the band's visit script

Free Read: The Band's Visit

Free read: the band's visit.

Winner of 10 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Original Score,  The Band's Visit  is an intimate musical about the brief yet lasting connections we make in our lives. With a haunting score by David Yazbek ( Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Full Monty ) and contemplative book by Itamar Moses ( Boardwalk Empire ,  The Fortress of Solitude ),  The Band's Visit  is a carefully crafted gem of a musical.

We invite you to read the Tony-winning book and lyrics of  The Band's Visit in this special pre-perusal offering.

The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra arrives in Israel to play a concert. After a mix-up at the border, they are sent to Bet Hatikva, a remote village in the middle of the desert. For the residents of Bet Hatikva, life is aimless and monotonous. With no bus until morning and no hotel in sight, the unexpected travelers from the orchestra are taken in by the locals. Under the spell of the desert sky, their lives become intertwined in the most unexpected ways.

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The Band's Visit

A band comprised of members of the Egyptian police force head to Israel to play at the inaugural ceremony of an Arab arts center, only to find themselves lost in the wrong town. A band comprised of members of the Egyptian police force head to Israel to play at the inaugural ceremony of an Arab arts center, only to find themselves lost in the wrong town. A band comprised of members of the Egyptian police force head to Israel to play at the inaugural ceremony of an Arab arts center, only to find themselves lost in the wrong town.

• Eran Kolirin
• Sasson Gabay
• Ronit Elkabetz
• Saleh Bakri
• 77 User reviews
• 113 Critic reviews
• 80 Metascore
• 46 wins & 16 nominations

Top cast 19

• Lieutenant-colonel Tawfiq Zacharya
• (as Sasson Gabai)

• Major-general Camal Abdel Azim

• (as Tarak Kopty)

• Man with yellow ball

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Did you know

• Trivia The movie was selected to be Israel's Official Submission to the Best Foreign Language Film Category of The 80th Annual Academy Awards (2008) , but it was disqualified by AMPAS because more than 50% of the film's dialogue was found to be in English, as opposed to Arabic and Hebrew. After an unsuccessful appeal, Israel sent Beaufort (2007) instead.
• Goofs When speaking in Arabic, Tawfiq pronounces some words with the Egyptian Arabic pronunciation, and some words with the Palestinian Arabic pronunciation. Being an Egyptian, he should talk in Egyptian Arabic dialect all the time.

Lieutenant-colonel Tawfiq Zacharya : This is like asking why a man needs a soul.

• Connections Featured in Sharon Amrani: Remember His Name (2010)
• Soundtracks My Funny Valentine (From musical "Babes in Arms", 1937) Music by Richard Rodgers Lyrics by Lorenz Hart

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 27 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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The Band's Visit

Writers: Itamar Moses David Yazbek

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It is 1996, and through an error in pronunciation, the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra is stranded in the isolated desert town of Bet Havitka, Israel (rather than the city Petah Tikva, their actual destination). Without knowing the language and with very little money, the band members - led by conductor Tewfiq Zakaria - are welcomed by the locals, including cafe owner Dina and her two employees, Papi and Itzik. During this one night in a sleepy town where nothing much changes, the Egyptian band members and their Israeli hosts communicate in English (their only common language) and find their mutual love of music, whether traditional Middle Eastern ballads or American jazz and Chet Baker. Winner of ten Tony Awards and a score based in traditional middle eastern styles (with musicians planted all around the stage), The Band’s Visit appeals to the universal romance and passion people find in music, no matter where they are from.

Lead Characters

Tewfiq zakaria, the band's visit - musical.

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• Cindi Calhoun

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Broadway's 'The Band's Visit' Tells A Story Of Common Ground Between Cultures

Jeff Lunden

Katrina Lenk's and Tony Shalhoub's characters have an almost-romance in The Band's Visit . Matthew Murphy/Courtesy of the artist hide caption

Katrina Lenk's and Tony Shalhoub's characters have an almost-romance in The Band's Visit .

When songwriter David Yazbek, whose mother is Jewish and father Lebanese, decided to write a musical that fused his two cultural backgrounds, he knew he didn't want it to be about tribal conflict.

His new Broadway show, The Band's Visit , attempts to do something that seems almost unfashionable: look at two historically antagonistic cultures and tell a story about their commonality.

It all started when a producer contacted Yazbek about adapting a 10-year-old Israeli movie for the stage: The Band's Visit . In the movie, an Egyptian ceremonial police band gets stranded in a town in the middle of the Israeli desert. When the townspeople discover the musicians are stuck for the night, they invite them into their homes. That's pretty much the plot.

