At the Israeli border, there's a mix-up: a band visiting from Egypt is scheduled to play in Petah Tikvah, a populous city near Tel Aviv. Instead, the members arrive in Bet Hatikva — it sounds similar, but is spelled with a "B" and it's in the desert.
"Welcome to nowhere," says Dina (Katrina Lenk), the owner of a small cafe. She offers to put some of the men up and find rooms for the others, since their nothing town has no hotel.
Egyptians. Israelis. A small town that rarely sees strangers — you might expect that all of this would lead to hostility and political fireworks. But that's not what happens.
Instead, David Yazbek's delicate musical focuses on small moments of kindness and understanding between strangers and how the experience opens the Israelis up to dreams they had long ago set aside.
A stranger changing a small town is a theater and film trope, certainly, and except for one notable exception (the band leader, played by Tony Shalhoub), we never learn much about the Egyptians. But director David Cromer uses actors standing alone on a wide stage to emphasize these characters' deep loneliness. One waits in the dark, staring at a brightly-lit pay phone in the hope that his girlfriend might call.
It's Yazbek's lovely score, though, that makes this Off-Broadway transfer captivating and carries it through the occasional aimless scene. He uses the complex rhythms of Middle Eastern music (much of it played by onstage actor/musicians) to explore the equally complicated, subterranean feelings of people who love their families and their friends, but still long for something else. And his lyrics are poetry: Dina, when singing about the Egyptian movies she watched with her mother as a child, says they "floated in on a jasmine wind from the west, from the south/honey in my ears, spice in my mouth."
The other winning thing about this show is that it doesn't go where you expect it to. There's no easy resolution, just an acknowledgement that whatever people think they might want, what they need is connection.
Book by Itamar Moses, music & lyrics by David Yazbek, directed by David Cromer.
At the Barrymore Theatre; open run.