'The Band's Visit' — a smashing SpeakEasy-Huntington coproduction

Music and memory often go hand in hand. Whether learning something new, falling in love or healing from heartbreak, the soundtrack of one's life is enduring. This is true for everyone involved in Itamar Moses' illuminating and thoroughly engaging musical "The Band's Visit," at the Huntington Theatre Company in a co-production with SpeakEasy Stage Company through Dec. 17.

Music's endurance is essential to the characters in this narrative, which explores its power to shape lives, spark connections and bridge differences when an Egyptian band becomes stranded in a sleepy Israeli town due to a mix-up. The weary travelers stay with local families and find that despite dissimilar cultures and language barriers, they have more in common than they thought.

Over the years, I've watched and enjoyed many musicals that are chock-a-block with prominent voices and performances, but "The Band's Visit" — based on the 2007 Eran Kolirin film of the same name — employs a different approach. The voices are still remarkable and the show folds in David Yazbek's wonderfully tender tunes with beautiful harmonies under the musical direction of José Delgado seamlessly. But the story also takes its time with dialogue, which makes it flow more smoothly.

There’s a multicultural aspect to the music, particularly as rendered by the onstage band.  While growing up in Albania, according to the program, percussionist Herdie Xha played along to whatever cassette tapes he could find, guitar player Mac Ritchey was led to play the oud after hearing Peter Gabriel's album "Passion," and percussionist Fabio Pirozzolo's first instrument was the traditional tambourine, or the tamburello, the soul of Southern Italian folk music.

With artfully-paced direction from SpeakEasy artistic director Paul Daigneault, the show boasts an excellent cast led by Jennifer Apple as café owner Dina, whose love life has left a sour taste in her mouth. Dina, whose marriage didn’t work out, is having a tryst with a wedded man but seems to be falling in love with Tewfiq (Brian Thomas Abraham), the respectful conductor of the visiting band.

Local actors Marianna Bassham and Jared Troilo shine as a husband and wife (Iris and Itzik) struggling to keep their love alive. But music is the biggest star here, threading the characters' experiences together. Iris' father tells some visiting band members about finding his wife while playing Gershwin's "Summertime" (which they all sing together tableside); Dina and  Tewfiq sing a lovely duet;  and Troilo's Itzik and Andrew Mayer's (Camal) gorgeous timbre combine for a memorable lullaby. There's a skating rink scene where Papi's (a vocally gifted Jesse Garlick) awkwardness threatens to ruin a date until one of the visiting bandmembers helps during a wonderfully rendered "Papi Hears the Ocean," and Noah Kieserman's character "telephone guy" sings "Answer Me," with beauty and longing.

The band members — both onstage and in an upstage hidden room ­— deliver performances of Yazbek's music with orchestrations by Jamsheid Sharifi and arrangements by Andrea Grody with vibrancy throughout the show, leading to a rousing finale.

Moses takes an ordinary night and turns it into something exemplary through characters who are willing to be vulnerable with strangers. Its altruistic striving can feel simultaneously hopeful and unattainable while the world's wars — from Sudan to the Ukraine and the Middle East — rage on. Still, the idea of finding commonality is, and always will be, alluring, particularly when that commonality is as powerfully rendered as it is in “The Band’s Visit.”

"The Band's Visit," a co-production by SpeakEasy Stage Company and the Huntington Theatre Company, runs through Dec. 17, at the Huntington’s mainstage theater.