ARTS&LIFE
MUSICAL THEATER

continued from page 45

46 | APRIL 7 • 2022 

the co-starring role of Dina 
as well as Joe Joseph as Haled, 
Clay Singer as Itzik and Joseph 
Grosso as Telephone Guy.

MEET THE PLAYWRIGHT
As the tour moves toward 
Detroit, playwright Itamar 
Moses, 44, moves into new 
projects while appreciating the 
friendship he established with 
Gabay, 74, because of their 
connections to Israel. Moses 
was born in America to parents 
from Israel.
“There turned out to be not 
many degrees of separation 
between people he knew in 
Israel and who my parents 
knew or were related to my 
family,
” said Moses, based in 
New York and married to a 
theatrical lighting designer. “We 
have forged a bond around the 
people we know.
” 
Another bond is an appre-
ciation of the music and lyrics 
written for The Band’s Visit by 
David Yazbek, a winner of Tony 
and Drama Desk awards with 
past productions including The 
Full Monty and Dirty Rotten 
Scoundrels.
Actor and playwright are 
especially drawn to a song 
at the end of the musical 
—“
Answer Me” —which 
expresses the feelings of a 
man waiting for a phone call 
from the woman he loves. The 
number musicalizes a person’s 
yearning to connect with some-
one else.
Away from work, both men 
are drawn to taking long walks 
and reading novels.
Moses, asked by the produc-
ing team to adapt the film for 
theater, is satisfied with the way 
the musical “feels more than 
the sum of its parts” and seems 
to have an overall effect that 
can’t be attributed to a specific 
element.

This will be the second time 
Moses has been chosen to han-
dle an adaptation. His first such 
project involved a novel, The 
Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan 
Lethem.
“Other than that, all my 
stage work has been original,
” 
said Moses, who explained 
that transitioning a novel was 
more fundamentally difficult. 
“
Although novels are another 
storytelling form, they’re not 
a dramatic storytelling form. 
They’re all about description 
and subjective experiences of 
the characters, and that’s very 
difficult to translate to a stage. 
“While The Band’s Visit as a 
movie is very different from 
the theater [version], it’s much 
closer, but if you’re doing an 
adaptation, you have to find 
yourself in it and what it is say-
ing to you.
”
Moses found his way into the 
storyline through his experi-
ences in Israel.
“I’ve been to the Middle East 
many times,
” he said. “I have 

a lot of relatives in the region, 
and there was something on 
the cultural level that spoke to 
me about the story. It felt like 
I understood the people in the 
story as part of my familial past. 
“On a more universal level, 
there are these universal human 
truths in the story that spoke 
to me. One of the things this 
show is about is that if you strip 
away external structures — 
governments, political ideolo-
gies — and boil things down to 
individual people, the divisions 
that seem so insurmountable 
dissolve.
”
Moses, the son of a psycho-
therapist mom and film pro-
fessor dad, became interested 
in theater during high school 
by watching plays and having 
friends immersed in theater 
programs. At Yale University, 
while majoring in the human-
ities, he participated in extra-
curricular theater activities and 
turned to writing.
In graduate school at New 
York University, he focused on 

writing. Outrage, about martyr-
dom and written to apply for 
graduate school, became his 
first-produced play performed 
by Portland Center Stage in 
Oregon. Other plays staged at 
regional theaters include Bach 
at Leipzig, Celebrity Row and 
Yellowjackets.
Scripting for television in 
a team environment has con-
nected him with TNT’s Men of 
a Certain Age, HBO’s Boardwalk 
Empire and WGN’s Outsiders. 
“I have had individual char-
acters with aspects of my own 
Jewishness or family history 
making their way into shows, 
sometimes more overtly and 
sometimes less,
” he said. 
“I also think there’s some-
thing very Jewish about the way 
that I write inherently even if 
there isn’t anything very Jewish 
about the characters. I’m the 
kind of writer who likes to give 
every character the best possi-
ble argument for [each one’s] 
point of view or the strongest 
possible position for what 
they’re arguing for.
“Since The Band’s Visit, there’s 
an uptick in the Jewish spec-
ificity in the work that I’m 
being offered and choosing 
to do myself. Even aside from 
the success of The Band’s Visit, 
there’s a byproduct of some-
thing that show triggered in 
me.
” 

Details 
The Band’s Visit 
runs April 19-May 
1 at the Fisher 
Theatre in Detroit. 
Tickets start 
at $35. Ticket 
purchasers 
will receive a 
Detroit Health 
& Safety 
Guide via 
email prior to 
performance. 
Ticketmaster.
com. (313) 
872-1000 
(ext. 0).
TOP: Janet Dacal 
and Sasson Gabay 
RIGHT: Clay Singer

