alone those from another culture. Two of the songs, to give you a sense, are called “Welcome to Nowhere” and “Something Different.”

This production has the cast playing nearly all the instruments — including Middle Eastern ones like the pear-shaped, lute-like oud — with a few supplements from offstage. A benefit is that the musical interstices serve as an indication of how the townspeople manage to pass the time, given that there is so little going on in Bet Hatikvah.

• From 2019: ‘The Band’s Visit’ a marvelous, exquisitely crafted arrival indeed

Yazbek’s lovely, nuanced score, highly unusual for a Broadway show, feels deeply connected to the region, which is essential for bringing an authenticity to the setting and story, which itself is minimal but involving.

During a single evening, the strangers get to know each other. Café owner Dina (Sophie Madorsky) and the orchestra’s leader Tewfiq (Rom Barkhordar) bond over memories of Omar Sharif movies and the music of Egyptian Umm Kulthum, which Dina grew up with. Simon (Jonathan Shaboo), the orchestra’s clarinetist, finds himself observing the quarrels of a married couple (Dave Honigman and Dana Saleh Omar). The Chet Baker-loving Haled (Armand Akbari, exuding friendly charm) tags along as an extra wheel on a roller-skating date with locals (Sam Linda, Marielle Issa, Becky Keeshin, Jordan Golding).

This ensemble is extraordinary: un-showy, uniformly honest, remarkably likable.

I understand Madorsky’s Dina more than I did that of Katrina Lenk, who played the role on Broadway and just couldn’t cover up her sense of glamor, that Dina was truly stuck in this small town, so clearly out of place. While equally as compelling, this Dina may long for something more, but also very much belongs here, and she comes across as far more vulnerable.

Sam Linda and Becky Keeshin play locals in Bet Hatikvah on a roller-skating date.

Another standout is Sam Linda, a performer I’ve seen before without his making this type of impression. He seems born for this part, and his “Papi Hears the Ocean,” about what he hears when he tries to talk with girls, is wildly enjoyable, all the funnier for its fundamental believability and the careful timing of Sebastiani Romagnolo’s choreography.

I was concerned, given the current, horrifying events occurring on the Israeli-Egypt border, that this show would feel too slight for the moment, a “can’t we all get along?” message at a moment when reality suggests the answer to that is a resounding “No.”

• From 2019: David Cromer sees ‘everyday heroes’ as the heart and soul of ‘The Band’s Visit’

But from the moment this story starts, this magnificent production pulls you in to the characters' world and you don’t want to leave. It’s an innocent, peaceful place. The actors all speak with accents — believable to my ear, for sure — as the Arabic- and Hebrew-speaking characters use sometimes-halting English to communicate. It’s about what people have in common. Politics doesn’t exist. The characters expose their inner selves to strangers; although at first surprised to be dealing with the situation, they’re ultimately emotionally unguarded.

But the show also gains deep, complex, upsetting layers from the fact that, when you awaken from the reverie of its sweetness, you realize these people — that is to say, people just like them — may be dead or hostages or at least in mourning for loved ones, and times past.

Omar Sharif lyrics - Band's Visit

• Welcome to Nowhere
• It Is What It Is
• Beat Of Your Heart

Omar Sharif

• Papi Hears the Ocean
• Haled's Song About Love
• Itgara'a
• Something Different
• Itzik's Lullaby
• Something Different (Reprise)
• The Concert
• Afifi (Bonus Track)

Omar Sharif lyrics

• Les Miserables
• Addams Family, The
• Phantom of the Opera, The
• Jesus Christ Superstar
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Omar Sharif Lyrics by Katrina Lenk

The Band’s Visit: “Omar Sharif” performed by Miri Mesika

Pesach Vacations

Passover vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Pesach at Fairmont Grand Del Mar, San Diego, CA

Pesach in Spain, Le Meridien

“Omar Sharif” performed by Miri Mesika from THE BANDS VISIT for the European premiere at the Donmar Warehouse in London

“Once, not long ago, a group of musicians came to Israel from Egypt. You probably didn’t hear about it. It wasn’t very important.”

