Musical theatre (and film) in Arabic has a long and rich history. While the music hasn’t always survived, there is a long tradition of khayal al-dhill, or shadow-puppetry, and other performances by el-mohabbazeen, or street performers, who variously used music in their shows, although those were more straight theatre than musicals in the traditional sense.

In 1902, Salama Hijazi, a musician and theatre pioneer with his own company, attempted to present on stage a translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet without songs. The audience, knowing what a great singer and musician Hijazi was, would have none of it, and insisted he add musical numbers. This was only the continuation of a long theatre tradition where audiences expected music with their straight theatre. At this stage, singing in theatre was mostly in the Arabic style based on tarab, or singing for the pleasure of listening rather than serving the drama or advancing the plot. In fact, such songs interrupted rather than moved the action, especially given the tradition of itaala (extension) and i’aada (repetition).

However, this was bound to change at some point: the first Egyptian opera house, the Khedival Opera House, had opened its doors in 1869, and the Western style of musical composition must have gradually begun to trickle down to affect the music in the streets, played in hotels, bars, cabarets and nightclubs, of which Egypt had an innumerable number. A forgotten pioneer, unknown and under-documented, is Dawood Hosny, not to be confused with the movie director of that name. The missing link between Salama Hijazi and the immortal Sayed Darwish, he wrote operas that imitated Rossini’s (and, before him, Shakespeare’s) comedies of disguise and mistaken identity. It was with Dawood Hosny that sung dialogue, for the first time, began to deviate from the tarab tradition and take on the rhythm and cadence of speech, enabling musical theatre to verge on the dramatic for the first time in Arabic. Hosny wrote Shamshoon wa Dalilah (Samson and Delilah), believed to be the first Egyptian opera, and numerous other works such as Ma’rouf Al-Iskafi (Ma’rouf the Shoemaker), Sabah, Al-Brensissa (The Princess), Al-Ghandoura (The Vain Lady), and Al-Layali Al-Milah (Lovely Nights); he collaborated with various musicians and theatre pioneers such as Mounira Al-Mahdeyya, Naguib Al-Rihani, and Ali Al-Kassar. From this we can see that adaptations of foreign texts rubbed shoulders with purely organic Egyptian themes from the very inception of musical theatre.

No mention of musical theatre would be complete without Egyptian superstar “the People’s Musician” Sayed Darwish. Darwish pioneered the twentieth-century trend of, first, doing away with the itaala and i’ada that had impeded song advancing the drama in musical theatre, and secondly, using the Arabic music maqamat of hijaz, nahawand and ajam in his music, which brought it much closer to Western music and facilitated a gradual Western musical and lyrical influence on musical theatre. Most Rihani plays had songs by Darwish, and a great many songs still famous today are taken from his musicals, including Oom Ya Masri (Rise Up, Egyptian) from his musical drama Scheherazade, and Biladi Biladi, our national anthem. His most famous work is Al-‘Ashara Al-Tayyeba, with song lyrics by Badie’ Khairy (who wrote the best film scripts for Naguib Al-Rihani), first performed in 1921. He had already written and performed several musicals, including Al-Sheikh wa Banat Al-Kahraba (The Imam and the Girls from the Electric Company), first performed on 8 February 1917, and Khod Balak Ya Ustaz (Watch Out, Sir) on 26 February 1917, both staged at the now-defunct Globe Casino; he later wrote other musicals including Al-Tahouna Al-Hamraa (The Red Mill), first performed at the now-defunct Bosphorus Theatre on 14 December 1922.

Musical theatre continued after these pioneers, especially as the major theatre companies were still in operation. In fact, Badie’ Khairy has said in an interview that the first version of his 1968 mega-hit Al-Secretaire Al-Fanni (The Technical Secretary) flopped horribly when first introduced in 1931 because audiences were used to music and songs, while this play was straight theatre without any songs at all. That said, musical drama began a gradual process of migration to the silver screen, as we can see from the numerous movies starring Mohamed Abdul-Wahab, Farid Al-Atrache, Leila Murad, and innumerable others. Vaudeville and comic song were also still going strong at public venues. Abdel-Wahab attempted to write an Egyptian opera, Masra’ Cleopatra (The Death of Cleopatra), but abandoned the project with the untimely death of his prospective leading lady, Asmahan, in 1944.

In the 1960s, Baleegh Hamdi, Zakariya Ahmad, Mounira Al-Mahdeya, and others wrote musical theatre although it is not widely documented. Hamdi’s Oyoun Baheyya (Baheyya’s Eyes) was performed at the Balloon Theatre. Gamal Salama also produced musical theatre in the 1970s and 1980s, including writing the music for the well-known Inqilab (Coup d’Etat), starring Iman Al-Bahr Darwish and Nellie, and a translation of Romeo and Juliet. In the 1960s, Abdul-Rahman Al-Khamisi produced an Arabic translation of The Merry Widow – to my knowledge, the first time a European operetta was performed as-is with its original music and translated lyrics phrased and crafted to fit the musical phrases rather than the other way around. In 1969, Aziz Al-Shawan wrote an opera in the classical tradition with full orchestration entitled Anas Al-Wujoudd, recognised as a pioneering attempt and performed in regular rotation at the Cairo Opera House today.

