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This heartwarming and poignant winner of the Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard prize is the mesmerizing and witty story of strangers in a strange land. A fading Egyptian police band arrives in Israel to play at the Arab Cultural Center. When they take the wrong bus, the band members find themselves in a desolate Israeli village. With no other option than to spend the night with the local townspeople, the two distinctly different cultures realize the universal bonds of love, music and life. Set against a breathtaking desert landscape, this cross-cultural comedy proves that getting lost is sometimes the best way to find yourself.

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Review: ‘The Band’s Visit’ Is a Ravishing Musical That Whispers With Romance

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By Ben Brantley

• Nov. 9, 2017

Breaking news for Broadway theatergoers, even — or perhaps especially — those who thought they were past the age of infatuation: It is time to fall in love again.

One of the most ravishing musicals you will ever be seduced by opened on Thursday night at the Barrymore Theater. It is called “The Band’s Visit,” and its undeniable allure is not of the hard-charging, brightly blaring sort common to box-office extravaganzas.

Instead, this portrait of a single night in a tiny Israeli desert town confirms a lyric that arrives, like nearly everything in this remarkable show, on a breath of reluctantly romantic hope: “Nothing is as beautiful as something you don’t expect.”

With songs by David Yazbek and a script by Itamar Moses, “The Band’s Visit” is a Broadway rarity seldom found these days outside of the canon of Stephen Sondheim: an honest-to-God musical for grown-ups. It is not a work to be punctuated with rowdy cheers and foot-stomping ovations, despite the uncanny virtuosity of Mr. Yazbek’s benchmark score.

That would stop the show, and you really don’t want that to happen. Directed by David Cromer with an inspired inventiveness that never calls attention to itself, “The Band’s Visit” flows with the grave and joyful insistence of life itself. All it asks is that you be quiet enough to hear the music in the murmurs, whispers and silences of human existence at its most mundane — and transcendent.

And, oh yes, be willing to have your heart broken, at least a little. Because “The Band’s Visit,” which stars a magnificent Katrina Lenk and Tony Shalhoub as would-be lovers in a not-quite paradise, is like life in that way, too.

There were worries that this finely detailed show, based on Eran Kolirin’s screenplay for the 2007 film of the same title, might not survive the transfer to Broadway. First staged to sold-out houses late last year at the Atlantic Theater Company, it exuded a shimmering transparency that might well have evaporated in less intimate quarters.

Yet “The Band’s Visit” — which follows the modest adventures of a touring Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli village significant only for its insignificance — more than holds its own on a larger stage. Its impeccably coordinated creative team has magnified and polished its assets to a high sheen that never feels synthetic.

This show was always close to perfect musically. (Mr. Yazbek’s quietly simmering score, which inflects Broadway balladry and character songs with a haunting Middle Eastern accent, felt as essential as oxygen.) But it felt a shade less persuasive in its connective spoken scenes.

That is, to say the least, no longer a problem. Though the lives it depicts are governed by a caution born of chronic disappointment, Mr. Cromer’s production now moves wire to wire with a thoroughbred’s confidence.

Such assurance is all the more impressive when you consider that “The Band’s Visit” is built on delicately balanced contradictions. It finds ecstasy in ennui; eroticism among people who rarely make physical contact; and a sense of profound eventfulness in a plot in which, all told, very little happens.

The story is sprung when the members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Band, led by their straight-backed conductor, Tewfiq (Mr. Shalhoub), board a bus in 1996 for an engagement at the Arab Cultural Center in the city of Petah Tikva. Thanks to some understandable confusion at the ticket counter, they wind up instead in the flyblown backwater of Bet Hatikva.

They register as unmistakably alien figures there, looking like refugees from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in their powder-blue uniforms. (Sarah Laux did the costumes.) And there’s not a bus out of this godforsaken hole until the next morning.

Just how uninteresting is Bet Hatikva? Its residents are happy to tell you, in some of the wittiest songs ever written about being bored. The “B” that begins its name might as well stand for “basically bleak and beige and blah blah blah.”