In a quiet desert town way off the beaten path, a band of musicians arrive lost. As they wait for the next bus out, these unexpected visitors bring the town to life in surprising ways, proving that even the briefest visit can stay with you forever.

Winner of 10 Tony Awards and a Grammy for best Musical Theatre Album, The Band’s Visit rejoices in the way music makes us laugh, makes us cry, and ultimately, brings us together.

Artistic Director Michael Longhurst directs the European premiere of a brand new production of The Band’s Visit, his next musical following his Broadway-transferring smash hit Caroline, or Change, nominated for three Tony Awards.

“It is time to fall in love again! One of the most ravishing musicals you will ever be seduced by” The New York Times

You may also like

כרקוקלי – אמאלה אבאלה

שבורי לב (לייב) | להקת הרבנות הצבאית

שירת המונים בבית הספר אוולינה

דני רובס ודני בסן – מה שנשאר לי אחרי המלחמה

עוז זהבי – ארמונות מחול

בית להילחם – הלהקות הצבאיות 2024 – אגם בוחבוט, אלה לי להב, אור עמרמי, עילאי אלמקייס.

אמיר שדה – אלוהים לא התעורר היום

שילה בן סעדון – כוכבים

Pesach In Der Heim – Benny Friedman, Zaltz Band & Yedidim

Yonina- Ein Li Eretz Acheret

ברדק – שלום זכר – הקרב על הסודה

שחר טבוך – יום שני (לבד)

The Band's Visit - Omar Sharif Lyrics

• Add/Correct lyrics
• Privacy Policy

Site updates:

• One to Seventeen Lyrics
• Ride the Cyclone - SYNOPSIS
• Karnak's Dream of Life Lyrics
• What the World Needs Lyrics
• This Song Is Awesome Lyrics
• The Ballad of Jane Doe Lyrics
• Sugar Cloud Lyrics
• Hamilton - SYNOPSIS
• Hamilton - Alexander Hamilton Lyrics
• Hamilton - My Shot Lyrics
• Hamilton - Satisfied Lyrics
• Ghost the Musical - With You Lyrics
• Hamilton - The Schuyler Sisters Lyrics
• Hamilton - Aaron Burr, Sir Lyrics

Join StageAgent today and unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities.

• Audition Songs

The Band's Visit

Omar Sharif

See more songs from Itamar Moses David Yazbek

• Vocal Notes
• 16/32 bar cut suggestions
• Useful Links
• Related Products
• Useful Articles

KEY INFORMATION

Dina, a cafe owner in the small desert town of Bet Havitka, is at

READ MORE - PRO MEMBERS ONLY

Join the StageAgent community to read expert guidance for Omar Sharif and unlock other amazing theatre resources!

Already a member? Log in

Upgrade to PRO to read expert guidance for Omar Sharif and unlock other amazing theatre resources!

Upgrade to StageAgent PRO

Similar Songs

Secret Love

Calamity Jane

Calamity Jane - Musical

London Road in Bloom

London Road - Musical

Can You Use Any Money Today

Mrs. Sally Adams

Call Me Madam - Musical

Video Clips

Original Broadway Cast Recording on Amazon

The Band's Visit book by Itamar Moses on Amazon

Vocal Selections by Hal Leonard on Amazon

Sign up today to unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities.

Auditions & Jobs

Simonas Search - Submit for NYC Appointments New York, NY

New York, NY

Next Fall New York, NY

A Midsummer Night's Dream/Summer Staged Readings New York, NY

Oops! This page is only accessible by StageAgent Pro members.

Take your performing arts career to the next level.

Gain full access to show guides, character breakdowns, auditions, monologues and more!

or log in to your account

You need a Pro account to access this feature.

UPGRADE TO PRO

or or log in to your account