Review: When ​'awful' rhymes with 'falafel' at the Huntington Theatre

The Band's Visit
The Huntington Theatre
264 Huntington Ave., Fenway
Through Dec. 17, 2023

“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."

So begins The Band's Visit, with three sentences written in Hebrew, Arabic, and English and projected on a screen over the stage.

The play, currently being performed at The Huntington, is directed by Paul Daigneault, with choreography by Daniel Pelzig and music direction by Jose Delgado. It opens at a bus station, set in a fictional town in the middle of the Negev Desert in 1996. It soon becomes clear that an Egyptian band has mixed up their destination - confusing Petah Tikva, where they are meant to perform at the Arab Cultural Center the next day, with Bet Hatikva. "B" like in "boring," like in barren," like in "bullshit," like in "bland," the other townies helpfully chime in, writing it off as a cultural wasteland. "Welcome to nowhere - with a B!"

The band stands at comical attention in clean gray suits, their precision and quirkily exacting organization making them feel like Wes Anderson characters. The band comes to be put up for the night in various local households. We watch as the characters find common ground by the time the band's visit is over, connecting deeply during their short stay before saying goodbye.

There are times when you watch a show and can't possibly imagine it being as good with any other cast. This was one of those times. The play is clearly written with humor and nuance, but the performers on stage brought it alive with the delivery of their lines as well as their excellent sense for comedic timing and physical comedy. The band members, who both acted and performed as characters, left me wondering how it was possible to cast people who were as accomplished of actors as they were musicians.

Quality shines through in every aspect of the production. The set design is visually appealing; it recreates a large empty street, as though to emphasize the deserted nature of the town and the fact that the characters are all on a journey, and completes its look with a full-size lamp post, curb, and telephone booth. The vocals and sound mixing are exceptionally crisp, and the lighting design is breathtakingly beautiful at times. Light falls onto the stage in colorful gradients as the time shifted from day to night. At one point in a restaurant a large, tungsten menu comes down from the ceiling, and the overly-bright lighting matched the tone.

Surprisingly, perhaps, for a play set in the Middle East and featuring Egyptians and Israelis, there is no explicit mention of politics, history, religion, or any of the expected references to the region's divides in the story. If the musical is political, it's in its preference to dream up a parallel universe where it is possible to give center stage to the human experiences that unite us, like love, loneliness, and grander longing for human connection.

Kareem Elsamadicy, Jesse Garlick, Josephine Moshiri Elwood onstage, photo by T. Charles Erickson:

Music maintains a central force of connection throughout. In one scene the band's leader, Tewfiq (Brian Thomas Abraham) and Dina, a local cafe owner (Jennifer Apple), connect over their love of singer and actor Umm Kulthum and Omar Sharif. "The ship from Egypt always came sailing on radio waves," Dina sings.

In other scenes, the language itself becomes the music. (“Tell me something in Arabic," Dina prompts Tewfiq, "What?" he asks, "I don't know, something to hear the music," she replies). And where language fails, as it sometimes does for many of the characters who are trudging through English as an awkward middle language, music fills the spaces where the characters can't find the right words.

Music expands to become the very fabric of the world - the clatter of silverware becomes percussion, the sound of the ocean is compared to a symphony. In this way, The Band's Visit becomes a story about what's beyond the words that people say - the music of life and connection and commonality that runs deeper than words.

It seems as though most people have either never heard of The Band's Visit, or have gone to see it multiple times, and I can see why. It's not a huge, showy production with loud, full-cast numbers, but it's a true feel-good musical that avoids being sappy or losing its sense of tongue-in-cheek irony. It's a tale of longing, of what-could-have-beens, and of regrets. But it's also a tale of all the silly things that make up day-to-day life. This musical has both joy and depth, and packs a punch with its quick wit and clever lyrics.

After all, who doesn't love a musical that can rhyme "awful" with "falafel"?

The musical ends with a live concert. The back drops out from behind the set, revealing an orchestra behind the stage. Lights fly down from the ceiling in a stunning visual display, and the fourth wall breaks between the band on stage and the audience as the play becomes a concert in rainbow colors. The audience stands together to cheer the band on, and the real world for a brief moment reflects the world on the stage.

It might not be the musical that everyone needs or wants at the moment, but it's certainly one that I felt gave a breath of fresh air and sounded a hopeful note for humanity. As one of the characters sings:

So maybe I'm romantic
Maybe I'm a sentimental fool
Maybe music is the food of love
But music and love, who can tell them apart?

Review from the Independent Review Crew.