More recently, contemporary composer Sherif Mohieddin and the late, great poet and lyricist Sayed Higab collaborated on a number of original Egyptian operas, including Talat Operat fi Sa’a, (Three Operas in an Hour), Miramar, and El Saqqa Mat (The Water Carrier Is Dead), all adapted from works by famous Egyptian authors. The Alexandria Library, under Mohieddin’s artistic direction, also put on Egyptian Arabic translations of Schikaneder/Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Weill/Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, with lyrics by yours truly and Sayed Higab respectively. Which brings us to Fabrica, the independent musical theatre organisation founded by opera singer and voice teacher Neveen Allouba and staffed almost entirely by young singers, which has done solid work in this field. In addition to performing innumerable concerts featuring excerpts from foreign musicals, they have had significant artistic success in putting on the famous Egyptian operetta Al Leila Al-Kebira (lyrics by Salah Jaheen) and an Arabic translation of the famous musical Les Miserables (lyrics by yours truly). Most recently, in 2023, director and producer Ahmad Al-Bouhy presented Charlie, an original Egyptian musical about the life of Charlie Chaplin, with lyrics by Medhat Al-Adl.

***

Fabrica’s latest foray into musical theatre, translated from a Western text, is an Egyptian translation of Joe DiPietro/Jimmy Roberts’ 1996 off-Broadway musical I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change – rendered into Arabic as Ha-Hebak Zay Manta Law It-ghayart. This translation is the brainchild of Serag Mahmoud, who translated the text, and directed by Farida Islam and Youssef Basir, with recorded piano accompaniment but sung live. The summary of the show reads, “a comic representation of the joys and troubles of love and relationships,” which is as good a summary as any of the rich collection of unrelated, self-contained sketches, both acted and sung, which reflect the stages of heterosexual love from young people dating, through marriage, to love later in life. If it had a plot in the traditional sense, it would probably be boring; but what keeps it fresh is the disjointedness of the lively snapshots, and what keeps it coherent is the gradual arc from youth to old age.

The performance itself is clearly the brainchild of youth and enthusiasm, and in many aspects it takes on the unspoiled, refreshingly innocent spirit of a student performance. Youssef Bousir’s set, executed by Ahmad Ismail, is one of the show’s major sources of theatricality and a strong point of the performance in general, a surprisingly efficient and versatile collection of geometric steps that play out very creatively in various combinations to represent a couch in a house, tables at a café, a car (with the aid of a steering-wheel as a prop), seats in a studio, benches at a funeral, beds in a bedroom, equipment in a gym (with a water-bottle as a prop), a large dinner-table in a family home, and numerous other combinations that delight and engage to see what will come next. The professionalism of the stagehands and stage-manager (Shams Ihab) deserves special mention, performing these numerous and difficult changes in admirable silence and with great efficiency. The acting and singing are done with relish and again have the unbridled zest of a student performance: some notes are fluffed in the singing parts (almost unheard-of for Fabrica), but the acting parts are well-rehearsed, tight and full of comic flair; and the performers, despite their youth, never shy away from giving their all. Their palpable gusto can be felt in the auditorium and helps make up for any sense of inexperience that sometimes comes through.

Which brings us to the all-important question: How relevant is an off-Broadway text, on such a universal but at the same time highly culture-specific issue as love and marriage, with so many cultural differences, to Egyptian audiences? And is the effort of doing it in Arabic (a) successful and (b) worth it? Although another critic in the audience with me opined, not entirely inaccurately, that the source text has its weaknesses, and that an original work composed for an Egyptian audience might have packed more punch, I was surprised by how directly many of the concepts translated to an Egyptian context. Some could translate to an Egyptian family of any social stratum; others are more exclusive to the elites of the Fifth Settlement and other aristocratic locales. The first sketch, about dating, made my heart sink and led me to fear for the performance as a whole, being about profile pictures, sex on the first or second date, and other aspects of the marriage market that apply exclusively to young people of a certain class, not the vast majority. “This is going to be a foreign-coded performance that doesn’t relate and is culturally alienated,” I thought – despite, it must be noted, the brilliant effort made to localise the scene and present it in contemporary language that lessens the cultural alienation as much as possible. But moving on from that, it was positively astonishing how relatable the sketches were. The scene where a young couple announce they are breaking off their engagement to a wailing mother and father complete with an inquisitive aunt joining in on speakerphone could have been taken directly from any Egyptian household of the upper or lower middle class. (In severely traditional households and in the slums, there are different power structures within the family.) Similarly, the scene where a couple welcomes their new baby, except for the baby monitor, which remains alien to most middle-class Egyptians, is so poignant and human it hurts. Both scenes are impressively and deeply Egyptian in their vocabulary and phrasing, further breaking down cultural barriers.

As for the translation, the pillar of every such performance, I will go so far as to say that the acting scenes are flawless. Given the freedom to Egyptianise the sketches as much as possible while remaining faithful to the source, Serag Mahmoud produced wonderfully spontaneous-sounding dialogue that resonated with the predominantly youthful audience and had them shouting with laughter and engaging with the performance. The translation of the sung part, with its naturally stressed syllables, singable vowels, and rich Egyptian colloquial vocabulary, is absolutely exceptional in patches and in need of work in others, and I hope he will continue to refine it in future iterations of this performance, as it is worth perfecting. The translator also acts and sings in the show in many scenes, the most powerful of which is a delicately phrased, poignant sketch about an older couple finding love at a mutual friend’s funeral, played with old-world charm by Mahmoud alongside Christine Asham. Their understated connection is underscored by the brilliant use of old-fashioned place names and Egyptianised situations, and their song is one of the best translated (and sung) in the show, flowing so easily that one could easily imagine it having been written in Arabic. It was a perfect ending to a show that resonated with the audience, never failed to entertain and is well worth seeing.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 12 December, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly