Life
Theatre review: The Band's Visit - A miraculous musical
Michael Longhurst’s exquisite new production pairs two superb Israeli performers - Alon Moni Aboutboul and Miri Mesika
October 14, 2022 14:14
2 min read
Michael Longhurst’s exquisite new production pairs two superb Israeli performers - Alon Moni Aboutboul and Miri Mesika
October 14, 2022 14:14The Band’s Visit
Donmar Warehouse | ★★★★★
There is a lot to love about this miraculous little musical whose world premiere won ten Tonys in New York.
Based on an Israeli film with an if-only-it-were-true plot, it imagines what would happen if an Egyptian ceremonial police band who have been booked to perform at the Arab culture centre in Petah Tikvah, central Israel discover too late that their bus ticket is for the similar sounding Bet Hatikva, a forgotten desert town in the south.
Michael Longhurst’s exquisite new production pairs two superb Israeli performers, Alon Moni Aboutboul, who plays Tewfiq, the band’s proud conductor, and Israeli singer and actress Miri Mesika, who is pitch perfect in both acting and singing senses as Dina, a cafe owner who takes pity on the visitors and organises food and shelter.
Alon Moni Aboutboul and Miri Mesika
Whether touring police bands actually travel in full uniform as these musicians do is just one of a few pedantic points that need to be set aside in order to suspend disbelief.
More important here than the factual truth is the emotional kind generated by this quietly told poignant story (adapted from the film by Itamar Moses) and the tender songs by composer David Yazbek that have musicalised it.
Longhurst’s production captures the ennui of a place whose main activity is doing very little. The first number, Waiting, is performed by the listless residents and when the title word is sung it is followed by the phrase “for something to happen”.
But then the bewildered, absurdly uniformed band turns up and over the following evening and night (the next bus is in the morning) lives are changed a little and for the better.
An Egyptian trumpet player (Sharif Afifi) teaches a painfully shy Israeli (Harel Glazer) how to talk to girls, and the distance between estranged parents Irisand Itzik (Michal Horowicz and Marc Antolin who theatregoers may remember as Chagall in The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk) is narrowed by an Egyptian clarinettist who while staying the night serenades their baby to sleep.
Ashley Margolis and Carlos Mendoza De Hevia
