Building a new world is just as difficult, maybe even more so, as tearing down an old one. Just ask the Arab Spring revolutionaries of “We Live in Cairo,” whose solidarity fractures after they get what they were fighting for.
The brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour’s show, which opened on Sunday at New York Theater Workshop, is divided into a before and after, with intermission sitting neatly in the middle: The leadup to the violent protests of January and February 2011, which prompted the resignation of the autocratic Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, followed by the buildup of bitterness and strife. But while passions supposedly run high, the temperature of this new musical — which at best and at worst feels like “Rent” on the barricades — almost never rises above tepid.
Like Mark Cohen, the aspiring filmmaker in “Rent,” Layla (Nadina Hassan), a photographer, takes on the responsibility of documenting the action, in this case the resistance of a handful of young Cairenes fighting government oppression.
Layla meets them through her boyfriend, Amir (Ali Louis Bourzgui, the lead in the recent revival of “The Who’s Tommy”). The group’s firebrand, Fadwa (Rotana Tarabzouni), who comes from an activist family, landed in jail for criticizing Mubarak on Facebook. Its levelheaded pillar is Amir’s brother, Hany (Michael Khalid Karadsheh), who wants to attend law school in New York, and its party-loving jester is Fadwa’s wealthy cousin, Karim (John El-Jor), an artist who spray-paints caricatures of the country’s leaders.
Those murals connect to some of the brightest elements of Taibi Magar’s production — the physical ones. Tilly Grimes’s set, with carpets in red tones and a place for the band at the back of the stage, has a lived-in quality that suggests the warmth of the friends’ relationship as well as the feeling of relative safety that prevails at their hangout. David Bengali’s video design does the heavy lifting when the outside world intrudes, and includes illustrations by the Egyptian artist Ganzeer that represent Karim’s work alongside projected news images, some of them appropriately brutal. (Raphael Mishler designed the papier-mâché head of Mubarak that Karim wears when we meet him.)
Unfortunately, design alone does not a musical make, and piddly details like book and score must be taken into account. There is no questioning the Lazours’ passion for the project, which has been in the works for a decade and premiered at American Repertory Theater, in Massachusetts, in 2019 — the album “Flap My Wings (Songs from We Live in Cairo)” was recorded remotely with various singers the following year. But the characters are never convincingly defined, except for Fadwa, who also benefits from Tarabzouni’s fiery performance.
What goes through Layla’s head, for example? At first she tells Amir that she’s “just not political,” then she comes around — why? — and starts documenting the history they are making. That Layla is in an interfaith relationship with Amir, a Coptic Christian, is mentioned but not explored, which feels like a missed opportunity. The same is true of the character of Hassan (Drew Elhamalawy), a newcomer to the group, torn by his desire for change, his loyalty to the Muslim Brotherhood and his friendship with Karim (who pines for a more intimate connection).
How the personal and the political, the ideals and compromises collide is a thorny subject because it reveals people’s often contradictory, less than noble impulses. Which is why “We Live in Cairo” is the rare musical that gets better after intermission; Act II is when the Lazours finally allow their characters to be uncomfortable, imperfect and complicated.
Take Amir, for example. After spending much of Act I trying to write a great song, he finally strums the result, “Tahrir Is Now,” at the protests — and spends Act II struggling to come up with a worthy follow-up. Amir seems more driven by his music than by either a stable life or politics, which puts him at odds with his brother, Layla and Fadwa. That solipsism makes him flawed, thus interesting, but the show does not allow him to be anything other than a sensitive heartthrob.
This fuzziness is mirrored in the score, which sounds like 1990s soft rock filtered through agit-pop (at one point I was reminded of the classic protest song “The People United Will Never Be Defeated,” which was among the chants picked up by the real-life Egyptian protesters) and an earnest musical-theater sensibility, with Hassan’s Layla as the designated belter. This all works better when it comes to the lyrics — I certainly won’t forget Karim rhyming “Dior” and “war” in the number “The Benevolent Regime of King Farouk II” — than to the music. The compositions, with Middle Eastern-infused orchestrations by Daniel Lazour and Michael Starobin, certainly have a polished sheen, like the production as a whole. But is that really what we need from a story about revolution and its morning after?
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