Broadway’s Comic Chameleon Writes a Heartfelt New Tune

That, too, was wrong. Mr. Yazbek doesn’t smoke.

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It’s a musical chameleon’s curse, and maybe his protection, that people don’t have any idea, sonically or otherwise, who he really is. Those familiar with Mr. Yazbek as Broadway’s go-to songwriter for comedy film adaptations probably haven’t heard his solo work as frontman for a series of rock bands with names like Coke Machine, Moon Pudding, Barn and His Warmest Regards.

And vice versa: Those who groove to his sulfurous, often cheerfully pessimistic albums, with songs like “Monkey Baby Hanging on a Chicken Wire” and “Ultrasad,” would probably be surprised by brassy show tunes like “Here I Am” and unironic ballads like “Breeze Off the River.”

Which is why it’s understandable that the talk around Broadway about Mr. Yazbek and “The Band’s Visit,” which opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Nov. 9 in a production directed by Mr. Cromer, is so wrong.

This delicate, contemplative and thoroughly gorgeous musical, first seen last winter at the Atlantic Theater Company, does not represent, as some say, Mr. Yazbek’s unlikeliest disguise to date. Quite the opposite. “The Band’s Visit” is the truest version of him Broadway has yet heard, or is ever likely to.

“All my life I’ve written songs, right?” he half-asks, half-demands, lying like an analysand on a couch in the studio he built a few yards from his house in Rockland County. Unlike most people in analysis, though, he noodles gently on a bass as he speaks.

“I’ve made five albums that have nothing to do with musical theater,” he continues. “And, like most singer-songwriters, my motive for writing them was to tell people what I was thinking and feeling. That usually has to do with human connection and death, in a good way: How life is ennobled by the fact of death, and is deeper than what we run around frittering about all day.”

He pauses and plinks. “But unlike my other shows, in which I had a real but superficial connection to the characters’ issues, almost every song in ‘The Band’s Visit’ gives me the feeling that I’ve expressed something I feel deeply about.”

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If that’s a tall order for a musical, “The Band’s Visit” is unusually ambitious, its many comic moments woven like countermelodies into a story of “human beings crying from the heart in joy or pain,” as Mr. Yazbek puts it.

With a book by Itamar Moses, based on the screenplay by Eran Kolirin, it concerns a ragtag Egyptian police orchestra that gets stranded in the wrong Israeli town en route to a gig at an Arab cultural center. Instead of exciting Petah Tikvah, with a ‘P,’ they wind up in a stultifying Negev outpost called Bet Hatkivah, with a ‘B’ — “like in basically bleak and beige and blah blah blah,” as one of Mr. Yazbek’s dead-on lyrics puts it.

The theme is miscommunication, including the romantic kind: the terrible gap between what we feel and what we say. In “The Band’s Visit,” the only cure is music, and yet it isn’t enough.

The Egyptians and the Israelis reach out to one another on waves of melody, from ethereal Arab song to thumping klezmer. Two in particular — the band’s leader, Tewfiq (Tony Shalhoub), and Dina, who houses him (Katrina Lenk) — nearly find a common language. But even they eventually have to acknowledge the emptiness, if perhaps a slightly less empty emptiness, that seeps back when melody passes.

This theme and setting made “The Band’s Visit” a natural playground for Mr. Yazbek, who grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with a Maronite Arab father and a half Jewish, half Italian mother. For a song about the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, he could call on his own memory of her voice on the radio in a cab while visiting his grandfather in Lebanon. To shape the score’s swirling contours, he did not have to study Middle Eastern scales or Egyptian instrumentation; he was already handy on darbouka (a goblet-shaped drum) and oud (a short-necked lyre). He was also in a good position to translate what he calls “the sound of Israeli sarcasm.”

But he had a surfeit of other sounds as well. Growing up surrounded by every kind of music — “Kiss Me, Kate” and Miles Davis on the stereo, the polyrhythms of congas in Central Park — he developed an early and eclectic ear. He started his first band, whose name cannot be published here, when he was 12; played gigs for a thousand students at college block parties; landed a solo recording contract at 28.

Another lifetime later, at 57, though married (to Elizabeth Doberneck, a meditation teacher) and with a son, Omar, in college, Mr. Yazbek retains the slightly hassled aura of a man who has almost made peace with his work — or, maybe more accurately, a man who remakes that peace every day. (He, too, meditates.)