Yazbek says the musical follows the film's lead in dramatizing the situation by not overtly dealing with the tensions between Israel and Arab countries.

"If you were to point a finger at it, you would distract from what the movie is really about," Yazbek explains. "This could be a movie about any two groups, even Democrats and Republicans."

Itamar Moses, the playwright who adapted the film's script, says the show's message resonates more now than when he and Yazbek were writing it.

"It suddenly felt really urgent to say that people are people," says Moses. "And when you strip away politics and the sort of rigid tribes that we seem to cling to and belong to, everybody can connect over the need for food and shelter and music and the need for love itself."

As for the musical's score, it certainly doesn't sound like a typical Broadway musical. Tony Shalhoub, best known as the TV character Monk, plays the Egyptian band leader. He says that it's the first musical he's ever heard that "has Arabic music and Israeli music and people singing in both languages."

Some of the actors also play instruments, like violinist George Abud.

"When you're a Lebanese actor, or an [Arab] actor, in New York, you go in for certain roles," Abud says. "And you are kind of destined to play certain situations. And most of the situations are politicized or religious or terrorists. And then finally we get a play where everybody's just being a person."

In a series of vignettes, the Egyptian band members and their Israeli hosts get to know one another. There are stressed-out parents, angsty teens, and a band member obsessed with Chet Baker. Shaloub's band leader has an almost- romance with a café owner played by Katrina Lenk.

Lenk says that these two somewhat lonely characters, with complicated histories, discover "that magical thing that can happen when you meet a stranger and suddenly you feel like you can tell them things that you can't tell people that are your good friends."

Shalhoub thinks that the musical's choice to not emphasize the political conflicts between Egyptians and Israelis has almost become a political choice in itself.

"[The musical is] political almost by virtue of the fact that it isn't," Shalhoub says. "It isn't a story about politics. And somehow, today everything becomes political. It's the prism we all look through now."

Which, The Band's Visit suggests, might not be the only way to look at things.

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‘The Band’s Visit’ is a Story of Connection for These Isolating Times

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Writing a book for a musical is a challenging task for any author. Itamar Moses , despite all his success as a playwright, found it to be downright daunting.

Yet the Berkeley native found a project that drew him in. After a successful off-Broadway run in 2016 followed by a triumphant Broadway transfer, Moses’ initial reticence of handling the script for The Band’s Visit paid off with a stunning statuette—the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical in 2018.

The show, which garnered 10 Tonys in total, including the Best Musical prize, makes its Bay Area debut at BroadwaySF on Tuesday, Jan. 11. The show will continue through Feb. 6 at the Golden Gate Theatre.

The musical is based on the 2007 Israeli film of the same name written and directed by Eran Kolirin. (The film’s original star, Sasson Gabay , also plays the leading role of Colonel Tewfiq in BroadwaySF’s production.) Eight men of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra are booked to play a concert at an Arab cultural center located in Petah Tikva, Israel, but a miscommunication accidentally puts them in Beit Hatikva, a sleepy town without much going on. Through a series of poignant interactions, the forlorn citizens are forever changed by the powder blue band through the show’s 100 uninterrupted minutes.

Writing for a medium where songs are the stars of the show, the script always has the potential to be an afterthought, which Moses understands.

“Good lyrics often express poetically what people’s inner lives are in a way that dialogue can’t,” he says. “Putting those things together can be really difficult because you’re inherently operating in two contradictory modes. At times the dialogue gets overly explicit and the subtext comes right to the surface, or it can be purely functional and just about handing the baton from one song to the next. It’s just a very tricky process.”

While a musical is often judged by the quality and hummability of its tunes, Moses explains that if the story doesn’t work, then nothing works: “It’s also the thing you spend the least time on because staging numbers, learning songs and doing choreography takes longer.”

Moses’ path from his days growing up in a Jewish family in Berkeley took him to Yale University in the mid 1990s, where he graduated in 1999, and then to New York University, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in dramatic writing. He has had world premieres at many major regional theaters throughout the country, including in his hometown at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2008. While he has also spent time in television writing for shows such as HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and TNT’s Men of a Certain Age , it’s his writing for the stage that has been his bread and butter.

Adding Tony winner to his lengthy resume is quite the culmination of a successful career as a playwright, yet Moses sees the award as a smaller piece of a grander puzzle.

