This week’s review comes to you courtesy of my kitchen table rather than the stalls of a theatre. At the last minute, I had to cancel seeing the intended show for this edition after testing positive for Covid.
Having successfully dodged the virus for nearly two-and-a-half years of pandemic, it has finally found me. Not just me, I realise. Theatre has only just started recovering from the most devastating era in its history. Even now, there are productions being rehearsed on Zoom because either a member of the cast or the director has tested positive for Covid. One critic going down towards the (hopefully) tail-end of the most calamitous disruption the performing arts have ever seen is the least of it.
Still, I can’t help but take it personally and I hope you are wearing a mask because as I write I am more infectious than a plague-ridden rat disembarking from a 15th-century clipper.
There is good news however from the New World. It was announced this week that 10-times Tony-winning musical The Band’s Visit is to make its European première at the Donmar Warehouse.
Based on the film of the same name, the unlikely story of the show follows the connections that are made when an Arab police band disembark from a bus at the wrong destination. The Alexandria ceremonial police orchestra are in full regalia when they get off. The Egyptian musicians are in Israel to play a concert but end up in the wrong town in the middle of nowhere in the Negev desert.
We’re looking for the Arab culture centre, asks one of the band’s members. “No Arab culture,” replies one of the town’s residents, “no Israeli culture, no culture at all.”
The problem is that the bus to the right town doesn’t leave until the following morning. So the show is set during one evening in which the band interact with the town’s residents and change them — for the better — for ever.
The London production will be directed by the Donmar artistic director Michael Longhurst who, although not Jewish, has compiled an impressive run of shows with Jewish content.
This musical follows his smash hit version of Tony Kushner’s autobiographical Caroline, or Change and Longhurst also directed the UK première of Josh Harmon’s Bad Jews which this paper recently exclusively revealed is returning to the West End.
Broadway composer David Yazbek wrote the music and lyrics for The Band’s Visit and Itamar Moses the show’s book. In 2014, I talked to Yazbek about an earlier hit show of his, the musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. He told me the uninspiring inspiration for that show was looking down a list of films that a studio was willing to have adapted for the stage.
I left the conversation disillusioned. Until then I had imagined all creatives of stage shows were fired by their passion for a particular story, not the showbiz equivalent of stock-taking. It all sounded so cynical. But I don’t care how The Band’s Visit came into musical being.
Theatre reviewers have learned the hard way never to pre-judge, but if this show has even a fraction of the delight that critical reception in America says it has, this hopeful story about the connections made between two previously warring tribes is truly what we need.