Leading this civic inventory is a cafe proprietor named Dina (Ms. Lenk, in a star-making performance), a wry beauty who clearly doesn’t belong here and just as clearly will never leave. Like her fellow citizens, she sees the defining condition of her life as eternal waiting, a state in which you “keep looking off out into the distance/ Even though you know the view is never gonna change.”

Scott Pask’s revolving set, so fitting for a world in which life seems to spin in an endless circle, captures the sameness of the view. But Tyler Micoleau’s lighting, and the whispers of projections by Maya Ciarrocchi, evoke the subliminal changes of perspective stirred by the arrival of strangers.

Connections among the Egyptian and the Israeli characters are inevitably incomplete. To begin with, they don’t share a language and must communicate in broken English. And as the stranded musicians interact with their hosts, their shared story becomes a tally of sweet nothings, of regretful might-have-beens.

That means that the cultural collisions and consummations that you — and they — might anticipate don’t occur. Even the frictions that emerge from uninvited Arabs on Israeli soil flicker and die like damp matches.

The show is carefully veined with images of incompleteness: a forever unlit cigarette in the mouth of a violinist (George Abud); a clarinet concerto that has never been completed by its composer (Alok Tewari); a public telephone that never rings, guarded by a local (Adam Kantor) waiting for a call from his girlfriend; and a pickup line that’s dangled like an unbaited hook by the band’s aspiring Lothario (Ari’el Stachel, whose smooth jazz vocals dazzle in the style of his character’s idol, Chet Baker).

All the cast members — who also include a deeply affecting John Cariani, Kristen Sieh, Etai Benson and Andrew Polk — forge precisely individualized characters, lonely people who have all known loss, with everything and nothing in common. A marvelous Mr. Shalhoub (“Monk”) has only grown in the role of a man who carries his dignity and private grief with the stiffness of someone transporting perilously fragile cargo.

As for Ms. Lenk, seen on Broadway last season in Paula Vogel’s “Indecent,” she is the ideal avatar of this show’s paradoxical spirit, at once coolly evasive and warmly expansive, like the jasmine wind that Dina describes in the breakout ballad “Omar Sharif.”

Listening to Tewfiq sing in Arabic, she wonders, “Is he singing about wishing?” She goes on: “I don’t know what I feel, and I don’t know what I know/All I know is I feel something different.”

Mr. Yazbek’s melody matches the exquisitely uncertain certainty of the lyrics. That “something different” is the heart-clutching sensation that throbs throughout this miraculous show, as precise as it is elusive, and all the more poignant for being both.

The Band's Visit Tickets

The critically acclaimed new musical that celebrates the deeply human ways music and laughter connect us all.

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Performances ended on Apr. 7, 2019.

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Spend an evening in the company of unforgettable strangers at The Band’s Visit —now one of the most celebrated musicals ever. It rejoices in the way music brings us to life, brings us to laughter, brings us to tears, and ultimately, brings us together. In an Israeli desert town where every day feels the same, something different is suddenly in the air. Dina, the local café owner, had long resigned her desires for romance to daydreaming about exotic films and music from her youth. When a band of Egyptian musicians shows up lost at her café, she and her fellow locals take them in for the night. Under the spell of the night sky, their lives intertwine in unexpected ways, and this once sleepy town begins to wake up.

"It's time to fall in love again! One of the most ravishing musicals you will ever be seduced by." The New York Times Ben Brantley

"Worlds collide, and hearts and minds open. It's ravishing! Unlike any musical I've ever seen." Vogue Adam Green

Cast & Creative

In addition to his turn in The   Band's Visit film, Gabay has been seen on-screen in Rambo III, Mermaids, Anachnu BaMapa and Shtisel . He won an Israeli Film Academy Award for his performance in the drama Gett and an Israeli Television Academy Award for his turn in the comedy series Polishuk.

