Broadway blockbuster ‘The Band’s Visit’ coming to Hancher

“The Band’s Visit” takes place in the middle of nowhere, but the story is everywhere.

Winner of 10 Tony Awards in 2018, including Best Musical, and the 2019 Grammy for Best Musical Theatre Album, the show is coming to Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City on April 6 and 7.

“The show is very much an ensemble drama. It’s more or less about some universal human experiences, and human adult experiences of love, loss, isolation, and the trials and subtle, simple challenges that we face as humans,” cast member Joe Joseph, 32, said by phone from a recent tour stop in Salt Lake City.

“The characters present various experiences, some of which I think will be very close to home for the audience, even with characters who don’t look anything like them or live in an environment anything like theirs,” Joseph said.

Most, if not all, of the cast members have Middle Eastern heritage, and the show is set in Israel. His roots are Syrian-Lebanese.

If you go

What: “The Band’s Visit”

Where: Hancher Auditorium, 141 E. Park Rd., Iowa City

When: 7:30 p.m. April 6 and 7

Tickets: $59 to $79 adults and youths; $30 to $50 college students; Hancher Box Office, 1-(800) HANCHER, (319) 335-1160 or hancher.uiowa.edu/2021-22/The_Bands_Visit

Show’s website: thebandsvisitmusical.com/

Study guide: Learn more about the cultural connections, plot and characters at thebandsvisitmusical.com/The_Band%27s_Visit_Study_Guide.pdf

“Our company is this huge cross-cultural exchange of actors — American actors, Israeli actors, Arab American, Jewish American actors. We have some international cast as well,” he said. “And our musicians, our crew — we truly do come from all over. It’s a pretty wide representation of the cultural Middle Eastern diaspora, as well the American theater scene, and it’s always been that way. It’s been that way since Broadway.”

The show presents a different opportunity for the performers.

“As actors, we seek to portray characters, we seek to portray humans. We’re not interested in portraying identities or ethnicities or trying to represent cultures as a monolith and reduce the variety and diversity of the human experience,” he said.

“We’re seeking to do the opposite of reducing it. We’re seeking to blow it wide-open, so ‘The Band’s Visit’ is a really special opportunity for us, because the characters are unexceptional. The characters are very much people who come from our real world — they’re not exaggerated, they’re not caricatures.

“It’s not a show about conflicts, which typically defines stories and people’s perceptions about the Middle East. Its demographics and populations are incredibly diverse as any country, any state in this country, as well.

“The value lies in being given the opportunity to give a human element and the ability to display (that) the differences between us are so much less important than what makes us human and what makes us as a species similar.

“Those are those opportunities that we look forward to,” he said, “because we’re not asked to stoop to present something that is diminishing our humanity. When you have an opportunity to tell a story that is very specific, it allows audiences in, that you can change perceptions that people might have, but more than that, you may inspire someone who never saw themselves in this spot, doing what we do, which I certainly relate to.”

He hopes audiences will approach the show “with an open mind and are here to listen to a show that’s going to be unlike any musical they’ve ever seen, in the best possible sense, and they’ve got two nights to do it.”

Musical language

The music is key.

“The animating force in our show, and the reason for it being onstage, is the music,” he said. “The music is a language in the show that manages to cut through all of the miscommunication and the inability to express what’s deepest inside of us.”

Miscommunication between Joseph’s character, Egyptian trumpet player Haled, and an Israeli ticket agent in Tel Aviv lands the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra on a bus to the desert town of Bet Hatikva instead of the city of Petah Tikvah, where the group is to perform. (Bet Hatikva is fictional, Petah Tikvah is a real city east of Tel Aviv.)

The mistake is readily apparent when the band arrives in the isolated town and asks for directions to the local Arab cultural center. The song “Welcome to Nowhere” is the cafe staff’s reply.

Since another bus won’t arrive until the next day, cafe owner Dina offers the band members a meal and a place to stay overnight. This sets into motion a confluence of different cultures and the chance to discover and bridge their differences.

Haled has an advantage over the others.

“Haled is a young member of the band,” Joseph said. “He’s looking for one last night of pleasure in an otherwise sleepy environment, and I think he is one of the few people in the show who is not burdened by great emotional weight. He’ll talk to strangers. He’ll say yes, not no. He’s a flirt, he’s a sophisticate, he’s a trumpet player.”

And Joseph gets to play the trumpet onstage.

“Haled is a big fan of (jazz trumpeter) Chet Baker, so there’s a little bit of trumpet a la Chet Baker in the show,” Joseph said.

In the show’s study guide, Tony-winning composer and lyricist David Yazbek adds to that: “What we don’t realize until the moment he sings his big song (“Haled’s Song About Love”) is that he is the spiritual underpinning of the show. He understands what connects people in love and friendship and that’s what the song is about.”

The cast features an unusual mix of performers, Joseph pointed out.

“We have a unique company, in that it’s comprised of actors who are merely speaking roles, and then in addition to that, we have roles who both play instruments on stage and act as characters in the play itself. In addition to that, we have a pit band backstage,” he said. “So we have a unique interplay between the musicians, the actor/musicians and the actors. The band itself is featured toward the end of the show in a concert-style performance.

“But otherwise, it’s a sort of compartmentalized, and there are various combinations of the musicians that play together in both story moments and for the score itself.

“I think the most exciting part is that the score is never the same. There are pockets of improvisation, which keeps it really exciting not only for us as a company, but for the audience, too. Every night, the score is different,” Joseph noted.

Pandemic effect

Joseph’s time with the show has been different, as well.

He jumped from being hired as a swing to cover multiple roles toward the end of the show’s Broadway run, which closed April 7, 2019, to embarking on the first national tour, which opened June 25, 2019.

And then the pandemic hit, halting the tour until September 2021. Concerned for his father’s well-being, Joseph returned to his hometown of Detroit for nearly a year, where he “got a lot of sleep, rest and relaxation.”

“We were thinking how it’s been about two years since the day we stopped performances in Pittsburgh, Pa. At that time we were all getting in our elevators, getting our Ubers, saying, ‘Oh great, we’ll get a couple months off. We’ll be back at it in a month or two, once this all blows over.’ Little did we know,” he said.

And while this show marks his first Broadway road tour, he said in some ways, it feels like the second.

“Before COVID, it was just a very, very different experience,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you that COVID has utterly changed the face of these cities across America. Seeing it now in a very direct way is totally fascinating and kind of surreal.

“We’re wearing face masks up till we get up on the deck and step onstage. It’s a different process. Every single element and aspect of what we do has been transformed by COVID. And while that is relaxing now, the last year for us has been defined by that, and how it’s affected not only our show and the people that are associated with our show, but the audience.

“You see it in every city that we go to — the way that COVID has changed the city and the people in the city. It’s humbling,” he said.

Background

Growing up in Detroit, he caught the acting bug in high school, “due to my amazing sister,” he said. “And then it somehow just turned me into a whole different person in the best possible way.”

He studied theater in college, worked at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, and returned to Detroit to work in the independent theater scene.

“Then I decided if I’m going to take this risk and really go for this, I gotta make good on that promise,” he said, so in 2013, he ”moved to New York and didn’t look back, (with) a suitcase and a couple thousand bucks.”

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