The Band’s Visit

ARTS&LIFE

MUSICAL THEATER

The Band’s Visit

Israeli-set production comes to the Fisher Theatre April 19-May 1.

SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Sasson Gabay

Musical theater audiences trade in razzle-dazzle staging for more subtle expressions of the heart when they view The Band’s Visit appearing April 19-May 1 at Detroit’s Fisher Theatre.

The caliber of the experience has been heralded by professional colleagues after seeing the Broadway run of the production, which is set in Israel. The play became one of only four musicals ever to win six Tony Awards.

In 2017, judges voted top rankings in the categories of Best Musical, Best Book, Best Score, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Direction.

The storyline explores personal reactions and interactions, with some laughs, as members of an Egyptian band heading for a performance in Israel mistakenly get on the wrong bus. They find themselves dropped off in a remote area that unexpectedly connects them — heart-to-heart — with lonely town residents as they wait for the next bus.

The production is an adaptation of an Israeli film written and directed by Eran Kolirin and developed for the stage at the behest of New York producer Orin Wolf, whose wife, Shiri Bilik Wolf, was raised in Michigan and occasionally wrote for the Detroit Jewish News.

“My romance with this project started in 2007 when we shot the film, and it hasn’t stopped,” said Sasson Gabay, an award-winning Israeli stage, film and TV star, who continued

PHOTOS BY EVAN ZIMMERMAN, MURPHYMADE.

The company of The Band’s Visit North American Tour.

with the Broadway and tour versions in the role of Tewfiq, conductor of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra.

ISRAELI STAR IN THE LEAD

“Maybe The Band’s Visit caught me at a certain time in my life or tugged at my imagination because I feel attached to the character. I felt something very special and unique in the simplicity and humanity of all the characters. Anyone can identify within the story.”

Gabay brings a varied resume to the tour. His roles have stretched from internationally acclaimed classics (such as Cyrano de Bergerac and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) at the Beit Lessin Theatre in Tel Aviv to more contemporary projects (such as the feature film Rambo III and HBO’s Oslo).

Depicting Tewfiq, he relates to the contradictions presented in the character, someone affected by personal tragedy despite projecting the strength and formality of a police officer while holding the artistic soul of a musician.

“In order to portray the character, I had to learn the Egyptian accent,” Gabay said. “This was a challenge, and I loved it.”

Bringing a special happiness during the first leg of the tour, interrupted by the pandemic, was having one of his five children in the cast. Son Adam (HBO’s Our Boys) was cast as Papi, a shy café worker.

Offstage, Gabay is happy that he is accompanied on tour by his wife, Dafna Halaf Gabay, an author of children’s books and writer for children’s programing in Israel.

“I feel lucky that I’m getting to see America,” said Gabay, who reads up about each tour city just before appearing there. “I enjoy it all more because my wife is with me.”

The acting team includes Janet Dacal (Prince of Broadway, Wonderland, In the Heights) in

continued on page 46

Joe Joseph, Sasson Gabay, Janet Dacal Itamar Moses

ANDREW ECCLES

ARTS&LIFE

MUSICAL THEATER

continued from page 45

the co-starring role of Dina as well as Joe Joseph as Haled, Clay Singer as Itzik and Joseph Grosso as Telephone Guy.

MEET THE PLAYWRIGHT

As the tour moves toward Detroit, playwright Itamar Moses, 44, moves into new projects while appreciating the friendship he established with Gabay, 74, because of their connections to Israel. Moses was born in America to parents from Israel.

“There turned out to be not many degrees of separation between people he knew in Israel and who my parents knew or were related to my family,” said Moses, based in New York and married to a theatrical lighting designer. “We have forged a bond around the people we know.”

Another bond is an appreciation of the music and lyrics written for The Band’s Visit by David Yazbek, a winner of Tony and Drama Desk awards with past productions including The Full Monty and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Actor and playwright are especially drawn to a song at the end of the musical —“Answer Me” —which expresses the feelings of a man waiting for a phone call from the woman he loves. The number musicalizes a person’s yearning to connect with someone else.

Away from work, both men are drawn to taking long walks and reading novels.

Moses, asked by the producing team to adapt the film for theater, is satisfied with the way the musical “feels more than the sum of its parts” and seems to have an overall effect that can’t be attributed to a specific element.

This will be the second time Moses has been chosen to handle an adaptation. His first such project involved a novel, The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem.

“Other than that, all my stage work has been original,” said Moses, who explained that transitioning a novel was more fundamentally difficult. “Although novels are another storytelling form, they’re not a dramatic storytelling form. They’re all about description and subjective experiences of the characters, and that’s very difficult to translate to a stage.

“While The Band’s Visit as a movie is very different from the theater [version], it’s much closer, but if you’re doing an adaptation, you have to find yourself in it and what it is saying to you.”

Moses found his way into the storyline through his experiences in Israel.

“I’ve been to the Middle East many times,” he said. “I have a lot of relatives in the region, and there was something on the cultural level that spoke to me about the story. It felt like I understood the people in the story as part of my familial past.

“On a more universal level, there are these universal human truths in the story that spoke to me. One of the things this show is about is that if you strip away external structures — governments, political ideologies — and boil things down to individual people, the divisions that seem so insurmountable dissolve.”

Moses, the son of a psychotherapist mom and film professor dad, became interested in theater during high school by watching plays and having friends immersed in theater programs. At Yale University, while majoring in the humanities, he participated in extracurricular theater activities and turned to writing.

In graduate school at New York University, he focused on writing. Outrage, about martyrdom and written to apply for graduate school, became his first-produced play performed by Portland Center Stage in Oregon. Other plays staged at regional theaters include Bach at Leipzig, Celebrity Row and Yellowjackets.

Scripting for television in a team environment has connected him with TNT’s Men of a Certain Age, HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and WGN’s Outsiders.

“I have had individual characters with aspects of my own Jewishness or family history making their way into shows, sometimes more overtly and sometimes less,” he said.

“I also think there’s something very Jewish about the way that I write inherently even if there isn’t anything very Jewish about the characters. I’m the kind of writer who likes to give every character the best possible argument for [each one’s] point of view or the strongest possible position for what they’re arguing for.

“Since The Band’s Visit, there’s an uptick in the Jewish specificity in the work that I’m being offered and choosing to do myself. Even aside from the success of The Band’s Visit, there’s a byproduct of something that show triggered in me.”

TOP: Janet Dacal

and Sasson Gabay

RIGHT: Clay Singer The Band’s Visit runs April 19-May 1 at the Fisher Theatre in Detroit. Tickets start at $35. Ticket purchasers will receive a

Detroit Health & Safety

Guide via email prior to performance. Ticketmaster. com. (313) 872-1000 (ext. 0).