Katrina Lenk is a triple threat artist who segues seamlessly between stage and screen. She most recently starred as Dina in Broadway’s Tony Award-winning production of The Band’s Visit and earned a Tony Award, Grammy Award, Emmy Award, Lucille Lortel Award, Outer Critics Circle Award nomination, Chita Rivera Award nomination, Drama League Award nomination, Theatre World Award’s Dorothy Louden Award, and a Clarence Derwent Award for Breakout Female of the Year. Lenk starred on Broadway in Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel’s Indecent (Outer Critics Circle Award nomination). Her other Broadway credits include Once, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark  and The Miracle Worker . Additional theater credits include iWitness (Mark Taper Forum), Lost Land (Steppenwolf), Caucasian Chalk Circle (South Coast Rep) and Lovelace: A Rock Opera (L.A./Edinburgh). To television audiences, Lenk is known for her pivotal roles on hit series including a recent major series arc on the The Village, The Good Fight, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Elementary, The Get Down, The Blacklist, According to Jim  and Will & Grace . On the big screen, she appeared in Look Away, Evol: The Theory of Love, Elan Vital, Crime Fiction, Kiss Me in the Dark  and Space Daze . Lenk is the ringleader of the band/performance art piece called Moxy Phinx.

Ari'el Stachel is making his Broadway debut after originating the role of Haled in The Band's Visit at the Atlantic Theatre Company (Lucille Lortel and Drama Desk Award nominations). His regional credits include  The Golem of Havana (Barrington Stage Company). He appeared in workshops for  We Live in Cairo (NYTW) and  The Visitor (Public Theatre). On screen, he's been seen in  Blue Bloods  and Jessica Jones .

George Abud is a proud Arab-American actor. Broadway:  The Band’s Visit  starring Katrina Lenk & Tony Shalhoub (Daytime Emmy Award, OBC Recording);  The Visit  starring Chita Rivera & Roger Rees (OBC Recording). Off-Broadway:  The Beautiful Lady  directed by Anne Bogart (La MaMa Experimental Theatre);  Cornelia Street  opposite Norbert Leo Butz (Atlantic Theater Company); Nerd Face in  Emojiland  (Drama Desk nomination, OOBC Recording);  The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui  opposite Raúl Esparza,  Nathan The Wise  opposite F. Murray Abraham, Ibsen’s  Peer Gynt , and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s  Allegro  directed by John Doyle (all for Classic Stage Company); also, at Atlantic,  The Band’s Visit  directed by David Cromer; and  Lolita, My Love  opposite Robert Sella (York Theatre Company). Regional: Richard Nixon in  The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical  directed by Christopher Ashley, and Marinetti in  Lempicka  directed by Rachel Chavkin (La Jolla Playhouse, Craig Noel nominations for both productions); Lewis Chapman in  August Rush  (Paramount Theatre);  Annie Get Your Gun  directed by Sarna Lapine (Bay Street Theater); and Puck in  A Midsummer Night’s Dream  (Geva Theatre Center).

Adam Kantor's Broadway credits include  The Band’s Visit  (Telephone Guy - Grammy & Emmy Awards),  Fiddler On The Roof  (Motel),  Next To Normal  (Henry), and  RENT  (Mark). Off-Broadway:  The Last Five Years  (Jamie),  Avenue Q  (Princeton/Rod). Regional:  Diner  (Signature Theatre),  Nobody Loves You  and  Two Gentlemen of Verona  (The Old Globe). TV: Billions on Showtime (Pununzio), The Good Wife on CBS (Ezra). Training: Northwestern University and British American Dramatic Academy. Co-Founder of StoryCourse - theatrical dining experiences.

Etain Benson is an Israeli-American actor based in NYC. On Broadway, he originated the role of Papi in the Tony Award-winning musical The Band’s Visit . Broadway/National Tour: Wicked (Boq); An American in Paris (Adam). TV: “God Friended Me.” Regional: The Fortress of Solitude (premiere, Dallas Theater Center), A Room with a View (premiere, The Old Globe), Next to Normal (Weston Playhouse), My Name is Asher Lev (GableStage). Workshops: The Band’s Visit (directed by Hal Prince), The Devil Wears Prada (directed by Anna Shapiro), Little Miss Sunshine (directed by James Lapine). Benson trained at the University of Michigan and the legendary Moscow Art Theatre. He is a Grammy Award winner as Principal Soloist on The Band’s Visit Original Broadway Cast Album.  