“The show is such an unusual piece of work because there were crucial contributions from people based on a film that none of us wrote,” says Moses, who resides in Brooklyn. “To make something that is more than the sum of its parts and getting a major award like that is actually a great lesson in the fact that it’s really not about you.”

Those contributions Moses speaks of came from director David Cromer and composer and lyricist David Yazbek.

The show’s Broadway run in 2017 took place in a very different climate than the one the country finds itself in now. Today, the pandemic has amplified a societal sense of solitude for many. Moses feels the show has brought about some new insight that comes with the communal experience of living disconnected lives.

“Is the pandemic creating new resonance for the show? I would say it is, but I think what it reveals about the show is actually something quite simple and fundamental,” he says. “The show is about the experience of living, about the value of slowing things down and taking a moment to listen and connect with what’s in front of you, along with the people you’re with. It’s about these fundamental human needs, these things we often ignore when we’re swept up in our usual busy lives.”

Moses has found some wonderful parallels in that theme of place. He returned to the Bay Area this past August to be with friends and family for the first time in a year and a half due to the pandemic. Still, no matter how long he’s away from his hometown, Berkeley is never far from his heart, or his work.

“I think the Bay Area, among other things, is a court and a place of arrival,” he says. “The mixing of cultures encountering one another and those points of encounter are really interesting. Having immigrant parents and this big Israeli community in the area, hearing people speak English with an Israeli accent, all that was a big part of the music of my childhood.”

The Band’s Visit runs Jan. 11-Feb. 6 at Golden Gate Theatre. Tickets and details here . 

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clock This article was published more than  6 years ago

‘The Band’s Visit’ is the little musical that could

“Welcome to Nowhere” say the words painted on the wall backstage at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre. The line is lifted from the script of the show in residence there, “The Band’s Visit.” And it could not be more misleading.

For the musical’s dreamers-in-chief — composer David Yazbek, book writer Itamar Moses, director David Cromer and producer Orin Wolf — have most certainly, in concert with the cast and design team, made their project a “somewhere.” On Tuesday, the production was nominated for 11 Tony Awards, including one for best musical, and many devotees of artful musical theater are hoping it has the inside track to follow recent works such as “Fun Home,” “Hamilton” and “Dear Evan Hansen” to the podium for the most coveted honors at the June 10 ceremony.

But even before the trophies are allocated, “The Band’s Visit” has to be regarded as a singular season sensation, and not only because its haunting and plaintive melodies and resonantly affecting plot betoken a work of unusual integrity and sensitivity. The importance of “The Band’s Visit” also has to do with the inordinate challenge it faces in a marketplace ever more focused on brand-name shows with roots in other media — as demonstrated by the fact that its competitors for best musical, Disney’s “Frozen,” Tina Fey’s “Mean Girls” and Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob SquarePants,” all arrived on Broadway with fan bases of their own.

“The Band’s Visit” had no such well-traveled wagon to which it could hitch itself. Based on a small-budget 2007 Israeli movie by director Eran Kolirin that grossed about $3 million in this country in the late 2000s, the musical tiptoed onto the stage of off-Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company in late 2016. Then, after stellar reviews, it moved uptown to the Barrymore in October, the response to which from many potential ticket-buyers was still, “The Band’s  What?”

“When people hear ‘Frozen’ or ‘Mean Girls’ or any of the other shows, they’re going to know exactly what it’s about,” says Wolf, a Silver Spring-based producer who persuaded Kolirin to go along with his plan for transforming the movie into a stage property, and recruited Moses, and then Yazbek, to turn it into a musical. “Not only are they brands, but they know the plot,” he added, referring to the other musicals and their patrons.

“Some people leave our show having loved it, and they still can’t really explain what it’s about, other than like in 12 sentences: ‘Oh it’s about this band that gets lost and they’re in Israel and . . . it’s a very hard elevator pitch.” The show seems to be holding its own at the box office: After seven months on Broadway, it’s filling more than 90 percent of its seats and grossing just south of $1 million a week.

In fact, “The Band’s Visit” tells a remarkably simple story: An all-male band of Arab musicians, led by Tony-nominated Tony Shalhoub’s Tewfiq, is supposed to perform in the Israeli city of Petah Tikvah. Instead, a distracted member of the orchestra (played by Ari’el Stachel, another nominee) buys bus tickets to the stultifyingly lifeless desert backwater of Bet Hatikvah. The Israelis of the dusty town are not so much surprised to see Egyptian visitors as they are to see any visitors. And although Dina, the blasé cafe owner played by superb (and, yes, Tony-nominated) Katrina Lenk, assures us that nothing of interest takes place over the next 24 hours in Bet Hatikvah — remember, this is “Welcome to Nowhere” land — an audience learns better.

