In The Band’s Visit, eight members of a police band from Alexandria, Egypt, uniformed in powder blue, peer out from the Ethel Barrymore theater stage looking for their airport bus connection. As in the 2007 movie on which this delightful musical is based, through miscommunications, humorous language blips, the band ends up in the wrong place, in a small town in the Israeli desert and must spend the night. Following the motif of strangers coming to a place and changing it—and themselves-- forever, the play is a picture of diplomacy, with the band’s conductor Tewfiq (Tony Shalhoub) meeting Dina (Katrina Lenk), at the café where she works: “Welcome to Nowhere,” she sings, her ultimate perception of Arab men: Omar Shariff. Tewfiq could be a muted variation, once he takes off his hat.
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