David Cromer is a New York-based director and actor. He appeared on Broadway as Karl Lindner in the 2014 revival of  A Raisin in the Sun , and Off-Broadway as the Stage Manager in  Our Town , which he also directed, at the Barrow Street Theatre. He appeared in the HBO series The Newsroom , the Showtime series Billions , and in the motion picture  The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) . As a director, his New York credits include  The Band’s Visit  (2018 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical, Ethel Barrymore Theatre); the Broadway revivals of  Brighton Beach Memoirs  and  The House of Blue Leaves ;  The Treasurer  (Playwrights Horizons);  Man from Nebraska  (Second Stage Theatre);  The Effect, Orson’s Shadow,  and  Tribes  (Barrow Street Theatre);  Women or Nothing (Atlantic Theater Company);  Really Really  (MCC Theater);  When the Rain Stops Falling  and  Nikolai and the Others  (Lincoln Center Theater); and  Adding Machine (Minetta Lane Theatre). Other directing credits include  Come Back, Little Sheba  (Huntington Theatre Company);  The Sound Inside  (Williamstown Theatre Festival); and  Our Town  in London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and Kansas City. Cromer has received a Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, three Obie Awards, three Lucille Lortel Awards, a Joe A. Callaway Award, four Jeff Awards, and in 2010 was made a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

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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.

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Review: ‘The Band’s Visit’ brings its musical poetry to Dolby Theatre

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A musical doesn’t have to make a lot of noise to dazzle. “The Band’s Visit,” the exquisitely delicate Tony-winning show now receiving its Los Angeles premiere at Dolby Theatre, treads lightly across the stage in a hush of magic.

Based on Israeli writer-director Eran Kolirin’s screenplay for his 2007 film of the same title, “The Band’s Visit” follows a group of Egyptian musicians who are stranded overnight in a sleepy desert town in Israel. Strangers in a suspicious land, they don’t expect to be welcomed. But instead of enmity, they find hospitality — their differences bridged first by courtesy, and later, as they get to know each other better, a somber-hued humanity.

Composer and lyricist David Yazbek infuses Itamar Moses ’ book with lyrical poetry. Discreetly flecked rather than dolloped, music provides a vehicle of shared expression for grief, longing and hope — a universal language that recognizes no borders.

The state-of-the-art Dolby, where the production runs through Dec. 19, is an ideal venue for a show that relies on quiet clarity. The theatergoing experience is refreshingly unharried. Spacious enough to comfortably accommodate a crowd, the Dolby manages through the crispness of its sound system and the sharpness of its lighting to feel intimate even at a distance.

And intimacy is essential for “The Band’s Visit,” a musical that moves lightly yet deeply into Chekhovian territory. The tone is playful, almost casual. But some essential truth about life is captured in the insouciant flow.

The scene is drolly set in a few sentences projected onto the stage at the start of the show: “Once not long ago a group of musicians came to Israel from Egypt. You probably didn’t hear about it. It wasn’t very important.”

Insignificance, however, marks the majority of our days. And what doesn’t make headlines turns out to matter a great deal.

The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, which was invited to perform at an Arab cultural center in Petah Tikva, is blown off course by a pronunciation error. The band winds up in Bet Hatikva, a fictional backwater that its own residents dismiss as “boring,” “barren” and “bland” in the wry number “Welcome to Nowhere.”

Dina (Janet Dacal), the owner of a café, greets this troupe of men with brusque bemusement. Tewfiq (Sasson Gabay, reprising the role he played in the film), the commander of the orchestra, asks with impeccable manners whether he and his musicians may dine at her establishment. With a businesswoman’s shrug, she consents.

Formality is out of place in Bet Hatikva. “Pick a sandhill of your choosing,” jokes Papi (Coby Getzug), one of the friendlier locals. But Dina is drawn to Tewfiq’s gravity and thinks he looks cute in his powder-blue Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band suit. She offers to find sleeping accommodations for the musicians after breaking the news that there are no more buses today.

The town is reluctant to open its doors, but Dina proves to be as formidable a commander as Tewfiq. She divides the men up, taking Tewfiq and Haled (Joe Joseph), a young romantic trumpet player obsessed with Chet Baker, to her place.