What’s beautiful about “The Band’s Visit” is its humane and humorous acceptance of the benefits of coincidence: the idea that people who have no real business becoming acquainted in short order help each other face their lives in new and affirmational ways. The unlikeliness of these worlds colliding is manifested most alluringly in the attraction between Dina and Tewfiq, each wounded and emotionally isolated and out of practice in reaching out to someone else.

 The context being Jews and Arabs, about whom the headlines remind us daily of their mutual antipathy, the musical is wading into highly charged terrain. An American audience is not conditioned for the tenor of narrative that is spun here, about confrontation in a part of the world that we believe can only head in one anguished direction. How, theatergoers might ask, can such gentle and moving discoveries as “The Band’s Visit” chronicles be memorialized by a Broadway songwriter and playwright?

“People aren’t used to seeing this tone,” explained Etai Benson, a young American actor who spent part of his childhood in Israel and who plays hapless Papi, an Israeli schooled by a visiting Arab trumpet player in the art of wooing. “A lot of people come in saying, ‘Huh, what is this? And by the end I was crying and I don’t know why.’ It’s an hour and a half of ephemeral moments of kindness and generosity. Just like in life, the emotion sneaks up on them.”

Wolf and his creative team are still learning how much they should incorporate the background politics of the show — it’s set in the early 1990s, when tensions between Israel and Egypt were in abeyance — into their efforts to promote the musical. Because at the heart of the show is a nuanced sense of optimism that doesn’t reflect the Middle East as it exists now. Earlier this year, I traveled to Israel and spoke to a group of Israeli acting students in Jaffa, in an event organized by the U.S. Embassy. For the occasion, I brought along a video montage from “The Band’s Visit,” and I talked about the underlying sense of hope communicated by the show.

The students at the Nissan Nativ acting studio, some of them veterans of service in the Israeli Defense Forces, weren’t buying my upbeat American take. Many had seen the movie, well known in Israel, and to which the musical is faithful. But my endorsement of the show’s conciliatory aspects was dismissed as wishful thinking. What I described as a realistic depiction of strangers groping for what united them, they thought of as fantasy.

I wanted to know how the students’ apparent cynicism — the musical has yet to run in Israel — sat with the musical’s actors and creative team. Because they were portraying ordinary people from the two stressed cultures, I was curious about whether they thought of the events of “The Band’s Visit” as portraying anything close to what is currently possible.

“Hope doesn’t have to be huge,” Lenk said in an interview backstage at the Barrymore. “It can be small, subtle — about things being a little bit better.” But Stachel, an American actor of Yemeni Jewish descent who plays the rakish Egyptian trumpet player, Haled, had some family members from Israel come to “The Band’s Visit” who didn’t see it as resembling their own reality. 

“It’s fiction to them,” Stachel said during a phone interview. Americans, he said, have the luxury of distance: “There’s something about being an outsider that allows us to see the commonality that those who are living the experience cannot.”

Yazbek took the position that, although the music he’s composed and the characters Moses depicted are inextricably linked to a specific time and place, the location does not have to be taken literally. “It could be any two groups,” he said of the show. “It’s not political. It’s not really just about Israelis and Arabs. It’s about any two peoples. It’s about tribalism.”

To that point, Etai Benson said: “People expect because there are Arabs and Israelis that there is going to be this intense conflict between them. It turns out the real conflict lies within each of those groups — and it takes someone from the other side to come mend the problem, and help them heal.”

Beside Lenk in her dressing room sat George Abud, a Lebanese American actor who plays the Egyptian violinist, Camal, in the musical. “It’s worthy to be told,” he said of the musical. “It’s important because of the horrors going on today.” Both he and Lenk were part of a group of artists from the show who went to Israel last summer. It was there, for him, that fact and fiction did come together. In the small Negev Desert town they visited — one of the residents calls it “the end of the world” — Abud played violin with the kids in the local student orchestra. The children were so excited to be performing with him, he said, that it was clear all that mattered was the art.

As in the musical itself, he said, the goal of the trip was to “distill the politics out of it. The center of it all, is people.”

The Band’s Visit , music and lyrics by David Yazbek, book by Itamar Moses. Directed by David Cromer. $59 to $299. At Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St., New York. Visit telecharge.com or call 212-239-6200.