Alon Moni Aboutboul and Miri Mesika in The Band’s Visit at the Donmar Warehouse, London. Picture: Marc Brenner
The Band’s Visit continues at the Donmar Warehouse, London until 3 December 2022.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
The 10-time Tony Award-winning The Band’s Visit finally pulls into London’s Donmar Warehouse for its European premiere and has immediately become the capital’s must-see show.
As much as I’ve harped on during my tenure here at MTR about the laziness of turning movies into musicals, here is one of those rare examples of a match in heaven, where the songwriting truly serves to augment and enrich the storytelling.
Eran Kolirin’s original screenplay of The Band’s Visit – a modest but critically acclaimed Israeli movie from 2007 – was transmuted into a book musical by Jewish American playwright Itamar Moses and composer-lyricist David Yazbek, who has previous with movie conversions: Tootsie, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and The Full Monty. The songs and the score layer beautifully into the story and are every bit as important as the characters.
The result is an exquisite gem of a show – a quiet, breathy, achingly romantic musical that wafts over you like a warm sirocco wind.
The Donmar’s artistic director, Michael Longhurst, is at the reins, and he and designer Soutra Gilmour keep the staging as simple as the storyline. This is a show that speaks volumes in its silent moments, and Longhurst’s experienced and light touch ensures that every nuanced line of dialogue or beat is executed to perfection. On press night, the auditorium was at times pin-drop silent – an electrifying experience for an audience so enraptured that they can barely breathe.
A projection at the top of the show tells us that a group of musicians came to Israel from Egypt. ‘You probably didn’t hear about it,’ says the writing on the wall. ‘It wasn’t very important.’ But for some of the inhabitants of a small desert commune, it proves to be the most important night of their lives.
The musicians are the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, who arrive in Tel Aviv for a cultural exchange concert and who end up accidentally taking the bus from the airport not to nearby Petah Tikva but to the distant (fictional) town of Bet Hatikva, an isolated outpost in the Negev Desert. There, they are met with a Jewish community who, despite their initial misgivings and distrust of the Arabs, quickly warm to their uninvited guests.
The residents of Bet Hatikva comprise Marc Antolin (Itzik), Harel Glazer (Papi), Peter Polycarpou (Avrum), Maya Kristal Tenenbaum (Julia), Michal Horowicz (Iris), Ido Gonen (Sammy), Emma Kingston (Sammy’s wife), Levi Goldmeier (Zelger), Yali Topol Margalith (Anna) and Ashley Margolis (Telephone Guy). This downtrodden lot introduce us to their depressing township (‘Waiting’ and ‘Welcome to Nowhere’), and in Avrum’s tender ‘The Beat of Your Heart’ we begin to see how people who might not be able to communicate using language – the dialogue is conducted mostly in broken English – can find a common voice in music.
The onstage band also has featured roles for Sargon Yelda (Simon/violin) and Carlos Mendoza de Hevia (Camal/clarinet), and Sharif Afifi (Haled/Trumpet) more than delivers on his role as the band’s casanova. Multiple threads emerge, with the various band members having interesting encounters with the locals.
This really is an ensemble piece but sharing the top billing is Alon Moni Aboutboul as the band’s leader, Colonel Tewfiq Zakaria, and Miri Mesika as Bet Hatikva’s cafe owner Dina, who welcomes the band into her humble establishment for the night.
Aboutboul – an Israeli actor with an impressive array of recent US TV credits – is perfectly cast as the starched Colonel and band leader. His performance is impressively measured and still, but he slowly peels back his layers, culminating in the beautiful Arabic hymn ‘Itgara’a’. He also has a usefully uncanny resemblance to movie star Omar Sharif, which plays into the storyline.
It’s Tunisian-Iraqi Mesika, though, who steals the show as the enigmatic and complex Dina. It comes as no surprise to read that she’s a best-selling and multi-awarding-winning recording artist in Israel and beyond. She’s also a natural actress, whose Dina is as compelling as she is believable. Her treatment of ‘Something Different’, which folds sensuously around Tewfiq’s ‘Itgara’a’, is mesmerising.
Well, I say Mesika steals the show but thinking back now, I suspect that the real star of the night might have actually been the incredible talent that is Andy Findon. You might not have heard the name – I certainly hadn’t – but you’ve definitely heard him perform, as he’s ‘Europe’s most recorded flute player’, having played for the likes of Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennett, The Beach Boys, Michael Nyman and Joni Mitchell, and recorded soundtrack albums for Phantom, Sweeney Todd, Cats, Evita, Mamma Mia! and Les Mis. Here, he’s wrangling an array of woodwinds and given the freedom to let rip with some exceptionally impressive solos.
In fact, the onstage Police Orchestra is formed from the most astonishingly talented – and diverse – group of performers: joining Brit Findon is Spain’s Ant Romero on percussion (wow, sensational!), Albanian cellist Idlir Shyti and Turkish oud player Baha Yetkin. I’d’ve paid the ticket price just to see this lot perform together, and hope that the Donmar might even consider scheduling a gig or two with this stunning line-up. Check out their biographies in the programme – these instrumentalists really are the best in the world at what they do.
The remaining musicians – Nicki Davenport (bass), Luke Baxter (percussion), led by MD Tarek Merchant – are nestled in the upper wings of the Donmar, and fill out Yazbek’s gorgeously exotic desert music (with orchestrations by Jamshied Sharifi and Andrea Grody, Arabic musical consultant by Attab Haddad, and musical supervision by Nigel Lilley). The evocative score is beautifully balanced, so band-caps off to sound designer Paul Groothuis for allowing us to hear every word clearly.
The Band’s Visit is an intelligent piece for the grown-ups, but devoid of pomposity or pretentiousness. It’s light and delicate – a distant melody caught in the wind – and its many emotional aches and pains are balanced with humour and quirkiness. It’s always without agenda – as apolitical a show can be that’s about Arabs and Jews being thrown together unexpectedly.
The residents of Bet Hatikva, mis-sold a new life in the desert after the founding of Israel, are an excluded, isolated tranche of society, drawn from immigrants seeking the promised land. So the arrival of yet more immigrants – even Arabs – ultimately engenders not hate or fear but mutual respect and curiosity.
The uniting factors are the commonly shared loves that transcend borders: food, music, movies and sex. This is all captured wonderfully in Yazbek’s Middle East-infused score and Moses’ witty, intelligent book, and the Donmar provides just the right level of intimacy for a show of this size, placing you at the heart of the story. The Band’s Visit is effectively a celebration of the human condition and of the levelling and transformative power of art. Don’t miss it – it’s 100 minutes of pure bliss.
Craig Glenday
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