Haled has reason to be nervous. It was his innocent miscommunication that landed the band on the wrong bus. Tewfiq has made his impatience with dreamy-headed Haled loudly known. Haled, however, is like a puppy unable to stop chasing after fun even after getting whacked with a newspaper.

As in a Chekhov play, a busy plot isn’t needed for revelations to emerge. “The Band’s Visit” relies on the alchemy of unexpected encounters. Dina and Tewfiq, ships in the night that aren’t supposed to be in the same waters, discover a shared love of old Egyptian movies, which Dina sings about in a lovely ode appropriately called “Omar Sharif.”

The characters catch glimpses of one another’s souls. Music leads the way by lifting the banal exchanges into a sudden sublime. In one of the most moving instances of this elevation, Simon (James Rana), a clarinetist and aspiring conductor who’s staying with a husband and wife (played by Clay Singer and Kendal Hartse) in the throes of marital problems, soothes their crying baby with some strains from his instrument.

Peace breaks out in this tempestuous household, and suddenly all of the built-up resentments don’t seem all that important. Simon hasn’t been able to finish the concerto he started writing long ago, but his art has done its job of easing the daily suffering.

The unspoken hangs between Dacal’s Dina and Gabay’s Tewfiq as they share a drink in the evening air. An affectionate melancholy fills the gaps in what they have time to say.

Joseph’s Haled radiates a sensual enjoyment, made all the most precious by his awareness that his days of youthful freedom are drawing to a close. The eclectic blend of musical styles — traditional Arab, klezmer and jazz, among them — enhances the cast’s subtle emotional chemistry.

David Cromer’s fluidly directed production glides from the café to domestic settings to a roller disco, all the while keeping tabs on a phone booth, where a forlorn-looking guy (Joshua Grosso) waits eternally for a call from his girlfriend that never seems to come.

The scenic design by Scott Pask has the same jaunty quality as the show itself. The settings are sketched with a simplicity that is more like a diagram than a photograph. Yet the moonlit atmosphere lends this elsewhere a haunting individuality.

At a time when everyone seems to be so angry, conflicts appear to be irresolvable and communion no longer within reach, “The Band’s Visit” is like balm for a tired spirit. The musical touched me deeply when I saw it on Broadway in 2017, but after such a long period away from the theater, I found the show even more profoundly affecting.

Operating on a subtler-than-usual Broadway frequency, Yazbek and Moses’ musical drama invites us to transcend our rifts. I didn’t realize how badly I needed “The Band’s Visit,” but this gift of a show has arrived in just the nick of time.

'The Band's Visit'

Where: Dolby Theatre, 6801 Hollywood Blvd., L.A. When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends Dec. 19 Tickets: Start at $30 (subject to change) Contact: 1-800-982-2787 or BroadwayInHollywood.com or Ticketmaster.com Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes Also Segerstrom Center for the Arts March 22-April 3 at scfta.org

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Charles McNulty is the theater critic of the Los Angeles Times. He received his doctorate in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism from the Yale School of Drama.

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In moving musical 'The Band's Visit,' strangers from distinct Mideast cultures find harmony

Magnificent writers theatre production of the tony-winning show pulls you in to the characters’ world and you don’t want to leave..

Café owner Dina (Sophie Madorsky, with Rom Barkhordar and Armand Akbari) is among the people in a remote Israeli town showing hospitality to stranded Egyptian musicians in “The Band’s Visit.”

Michael Brosilow

Quirky, character-driven, self-declared at the start as being not “very important,” the 2018 Tony-winning best musical “The Band’s Visit” has always been a modest, heartwarming show, a pixelated slice-of-life about the ways humans feel connected with each other. It’s mostly about love, but also about how music and movies help bring people together.

I enjoyed the piece immensely on Broadway, where it was directed by David Cromer, a longtime Chicago artist now on the A-plus-list in New York. He won the directing Tony for his work on this show.

But I was far more deeply moved by this intimate, intensely engaging production at Writers Theater, directed by Zi Alikhan. Alikhan worked under Cromer on the national tour of the “The Band’s Visit,” and has an impressive, mostly regional-theater resume. He’s making an extremely memorable mark in his Chicago debut.

