Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – The Lazours’ new musical WE LIVE IN CAIRO is an unsteady ode to “Rent” and Arab Spring revolutionaries

• By drediman
• November 3, 2024
• No Comments

This fall’s offering at New York Theatre Workshop is the new musical We Live in Cairo, which arrives Off-Broadway after having been previously programmed at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge in 2019. Written by the Lebanese-American brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour, the long-in-gestation Cairo-set musical follows a group of artists-cum-activists leading up to and during the Arab Spring protests of 2011, as well as the fallout from the high of the revolution.

As much as the musical commemorates the efforts of Egyptian revolutionaries, it’s also just as much of an ode — albeit, an unsteady one — to Jonathan Larson’s Rent. Indeed, it’s no secret that the Lazours — winners, unsurprisingly, of the Jonathan Larson Grant — are clear devotees of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1996 musical. There are strong parallels between We Live in Cairo and Rent in terms of structure, character, and narrative arc. There’s also an unruly quality that courses through both works (the Lazours’ musical is even playing in the same Off-Broadway theater that catapulted Larson’s musical into the stratosphere). Unfortunately, while its intentions are firmly in the right place, We Live in Cairo is a muddled piece of musical theater storytelling that often feels more haphazard than it does a robust, explosive tapestry. Although there’s undeniable exhilaration in the sequences leading up to the 2011 revolution, its aftermath (pretty much all of the second act) is a bit anti-climactic — a hodgepodge of jumbled, half-baked character motivations that ultimately make for labored theater.

Thankfully, Taibi Magar’s exciting, atmospheric direction and the cast’s set of forceful, mostly authentic performances — the charismatic Ali Louis Bourzgui (who made such a distinctive impression in the title role of last season’s Broadway revival of The Who’s Tommy) in particular is a star-in-the-making — that go a long way in covering the flaws and holes of the material, as so do the aromatic and vivid musical stylings of the onstage band, which beautifully help to establish the work’s mood and specificity.

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WE LIVE IN CAIRO
Off-Broadway, Musical
New York Theatre Workshop
2 hours, 30 minutes (with one intermission)
Through November 24