It was a gray New York City afternoon, weeks ahead of the 2024 U.S. election. But on the third floor of New York Theatre Workshop, we were sitting in an arts center in 2011 Cairo in the aftermath of a revolution. The lights were off and the room was lit by a single shaft of sun from a skylight. Red and orange embroidered poufs and woven cushions were scattered over the hard rehearsal floor, along with an oud, a doumbek, hand drums, and a giant papier-mâché caricature head of Hosni Mubarak.
A young, entirely Arab American cast was huddled, along with Egyptian American director Taibi Magar, around a laptop at the center of the room, watching YouTube footage of an Algerian man dancing at the height of the Arab Spring.
“Feedback? What do you see?” Magar asked of the room. She started by giving an answer of her own: “This weird energy is packaged inside something bright, but underneath is this whole other subtext.”
“Yeah, why does he sing this bright song in this moment?” actor John El-Jor wondered, now referring not just to the Algerian man on the video but to his character, Karim, the charming, witty, and wounded queer scion of a wealthy family, who leads the number the cast are about to rehearse, “(The Benevolent Regime of) King Farouk II.” The song begins as a playful political satire of Western puppet dictators but eventually veers into frustration, longing, and grief to match the simmering tension between the characters in the room.
El-Jor sang the number a few times—running, jumping, climbing on a table—as he, Magar, and the cast kept trying to pinpoint the moment when Karim’s song transitions from a joyful, clever distraction to an expression of rage. And then love.
This has been one of the persistent dilemmas at the heart of creating We Live in Cairo, a new musical centered around six young student activists during the Egyptian revolution of early 2011: How do you fit the triumphs, losses, and complex emotions of a real historical event inside the traditionally very neat and shiny package of the American musical?
It’s a paradox that animates many of the most iconic American musicals, including Cabaret, Hamilton, and, possibly We Live in Cairo’s most direct musical theatre ancestor, Jonathan Larson’s Rent, also famously developed and produced at New York Theatre Workshop. Even NYTW’s location in the East Village evokes a history of protest and counterculture, as well as recent Palestinian solidarity encampments and pro-Palestine and pro-Israel student demonstrations at NYU’s campus right down the street.
“I feel like it’s in the DNA of the area, and it’s in the DNA of the workshop,” artistic director Patricia McGregor told me. “This felt like a continuation of that examination of, how do young artists use their voice to activate the world? What are the pitfalls? What are the points of hope? And how do we keep going?”
NYTW is producing We Live in Cairo (Oct. 9-Nov. 24) in a season that includes Palestinian writer/performer Khawla Ibraheem’s A Knock on the Roof, a gripping one-woman play about a mother’s fight to survive in Gaza, as well as Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole, a show from McGregor and Colman Domingo about the singer’s mid-century struggles with NBC to save his groundbreaking variety show. Though the theatre came under fire last year for not releasing a letter demanding a ceasefire in Gaza (inspiring former resident playwright Victor Cazares to go on an HIV meds strike in protest), NYTW programming is amplifying the voices of Arab artists in two major new works, giving both Ibraheem and the Lazour brothers, the creators of Cairo, their first New York productions.
It is a significant choice. While last fall La MaMa produced a 10-day run of The Mulberry Tree, Hanna Eady and Edward Mast’s play set in historic Palestine, and Noor Theatre continually develops and supports the work of Arab artists from all over the world, NYTW is the only New York theatre—perhaps the only American theatre—of comparable size, resources, and influence to include not one but two shows centering sympathetic Arab characters in its 2024-25 season.
Inspired by real Egyptian student activists, We Live in Cairo follows six friends who bring all their skills and gifts to the struggle to overthrow Hosni Mubarak’s crushing 30-year regime. They take photographs, paint murals, compose songs, and disseminate revolutionary messages and art through the internet. The set, designed by Tilly Grimes, features canvases evoking the tents of protesters in Tahrir Square, and showcases an ensemble of onstage musicians who sometimes join the action onstage. David Bengali has designed quick, thrilling projections of the tweets, posts, and televised addresses that eventually inspired over a million protesters to join the struggle. Magar skillfully layers onstage action with the singing and chants of performers, the footage of the crowds in Tahrir Square, the unfurling of canvases, the sounds of explosions and tear gas—all creating the sensation of standing in a square packed with people, feeling the ebbs and flows of a massive historic event.
The musical chronicles the success of the revolution and the celebrations of Mubarak’s downfall—and the confusion that followed, leading to the overthrow of the democratically elected but regressive Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi and the subsequent takeover by yet another military dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who is still Egypt’s president. Throughout the turmoil, we watch these hopeful young revolutionaries struggle to hang onto their hopes, their ideals, and their connections with each other.
