Pittsburgh native Mike Cefalo finds way home with ‘The Band’s Visit’
Pittsburgh is where Mike Cefalo grew up, and the Benedum Center is where he went to see the best of Broadway as it came through Pittsburgh. Now he’s returning for his hometown professional debut, and it’s in one of the best.
He arrives this week with the national tour of “The Band’s Visit” — the most acclaimed Broadway play of the decade after “Hamilton” — as Telephone Guy. It’s a role that earned a supporting actor Tony Award for Adam Kantor, one of 10 won by the subtle sultry show, with a spirit that reflects the 2007 that inspired it.
“It’s like the indie-film Broadway musical,” is how he describes the 90-minute show that New York critics raved about as “ravishing” and “romantic.”
Gushed Ben Brantley of The New York Times: “With songs by David Yazbek and a script by Itamar Moses, ‘The Band’s Visit’ is a Broadway rarity seldom found these days outside of the canon of Stephen Sondheim: an honest-to-God musical for grown-ups. [The show] flows with the grave and joyful insistence of life itself.”
The tour stars Chilina Kennedy (“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” on Broadway) and Sasson Gabay, the original band leader from the indie film that inspired the musical.
Mr. Cefalo is the Pittsburgh kid in the cast. He boasts many regional gigs since graduating Baldwin
Wallace University in Berea, Ohio, in 2017. He doesn’t have any local credits — unless you count North Allegheny High School and Vincentian Academy musicals — but he includes his hometown in his program bio. It begins, “Originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania ...”
He lives in New York these days, but his cellphone has a 412 area code. You can take the kid out of Pittsburgh ...
“To come full circle and make my professional debut at the Benedum, where I grew up seeing shows, is insane,” Mr. Cefalo said by phone during a February tour stop.
If his name sounds familiar, that’s probably because you’ve heard of Cefalo’s Banquet and Event Center in Carnegie.
“That’s my uncle,” says Mr. Cefalo, an only child who comes from a “giant” family.
“I hope that Pittsburgh audiences get a chance to see [the show], if my family doesn’t buy out the entire Benedum Center, which is very likely.”
Many of them came to see him when the tour opened at the Kennedy Center, but “it will be a different ballgame” coming home for the tour, which opens Tuesday. While he’s here, he will be staying “in my home, sleeping in my bed.”
After attending St. Teresa of Avila in Ross from kindergarten through eighth grade, and then Vincentian Academy in McCandless his freshman year of high school, Mr. Cefalo switched to North Allegheny, attracted by the district’s music program.
“I immediately joined choir and did the school musical every year,” he said. “The production quality there is insane, so it felt like a professional theater, truly, and it made me realize I wanted to do this, and could do this, as a career.”
He earned a degree in musical theater at Baldwin Wallace and moved to New York as soon as he graduated, working at regional theaters before landing “The Band’s
Visit” tour.
He did try out for Pittsburgh CLO a few times, “but it wasn’t the right kind of fit,” he said. “I made it through their final callbacks every single year, but I’m not much of an ensemblist, and that is truly what they are looking for in college kids.”
He saw “The Band’s Visit” when he was a senior in college and was so enamored with it that he kept returning. “It blew me away every single time I saw it, and when I got the audition, I was, like [he claps], ‘Let’s make this happen.’”
Mr. Cefalo had callbacks for both the tour and replacements for the Broadway production, but the latter closed in April 2019 before that could happen.
The musical takes place in 1996, when the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra of Egypt is headed by bus for a performance at a cultural center in Petah Tikvah, Israel. Through a misunderstanding, they are instead sold tickets to Bet Hatikva, a sleepy desert town where the bus comes once a day. Once they realize the mistake, they are already stranded overnight. The denizens of Bet Hatikva take them in, led by the charismatic Dina (Ms. Kennedy), owner of the town’s cafe.
The lovelorn character of Telephone Guy is a romantic who waits day and night at a pay phone, willing his girlfriend to call him.
The character is not just an odd guy in a sleepy town. He represents a hopefulness that others have lost in the desert heat.
“Everyone does check in on him,” Mr. Cefalo noted, “and every time Dina checks in and asks, ‘Has she called yet?’ she makes an impulsive decision to drive her life in a different direction. We talked about that in rehearsals, so it was interesting, that balance of me saying the exact same thing, and as soon as she sees me, she decides to make a change and try something new.
“When the show finishes and you think back on it, it makes a lot of sense why he’s there. All these characters are longing for something and have kind of given up hope. But he’s the one guy in town who is still actively hoping for something and is the only one being optimistic, albeit in a very strange, David Lynch kind of way. It’s bizarre, but it works.”
Mr. Cefalo got the role by winning over the creative team with, among other things, his talent for dialects.
“I think that was much to my advantage during the audition process,” he said. “This show has its own very distinct vibe when it comes to the storytelling, and I picked up the Hebrew pronunciations really easily when I was auditioning, so I think they knew they wanted me.”
He figures he sang “Answer Me” — Telephone Guy’s big number — a trillion times for the creative team.
Now he’s singing for his family and a distinctly Pittsburgh audience, and he can hardly contain his enthusiasm for the little musical that could.
When “The Band’s Visit” won all those Tony Awards, it was competing against more traditional musicals with the kind of pop sound and bells and whistles seen in “SpongeBob the Musical” and “Mean Girls.”
Mr. Yazbek’s award-winning score reflects a gentler, mesmerizing deep dive into Middle Eastern tunes.
“If you’re on the fence for any reason, take the leap, come see the show,” Mr. Cefalo said. “It’s 90 minutes, no intermission, you’re in and out quickly — and it will hit you like a train.”