Review: A desert song

In the era of the jukebox musical (imagine: Absolutely Free: the Frank Zappa Musical), the amusement park musical (bright lights, strobes, 3-D projections, a cast of dozens!), the reverse revival musical rewrite (let's change EVERYTHING!), and similar extravaganzas, one occasionally encounters an intimate, small-cast show that stands out like a tiny diamond in a pile of costume jewelry.

The Company
Photo by Evan Zimmerman

The Band's Visit, the national tour of which is now playing at The Fabulous Fox, is one of those little gems. Based on an award-winning 2007 Israeli film of the same name and boasting a captivating and ingenious score by David Yazbek (previously famous for big-budget stage versions of popular films like The Full Monty and Tootsie) and book by playwright Itamar Moses, The Band's Visit is the modest tale of an Egyptian police band which, due to some linguistic confusion at the main Tel Aviv bus station, finds itself marooned for the night in the tiny desert town of Bet Hatikva instead of their intended destination, the city of Petah Tikvah. Over the ensuing 24 hours, their lives become entwined with those of the villagers in ways none of them could have predicted.

Sasson Gabay, Janet Dacal
Photo by Evan Zimmerman

Heading the uniformly excellent ensemble cast are Sasson Gabay as the melancholy widowed band director Tewfiq (the role he created in the original film) and Janet Dacal as Dina, who runs the local restaurant and longs for some romance in her life to break up the daily monotony of living in, literally, the middle of nowhere. In a touching and subtly acted scene late in the show, she tries to get him to break out of his shell and he tries to do so. Alas, as the old song goes, "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

Joe Joseph, Sasson Gabay, Janet Dacal
Photo by Evan Zimmerman

There's finely nuanced work as well from Joe Joseph as trumpeter and would-be ladies' man Haled, whose standard pickup line is "do you like Chet Baker?" Not surprisingly, when he gives romantic advice to repressed villager Papi in "Haled's Song About Love," he does so in the soft, lyrical style of the late jazz trumpeter and vocalist. Substituting for Adam Gabay (son of Sasson) on opening night, Danny Burgos was a wonderfully vulnerable Papi who handled the character's wide-ranging song "Papi Hears the Ocean" with great skill.

Other standout performers include James Rana as the clarinetist and frustrated composer Simon, Pomme Koch as the village slacker Itzik, who loves his baby son but can no longer reach his wife, and David Studwell as Itzik's father-in-law Avrum.

The Company
Photo by Matthew Murphy

"Once not long ago a group of musicians came to Israel from Egypt," runs the sentence projected on a scrim at the top of the show. "You probably didn't hear about it. It wasn't very important." And, indeed, nothing that happens in The Bands Visit would be of any importance to the world outside of Bet Hativka. But to the inner lives of the villagers, the events in this 90-minute, one-act musical are very important indeed.

Performances continue through March 8th at The Fabulous Fox in Grand Center. When you go, make sure you hang around for the band's irresistibly lively post-curtain call session on stage. The ensemble of violin, cello, clarinet, oud (a Persian lute), and darbouka (a "goblet drum" that's harder to play than it looks, as I can attest from personal experience) is solid and guaranteed to send you out into the night with a smile on our face and maybe even a melismatic melody in your heart.