‘The Band’s Visit’ finally gets to The Bushnell
“The Band’s Visit”’s attempt to visit The Bushnell has been as fraught as the bizarre journey depicted in the musical, in which a ceremonial police band from Egypt finds itself unexpectedly in a tiny desert town in Israel.
The national tour of the 2017 winner of the Tony award for best musical was originally scheduled to play The Bushnell in April of 2020. Just weeks earlier, theaters shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the perception of the length and scope of the pandemic changed, “The Band’s Visit” was rescheduled again and again.
One other show originally planned as part of the 2019-20 season, “Escape to Margaritaville,” finally happened last month. Another, “Dear Evan Hansen,” is due in Hartford at the end of March 2022.
“The Band’s Visit” is based on the award-winning 2007 movie written and directed by Eran Kolirin. It was adapted for the stage by Itamar Moses and has songs by David Yazbek (whose previous successful efforts at turning movies into stage shows include “The Full Monty,” “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” and “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”).
One person who gave “The Band’s Visit” its singular style and voice is West Hartford native Andrea Grody, the show’s music supervisor. Grody helped make sure that the music in a musical about musicians was fluid and natural. In fact, it emanates from a small onstage band hidden within part of the small-town set.
In addition to the onstage musicians, many of the cast members playing band members in “The Band’s Visit” play their own musical instruments.
The national tour stars Janet Dacal as Dina the Israeli café owner who ends up hosting the unexpected Egyptian stragglers. Dacal appeared this past summer in a virtual workshop of Cin Martinez’s play “Moonlighters” at TheaterWorks Hartford and appeared in all the early incarnations of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights,” including when it was workshopped at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford.
The leader of the immaculately uniformed band, Tewfiq, is played by Sasson Gabay, a leading actor at the Beit Lessin Theatre company in Tel Aviv.
Also in the cast: Clay Singer, who appeared in recent Westport Country Playhouse productions of “Man of La Mancha” and “Romeo and Juliet,” as the café worker Itzik, who gets to sing a stirring lullaby late in the show.
“The Band’s Visit” won 10 Tony awards in 2017, against such strong contenders as the musical versions of “Mean Girls” and “Spongebob Squarepants,” each of which had received more nominations.
The national tour of “The Band’s Visit” runs Nov. 16-21 at The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. $31-$133. bushnell.org.
Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.
