I spent last weekend in New York City with colleagues from the American Theatre Critics Association, so I had a chance to see shows that might turn up in Cincinnati in a touring production or staged by our local theaters.
The likeliest prospect is Chazz Palminteri’s A Bronx Tale, a coming-of-age story set in New York City’s Italian-American Bronx neighborhood in the 1960s. Palminteri performed it as a one-man show in 1989. In 1993, it became a movie starring Palminteri and Robert De Niro. Now it’s a musical about a boy (at age 9 and then as a young man who narrates) caught between working-class family values and organized crime.
With a Rhythm & Blues and Doo-Wop score by Alan Menken, A Bronx Tale’s music more closely resembles his Little Shop of Horrors songs than his more recent Disney-produced hits Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. Add some spirited choreography by Sergio Trujillo, and it’s a crowd-pleasing production that several reviewers have compared to comfort food — “plain old pasta with red sauce.” Trust me, in another year or two, it will be at the Aronoff Center.
I also caught an audience-pleasing comedy, The Play That Goes Wrong, a British import now performed by an American cast. It’s a rip-roaring backstage farce about a disaster-plagued amateur theater company staging a wheezy murder mystery in a theater that has a devious, dangerous life of its own. From the get-go there are countless problems and mishaps (as the title warns) as the production slowly, hilariously and chaotically disintegrates. It was fun to watch, but not nearly as entertaining as Michael Frayn’s peerless Noises Off, which Cincinnati audiences can enjoy when Cincy Shakes stages it next spring.
The show that will truly stick with me was The Band’s Visit, a small-scale musical based on a 2007 Israeli film about an Egyptian police orchestra that strays off course while traveling to a gig, ending up in a town in the middle of Israel’s Negev desert. It’s reminiscent of the charming 2012 Tony Award-winning musical Once (based on another 2007 film) about everyday people coming together to make music and find shared threads of humanity.
The Band’s Visit bridges linguistic and cultural disconnections: The bmembers mistake Petah Tikva, a sizeable city with a new Arab cultural center, for the tiny, socially backward (and fictional) town of Bet Hatikva because the towns’ names sound similar in Arabic and Hebrew. They become stranded overnight. The characters communicate and find common ground using broken English — sometimes none too effectively, sometimes evocatively.
Tony Shalhoub plays Tewfiq, the stiff, widowed conductor who heads the musicians who wear Robin’s-egg blue uniforms that remind the bemused townspeople of Michael Jackson or Sgt. Pepper. As Dina, the world-weary, sensuous proprietor of a café where the characters intersect, Katrina Lenk (who was in the original Broadway cast of Once) turns in a warm, sensuous performance, breaking through Tewfiq’s reserved formality — at least for a few shared moments in the song “Something Different.”
The show’s score by David Yazbek (The Full Monty, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) is a striking mélange of Middle Eastern melodies and tonalities using traditional instruments, including a darbuka (drum) and the oud, a short-necked stringed instrument.
Instead of focusing on cultural differences, The Band’s Visit illustrates common emotions shared by humanity. One fellow stares at a pay phone for hours, yearning for a returned phone call from a lover; another, an inveterate and unsuccessful Arab Romeo, eventually coaches a withdrawn Israeli to make a romantic move (“Haled’s Song About Love”).
The show is transferring to Broadway after a much praised, four-week Off-Broadway run a year ago; it won a 2017 Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Musical. It opens this week at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. (I saw it with an appreciative preview audience.) The Band’s Visit is wistful, bittersweet, touching and funny, the kind of heartfelt show that can win audiences. It certainly captivated me.
Contact Rick Pender: rpender@citybeat.com
This article appears in Nov 1-8, 2017.