This offbeat musical from composer David Yazbeck (“The Full Monty,” “Tootsie”) and writer Itamar Moses, based on a 2007 Israeli film, tells the story of a small Egyptian orchestra invited to perform at the Arab cultural center in the real-life Israeli city of Petah Tikvah. Instead, the musicians accidentally, and understandably, find themselves in Bet Hatikvah, a fictional, remote desert town. Stranded awaiting the rare bus, and in a town too tiny for a hotel, they must rely on the hospitality of locals who aren’t used to visitors, let alone those from another culture. Two of the songs, to give you a sense, are called “Welcome to Nowhere” and “Something Different.”

This production has the cast playing nearly all the instruments — including Middle Eastern ones like the pear-shaped, lute-like oud — with a few supplements from offstage. A benefit is that the musical interstices serve as an indication of how the townspeople manage to pass the time, given that there is so little going on in Bet Hatikvah.

• From 2019: ‘The Band’s Visit’ a marvelous, exquisitely crafted arrival indeed

Yazbek’s lovely, nuanced score, highly unusual for a Broadway show, feels deeply connected to the region, which is essential for bringing an authenticity to the setting and story, which itself is minimal but involving.

During a single evening, the strangers get to know each other. Café owner Dina (Sophie Madorsky) and the orchestra’s leader Tewfiq (Rom Barkhordar) bond over memories of Omar Sharif movies and the music of Egyptian Umm Kulthum, which Dina grew up with. Simon (Jonathan Shaboo), the orchestra’s clarinetist, finds himself observing the quarrels of a married couple (Dave Honigman and Dana Saleh Omar). The Chet Baker-loving Haled (Armand Akbari, exuding friendly charm) tags along as an extra wheel on a roller-skating date with locals (Sam Linda, Marielle Issa, Becky Keeshin, Jordan Golding).

This ensemble is extraordinary: un-showy, uniformly honest, remarkably likable.

I understand Madorsky’s Dina more than I did that of Katrina Lenk, who played the role on Broadway and just couldn’t cover up her sense of glamor, that Dina was truly stuck in this small town, so clearly out of place. While equally as compelling, this Dina may long for something more, but also very much belongs here, and she comes across as far more vulnerable.

Sam Linda and Becky Keeshin play locals in Bet Hatikvah on a roller-skating date.

Another standout is Sam Linda, a performer I’ve seen before without his making this type of impression. He seems born for this part, and his “Papi Hears the Ocean,” about what he hears when he tries to talk with girls, is wildly enjoyable, all the funnier for its fundamental believability and the careful timing of Sebastiani Romagnolo’s choreography.

I was concerned, given the current, horrifying events occurring on the Israeli-Egypt border, that this show would feel too slight for the moment, a “can’t we all get along?” message at a moment when reality suggests the answer to that is a resounding “No.”

• From 2019: David Cromer sees ‘everyday heroes’ as the heart and soul of ‘The Band’s Visit’

But from the moment this story starts, this magnificent production pulls you in to the characters’ world and you don’t want to leave. It’s an innocent, peaceful place. The actors all speak with accents — believable to my ear, for sure — as the Arabic- and Hebrew-speaking characters use sometimes-halting English to communicate. It’s about what people have in common. Politics doesn’t exist. The characters expose their inner selves to strangers; although at first surprised to be dealing with the situation, they’re ultimately emotionally unguarded.

But the show also gains deep, complex, upsetting layers from the fact that, when you awaken from the reverie of its sweetness, you realize these people — that is to say, people just like them — may be dead or hostages or at least in mourning for loved ones, and times past.

Tours To You

Your home for information about the touring broadway productions in north america, ‘the band’s visit’ north american tour cast announced.

Producers announced today that the North American tour of the 10-time Tony Award®-winning Best Musical  The Band’s Visit , featuring music and lyrics by Tony® and Drama Desk Award®-winner David Yazbek, will resume its national tour on Tuesday, October 5, 2021 at the Durham Performing Arts Center (Durham, NC) and continue on to more than 25 cities through Summer 2022.

“After what everyone has been through, we are thrilled, proud, and relieved to return to the road and share this story of the power of music, the need for connection, and the undying spark of human decency,” said director David Cromer.