This is a vast improvement over the person who seemed to be jumping out of his skin when I first encountered him in the “Full Monty” era. Back then, he seemed embarrassed that, of all the roads open to him, he’d found his biggest success on the one that led to Broadway, with its corny philosophies and unprovoked belting.

Among the roads less taken was comedy. Directly out of Brown, he wrote for David Letterman, part of a “Late Show” team that won an Emmy Award in 1984. (His favorite bit was called “The Most Dangerous Game,” in which a pack of bloodhounds searched 30 Rock for the announcer Bill Wendell.) And his career as a solo musical artist never took off the way he had planned — though that was, he says, his own fault.

“I made my own bed when I decided not to tour all the time,” he explains. “There were guys like Ben Folds and Dave Matthews who started off at the same time, doing what I should have done: get in a van with a baby grand, go up and down the East Coast circuit and make a subsistence living while developing a fan base. But if I doomed myself by staying home, it turns out it was a great doom. Now all those guys are sick of touring and want to write musicals.”

Even so, for a long time the regret was easily read on his face. The “man-dudes” in his poker game, hoping to annoy him into making mistakes, insisted on calling him “Broadway’s David Yazbek.”

That taunt would have been incomprehensible during the so-called Golden Age of musicals. Loesser, Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim, three of Mr. Yazbek’s idols, could aspire to nothing higher than Broadway success — though Mr. Sondheim, coming at the end of the line, eventually grew so disheartened that he threatened to give up musicals for murder mysteries or video games.

It’s worth noting that what toppled theater music from its position as the prime engine of popular culture was the same trend that Mr. Yazbek was hoping to ride: the rise of the rock singer-songwriter. Mr. Yazbek has played both sides of the fence, bringing to each discipline the skills and, well, the discipline of the other.

Thanks to rock, he writes musical theater lyrics that arise from their stories at unexpected angles and with a looser diction than most of the classics. The rhymes in “The Band’s Visit” are accurate enough to get laughs (awful/falafel; marrow/Pharaoh) but not obsessively mitered. Thanks to musical theater, his rock songs are tighter and better structured than almost anyone’s.

And after decades in which critics openly prayed for a savior to resuscitate theater music with the primal energies of pop, perhaps we can now see that Mr. Yazbek has been doing it, insufficiently heralded, for years. (He received Tony Award nominations for all three of his previous Broadway scores, but has never won.) In the shadow of “The Producers,” “The Full Monty” was a marginal hit; “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” recouped only on the road. “Women on the Verge,” through no fault of Mr. Yazbek’s, was a major flop (though a revised version met with more success in London). Even “The Band’s Visit,” despite its Off Broadway raves, is nobody’s idea of a sure thing.

Mr. Yazbek would, of course, love a hit, but his pleasure in the work itself acts as a kind of professional prophylaxis. He has nearly completed the score for a musical version of the 1982 hit film “Tootsie” — as flat-out a musical comedy as you could imagine — and is working on the lyrics to Henry Krieger’s music for a show about the evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker. The luxury of writing only what he wants, while recording the occasional solo album, is enough, he says, to “service my pretensions.”

Servicing his spiritual aspirations is a different matter. This used to require performing in public: “The connection you make while sharing in the creation of music with other people in real time,” he says, “is the closest metaphor for the actual connection that every sentient being has, way beneath the surface, at the root of truth.”

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Now, he says, he can achieve that connection without so much performing. Still, after certain performances, when company members gather outside the Barrymore or beneath its stage for a jam session of Arabic music, Mr. Yazbek sometimes joins in. On a recent evening, after a two-show day, he grabbed a spare drum from the darbouka player Ossama Farouk, while George Abud, who plays Camal in the musical, improvised on his oud, with Ms. Lenk on violin. They fed one another melodies like canapés.

A few rugs and lanterns could not disguise the grimness of what was actually the musicians’ locker room, with costume racks pressing in. But as the four worked through “El Hayah Helwa” (“Life Is Beautiful”) by Farid al-Atrash, and an Umm Kulthum song called “Awedt Ainy,” which Mr. Abud translated as “I’m Addicted to You,” all the discomforts disappeared.

And so, after a while, with a huge smile, did Mr. Yazbek. He got what he wanted, and was gone.

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