‘Night Side Songs’ Explores Illness and Suffering With Communal Singing

You have to give the Lazours, the siblings who wrote the music, lyrics, and book for “Night Side Songs,” points for originality: Never before, at least to my knowledge, has a musical used audience singalongs to help document a battle with cancer.Brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour, who earned acclaim a couple of years ago with “We Live in Cairo,” an account of young activists in Egypt during the Arab Spring, developed “Songs” with Taibi Magar, an Obie Award-winning director who also helmed “Cairo.” For their latest musical, the collaborators have sought a more immersive vibe: Before the production begins, smiling actors hand out songbooks to audience members, who sit at or close to stage level in this New York premiere.The pamphlets contain lyrics for several musical numbers we’ll be invited to take part in, with the players guiding us. On the final page, there’s a quote attributed to Susan Sontag, which reads in part: “Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”These words, which inspired the show, are also spoken as it opens. At a recent preview, they elicited the predictable enthusiasm: Nothing wins an off-Broadway audience’s approval more reliably than a nod to a celebrated intellectual. Happily, “Songs” does not get mired in preciousness, and the musical wields its earnestness pretty lightly, with a warmth and humor that are well served by Ms. Magar’s accomplished cast. Brooke Ishibashi turns in a charming, moving performance as Yasmine, our heroine; the show will follow her from the present through 2035, though Matt Saunders’s virtually bare scenic design suggests her story could be unfolding any time.The musical is divided into segments, announced by the actors, who juggle several roles. The first part is a conversation between Yasmine and her boisterously devoted mother, Desirée, played here with an exaggerated New York accent and predictable buoyancy by Mary Testa, a beloved theater mainstay. Part Two is titled “Yasmine’s Diagnosis.”The C-word is used only once in “Songs,” in reference to a hospital department. Leukemia comes up a few times, often in conversations not directly related to Yasmine, along with other serious diseases—one song, “The Reason,” charts gossip sessions detailing various health crises—and ominous-sounding drugs are mentioned, prominent among them procarbazine, which I promptly Googled after the performance. (It’s a chemotherapy medication.)But a press release for the production stresses that the musical’s creators had something broader in mind. “Songs,” it explains, “is about the small human connections that make up the vast tapestry of our lives,” and the show “brings us together to explore how song heals us and empowers our spirits.”The singalongs are obviously meant to be part of that exploration, though the shy and musically challenged will be relieved to know there’s no coercion to participate, only gentle encouragement. The folky ballads that dominate the Lazours’ score — played primarily on piano and guitar under the music direction of Alex Bechtel, who also provided lean, fetching arrangements — can be quite touching, though a few lapse into twee territory.Highlights include the lush, aching “Miracle Song,” delivered by Robin de Jesús, an alumnus of numerous Broadway musicals who is poignant in roles ranging from a sympathetic doctor to the mother of a young cancer patient. Kris Saint-Louis, who also plays guitar, blends sweetness and spice as a troubadour and a male nurse, and Jonathan Raviv is tremendously endearing as a dorky professor who plays a key role in Yasmine’s journey.We pretty much know from the start how that journey will end. “For those who have been there, I don’t have to tell you: It gets very messy,” Ms. Ishibashi says, assuming more of a narrative voice. Yet “Night Side Songs” ends on an uplifting note, envisioning a contented Yasmine “on the balcony of a giant ship sailing out of a harbor.” I’m sure Sontag would have appreciated the metaphor.

‘Night Side Songs’ Explores Illness and Suffering With Communal Singing

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