Award-winning Israeli film actor Sasson Gabay will reprise the role of  Tewfiq , the role he created in the 2007 film of  The Band’s Visit  and has played on Broadway and in more than 17 cities on the First National Tour. Joining him to lead the company is the critically acclaimed actress Janet Dacal ( Prince of Broadway ,  Wonderland, In The Heights ) in the role of  Dina .

The cast will also include Joe Joseph as  Haled , Clay Singer as  Itzik , Yoni Avi Battat as  Camal , Coby Getzug as  Papi , Joshua Grosso as Telephone Guy , Kendal Hartse as  Iris , David Studwell as Avrum , Billy Cohen as  Zelger , Layan Elwazani as  Julia , Marc Ginsburg as  Sammy , Ariel Reich as Anna , and James Rana as  Simon  along with Ali Louis Bourzgui, Loren Lester, Dana Saleh Omar, Nick Sacks, and Hannah Shankman.

The Band’s Visit  tells a joyful, offbeat story of a band of musicians who arrive in a town way off the beaten path. Under the spell of the desert sky, with beautiful music perfuming the air, the band brings the town to life in unexpected ways. With a Tony- and Grammy-winning score that seduces your soul and sweeps you off your feet, performed by thrillingly talented onstage musicians,  The Band’s Visit  rejoices in the way music makes us laugh, makes us cry, and ultimately, brings us together.  

Click here to view the show’s current tour route.

The Band’s Visit world premiere opened to critical acclaim at the Atlantic Theater Company in December 2016, and opened at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore theatre in November 2017. It went on to play 589 regular performance and 36 previews, breaking the all-time box office record at Broadway’s Barrymore Theatre twice and winning 10 Tony Awards® before closing in April 2019. The production was featured in over 20 “Best Of The Year” lists including T he New York Times , Time Magazine  and  Entertainment Weekly . The First National Tour launched in June 2019 and played 17 cities before the touring entertainment industry was halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  

The Band’s Visit  is one of four musicals in Broadway history to win the unofficial “Big Six” Tony Awards®, which include Best Musical, Best Book, Best Score, Best Actor in a Musical, Best Actress in a Musical, and Best Direction of a Musical.

With music and lyrics by Tony Award®-winner David Yazbek, and a book by Tony Award®-winner Itamar Moses,  The Band’s Visit  won “Best Musical” awards from the Tony Awards®, Drama League, New York Drama Critics’ Circle, the Outer Critics Circle, the Lucille Lortel and the Obies. It is based on the screenplay by Eran Kolirin, and is directed by Tony Award®-winner David Cromer.

The creative team also includes Patrick McCollum (Choreography), Tony Award®-winner Scott Pask (Set Design), Sarah Laux (Costume Design), Tony Award®-winner Tyler Micoleau (Lighting Design), Tony Award®-winner Kai Harada (Sound Design), Charles G. LaPointe (Hair Designer), Tony Award®-winner Jamshied Sharifi (Orchestrations), Andrea Grody (Music Supervisor & Additional Arrangements), Dean Sharenow (Music Supervisor & Music Coordinator) and Adrian Ries (Music Director).

The Band’s Visit  is produced on tour by Orin Wolf, StylesFour Productions, Evamere Entertainment, Atlantic Theater Company, David F. Schwartz, Barbara Broccoli, Frederick Zollo, Grove•REG, Lassen Blume Baldwin, Thomas Steven Perakos, Marc Platt, The Shubert Organization, The Baruch/Routh/Frankel/Viertel Group, Robert Cole, DeRoy-Carr-Klausner, Federman-Moellenberg, FilmNation Entertainment, Roy Furman, FVSL Theatricals, Hendel-Karmazin, HoriPro Inc., IPN, JAM Theatricals, The John Gore Organization, Koenigsberg-Krauss, David Mirvish, James L. Nederlander, Al Nocciolino, Once Upon A Time Productions, Susan Rose and Paul Shiverick. The Executive Producers for  The Band’s Visit  are Allan Williams and Charlie Stone.

The Band’s Visit  original Broadway cast album received the 2019 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. The musical is also the recipient of a 2019 Daytime Emmy Award for a performance of “Answer Me” on NBC’s “Today”.

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