Haled, a super chill, slightly silly trumpet player in the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, has a go-to pickup line: “Do you know Chet Baker?”
In The Band’s Visit, playing at the Golden Gate Theater through January 30, the young Egyptian musician, played by Joe Joseph with a swoon-inducing balance of ingenuousness and suavity, first tries his come-on with a pretty ticket seller at an Israeli bus terminal. He and his bandmates, in sky-blue pseudo-military uniforms that make them look as much like ice cream men as government emissaries, are trying to catch a ride to a small town where they’ve been booked to perform at the local Arab cultural center.
Flummoxed by the woman’s disinterested response to his flirtation, Haled is unable to focus on her attempt to clarify which of two similarly named towns is his group’s destination. He buys the wrong tickets. They end up in the wrong place. A night of low-jinks ensues (No brassy Broadway escapades here; just intimate conversations, familiar domestic scenes, gentle jokes). The next morning they get on another bus and head out.
That’s the plot of The Band’s Visit.
If you know Chet Baker and you dig Chet Baker, you’ll find Haled and the whole of this show as seductive as a summer breeze. As in Baker’s late career vocals, there’s a tender bruise pulsing beneath every note of David Yazbek’s utterly immersive score. The Band’s Visit evokes a feeling even more than it tells a story; it grants permission to feel heartache, to feel human.
The nocturnal soundscape conjured by Jamshied Sharifi’s orchestrations is fragile and romantic, with musical motifs evanescing then recurring, persistent tendrils of emotion interpolated through multiple songs.
Yazbek’s compositions weave elements of traditional Arabic music and frolicsome klezmer together with invocations of a romanticized silver screen Middle East. When Dina (Janet Dacal), a café operator and de facto Israeli envoy to the accidental interlopers sings her moviegoing memories of “Omar Sharif”, Yazbek and book writer Itamar Moses are acknowledging the presence of pop-cultural fantasy in mundane lives even as they tone down Broadway bravado to honor delicate quotidien moments on stage.
As the citizens of this desolate village open their homes, break bread and share stories with band members over the course of a single evening’s wanderings, we are invited listen in on bittersweet snatches of their stories: Dina’s long-ago career as a dancer, young parents’ struggles with the responsibilities of adulthood, a clarinetist’s hopes to become a composer, a family’s loss of a mother and wife, a neurotic wallflower’s crippling shyness around women. Even Tewfiq, the buttoned-up band leader (played by Sasson Gabay who originated the role in the film from which the musical is adapted) reveals unexpected complexity with the story of a son’s suicide; the script intimates that the young man, rejected by his father, was gay.
There are no hard-won truths in The Band’s Visit, no morals to the story. And rather than showstoppers, the songs here are eavesdroppers, inviting us to listen in on these strangers and perhaps hear a bit of ourselves.
The Band’s Visit sings a funny Valentine to us all.
