A VISIT WITH
DAVID YAZBEK

The Band’s Visit swept through the Tony Awards like a cyclone, winning 10 of the 11 trophies for which it was nominated—notably Best Musical and Best Score. The music for this moving and sonically adventurous stage adaptation of the acclaimed 2007 Israeli film was penned by David Yazbek, who also crafted tunes and score for The Full Monty (multiple Tony nods, Drama Desk winner for music), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Tony and Drama Desk-nominated for score, music and lyrics) and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics’ Circle noms). He’s currently working on a musical adaptation of the Oscar-winning comedy Tootsie that will open on Broadway in the spring.

Yazbek (seen at left with our own Lenny Beer), a garrulous New Yorker for whom music has been an all-consuming, lifelong mission “probably from birth,” as he puts it, has an almost preternatural instinct for finding indelible characterization in song, and in each of his prior productions he was able to find a musical formula to mine the greatest emotional riches—and/or utter hilarity—from each key moment.

But with The Band’s Visit, it was a bit more personal.

The story of an Arab band in Israel to play a concert—and misdirected to a nowhere town where they find unexpected connection with the locals—was not his own choice to adapt for the stage, but when it was pitched to him he found it offered untold possibilities.

A self-described “mutt,” Yazbek cites both Arab and Jewish ancestry; his dad hailed from Lebanon and his mother’s heritage was eastern European and Italian. “I was really drawn to Arabic music when I was young,” he says. He found the rhythms and tonalities utterly compelling—though it would take decades before his infatuation with these sounds found full expression in his own work.

“The music of life—that’s what this play is,” he reflects. “There was a moment when I realized this entire show is a song. There are these quiet little moments when someone’s making coffee and just the sound of the spoon tapping on the cup—the whole thing feels like a piece of music.”

The way he describes it, his upbringing in an Upper West Side apartment building sounds like some Woody Allen-Stephen Sondheim hybrid, a bohemian jumble of opera singers, flamenco dancers and vocal coaches, while in the parks nearby, the polyrhythmic jams of Afro-Cuban musicians enticed his ears. His world thrummed with melody, harmony and groove.

Yazbek was inspired by the rock glory of the Beatles, Stones and Zeppelin and the unpredictable brilliance of Miles Davis as an adolescent; he was soon playing in bands and writing “really terrible songs.” Frustrated by the rote piano lessons he took as a kid, he decided to take “one or maybe two jazz lessons” at age 17. His instructor, Joy Kane, introduced him to some new chordal elements and he was, he says, “off to the races.”

He loved recording and began doing solo work, but thanks to a “wonky and weird” deal he went from what he thought would be a major-label release to a patchwork of international indies. He was discouraged by the recording-artist path but wanted to keep making music. A collaboration with XTC founder/leader Andy Partridge—whom Yazbek dubs “the only genius I’ve ever known”—gave him the gumption to continue. “Even when the record business wasn’t being very kind to me, or honest with me,” he recalls, “having Andy as an artistic moral support was really helpful.” (He reports that he’s eager to make a new solo record, about which we’ll keep you posted.)

At the time, Yazbek was getting steady work writing for TV, including Letterman, but he was yearning for something more. After the bumpy road of his early solo musical efforts, the stage turned out to be a more serendipitous path; his erstwhile bandmate, Adam Guettel (who wrote Floyd Collins and would go on to win a pair of Tonys for The Light in the Piazza), opened the door for him. “I was whining to him about touring and getting abused by club owners,” Yazbek remembers. “I wanted to write for musical theater, and he said, ‘You’ve got to jump in with both feet.’ I was like, ‘What the fuck?’” But a few months later, that precise opportunity arose after Guettel, who’d been offered The Full Monty, passed on it but recommended his friend.

Yazbek’s initial trepidation gave way to inspiration as he discussed the show with the director. “I started thinking, ‘I can develop these characters in song, and some of the issues they have are very similar to issues I’ve had—such as body issues.’ That’s when I realized I could really do something with this.”

“Music to me has always been the deepest metaphor for love, and when you’re talking about love you’re really talking about God,” he says. “This connection—with God, with other human beings—is all encompassed by music.”

His deep musical background and TV comedy writing chops combined to make him a natural as both composer and lyricist. Monty was an award-winning hit, and Scoundrels—which he saw as a unique chance to balance his highbrow and lowbrow tendencies, summed up as roughly “Noel Coward meets Adam Sandler”—followed suit.

He stretched into new territory with Women on the Verge—a ballsy adaptation of Pedro Almodovar’s iconic comedy—which initially faltered on Broadway but became a London hit and then returned triumphantly to the Great White Way. The show enabled him to tease out the North African musical strains in Spanish music, which in some ways provided the germ for his full-scale Arab-music explorations in The Band’s Visit.

But the stylistic specifics aside, the music in the latter show is a distillation of David Yazbek’s lifelong philosophy.

“Music to me has always been the deepest metaphor for love, and when you’re talking about love you’re really talking about God,” he says. “This connection—with God, with other human beings—is all encompassed by music.”