Triumphs in musical theater come in many sizes. In “The Band’s Visit,” wonderfully inhabiting the Segerstrom Center for the Arts for the next couple weeks, excellence arrives in the form of atmospheric and exotic intimacy.
Where musicals mostly announce and sustain themselves with propulsion and energy, this is a tiny tale of what happens when the small Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra catches the wrong bus and is marooned overnight in a lonely Israeli desert town.
As a projected preamble modestly, and deceptively, informs us at the show’s start: “You probably didn’t hear about it. It’s not very important.”
The 2018 Tony Awards begged to disagree. This single-act show, adapted from a non-musical 2007 Israeli movie, swept 10 Tonys, including best musical, best director and — this is very important — best original score.
We’ll get to the performance virtues on the Costa Mesa stage, but the heart and soul of this work, which beats with plenty of each, is the intoxicating swirl of David Yazbek’s entrancing arrangements and alternately searching and sly lyrics.
Yazbek is a musical Broadway songwriting shape-shifter, having contributed to in the past, in a wide variety of styles, “The Full Monty,” “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” and “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” But those comparatively mainstream works didn’t hint at his achievements here.
The composer’s own lineage might be part of this show’s secret sauce. Though he grew up in Manhattan, Yazbek’s father is Arab and his mother half Jewish.
In younger years he spent time in the Middle East, becoming familiar with some of the unfamiliar, to our ears, instruments encountered here, including the darbouka,) an upright drum that resembles a goblet and the tambourine-like riq, as well as the expressive, short-necked oud, a stringed instrument minus frets.
Wedded together with familiar instruments like keyboards, violin and cellos, “The Band’s Visit” is a compelling swirl of numbers that propel the mildly episodic storyline. There are also brief interludes of live instrumentation in the later parts of the show that provide connective tissue among scenes and amplify the compelling, yearning themes.
While very much an ensemble piece, three characters come to the fore and the actors in those roles make the most of them.
The principal lead is Dina, the town’s cynical, blunt café mistress by day. Come evening, when she literally lets her down her hair, she’s a desert sabra, that term describing native Israelis named for the emotionally prickly pear cactus concealing an inner, welcoming tenderness.
Playing her here, actress Janet Dacal is both vinegar and vulnerable. She also gets Yazbek’s most compelling earworm ballad, the soaring “Omar Sharif,” and her reading of it resonates far across the footlights.
In Tewfiq, the leader of the itinerant Egyptian band, this touring production is graced by the presence of Israeli-acting royalty in Sasson Gabay. A veteran actor of 40 years, Gabay filled the same role in the original 2007 film. Plus, for those lucky or astute enough to see the compelling Netfflix streamer “Shtisel,” about Orthodox Jewish life in modern-day Jerusalem, Gabay was bracing as the hard-bitten uncle.
In this work, his Tewfiq is like another kind of desert bloom, one slow to unfurl emotionally, but quietly impactful when his sad, defining truth emerges.
A third character named Haled, a member of the band with outsize musical ambitions and a desire to reach out to any female he trips across in the desert, is the straw stirring the plot through much of the show. He is played here with an engaging, sweet-lothario grin by Joe Joseph, who earned this role as an understudy in the original Broadway production.
A fear I had coming into this evening was how well the jewel that is “The Band’s Visit” might shine in a bigger venue like Segerstrom Hall. But at early points in the story’s telling — with less music and pauses in the pacing of dialogue to establish the work’s muted themes of longing and hope — I was relieved that the audience didn’t resort to coughing and throat-clearing to break up the silence, always a tell-tale sign of a disengaged crowd.
Instead, there was general quiet, punctuated at first by laughs at the wry, blunt verbal exchanges on stage and then falling under the spell of Yazbek’s extraordinary music.
A happy footnote: next in line at what is turning out to be a stellar Segerstrom Broadway season, is the criminally under-appreciated musical version of “Tootsie.”
The wildly different, but again quite enjoyable, pop-rock score for “Tootsie” is also from David Yazbek.
My whole-hearted advice would be to make like the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra and jump on the first bus available for this one, too.
‘The Band’s Visit’
Rating: 3 1/2 stars (out of 4)
When: Through April 3; 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m., Sundays
Where: Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa
Tickets: $26-$130
Information: 949-556-2787; www.scfta.org
COVID-19 protocols: Attendees are required to show proof of full vaccination and photo I.D. to enter the theater. Any ticket holders (including those under age 12) without proof of full vaccination must present a negative COVID-19 test (PCR taken within 48 hours or antigen taken within 6 hours) of the performance. At-home test results are not accepted. Regardless of vaccination status, masks must be worn inside the building.