Like the 2011 revolution itself, We Live in Cairo was many years in the making. Its creators, Lebanese American writer/composers Daniel and Patrick Lazour, who are brothers, began work on the show in 2013. One of their first challenges was to find a signature sound for the piece: something unmistakably theatrical, but clearly influenced by Middle Eastern music. The brothers were especially inspired by protest music from around the world, including the songs of Egyptian singer/songwriter Sheikh Imam, banned from Egyptian radio but still popular throughout the Arab world; Silvio Rodriguez, the Cuban folk singer and leader of the Nueva Trova movement; and, of course, Oum Kalthoum, the iconic Egyptian singer, once also banned from Egyptian airwaves after a regime change, whose patriotic songs have made her a legend.
We Live in Cairo’s structure evokes many familiar Western musicals: The songs advance the action and/or deepen character (Sondheim), the story centers two pairs of star-crossed lovers (multiple Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals), the first act ends with the ensemble facing the audience in a line at a revolution (Les Misérables), and the second act begins with a highly emotional group a cappella performance (Rent.)
But the Middle Eastern influence on the score also manifests throughout: in the fluid onstage presence of the musicians, in oud and doumbek instrumentation, in vocal runs, trills, riffs, quarter tones, and what the Lazours call “killer, danceable rhythms.” Middle Eastern vocal ornamentation is used effectively throughout the show to convey heightened emotions, but most unforgettably in Palestinian actress Rotana Tarabzouni’s spectacular, shattering performance of the song “Each and Every Name,” which is both a mourning song and a call to action.
Over the last 12 years, We Live in Cairo has been developed and performed everywhere from the National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT) Festival, the O’Neill Conference, SPACE at Ryder Farm, and American Repertory Theater (ART), where it had its first full production in 2019. Magar and the Lazours also traveled to Egypt for research and spoke with artists, professors, and students at the American University in Cairo.
Once the show finally got in front of audiences at ART, Magar and the Lazours identified a new challenge: Even within the familiar framework of musical theatre, would American audiences connect with a group of Egyptian student activists?
“I think it’s very interesting subject matter, and people really do love it and really appreciate it,” reflected lyricist and book writer Patrick Lazour. “But finding a large audience for this show is something we’re still trying to figure out.” Added composer Daniel Lazour, “The mission of the show was so that a Western audience could see themselves in these young Egyptians, you know? So the challenge is the point, also.”
Magar offered a more intimate perspective on the experience. “I remember watching the show at ART,” she said during a break from rehearsal. “I know that audience well, have directed there many times. I love that audience, they’re really smart. And then I sort of watched that audience go…” Magar tilted her head to one side, imitating a look of detached puzzlement. “I felt a real barrier to making a connection to Arab characters. It felt like they were struggling with that connection.”
Magar wondered if those 2019 audiences were unable to relate to the young students in We Live in Cairo because Americans often only hear about Arabs in the context of wars, national security, and villainous characters on long-running shows like Homeland. Perhaps audiences were not used to imagining ordinary Arab students with families and friends and simple, relatable aspirations.
“I mean, it was extraordinary that ART even programmed us—it’s not been an easy road for Arab and Arab American stories,” said Magar. The American theatre has “started to open up past white-centered narratives, but I think Arab stories got left behind. So I think that’s part of the growth—that’s part of why it took 10 years.”
The world has shifted since 2019 in ways that will undoubtedly change the way We Live in Cairo is received—for better and possibly worse. For one, pandemic-induced theatre closings slowed the progress of new musicals in development. On the domestic front, Americans now share the experience of having a democratically elected leader who, like Mohammed Morsi, masquerades as a populist but constitutes a serious threat to the rights of women and minorities. On an international front, Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, the murder of over 1,000 Israelis and the taking of hundreds of hostages, and the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, leading to tens of thousands of civilian deaths, have altered the power dynamics of the Middle East, heightening the possibility of a wider regional war with no end in sight.
Arab identity and humanity are, again, a subject of intense public debate and protest, in America and all over the world. And thanks to the George Floyd protests of 2020, millions of Americans now share the lived experience of taking to the streets in protest, like the young students in We Live in Cairo.
“There are many reasons why the George Floyd protests and the Egyptian uprising are very different,” Magar noted. “But they both started with police brutality.” Indeed, a gruesome photo of Khaled Said, a 28-year-old Egyptian man beaten to death by Egyptian police officers in 2010, belied the government’s false account of his death, triggering online horror and outrage and inspiring thousands to join the protest movement. “I think there’s now a real shared understanding,” said Magar. “I think we understand, or are struggling and trying to understand, how to liberate each other and ourselves from systems of oppression.”
The first act of We Live in Cairo seems to suggest that we can do just that: The students organize and create art, their work and their movement goes viral, a million people take to the streets, and they overthrow a seemingly immovable dictatorship. Impossible love stories seem possible—including a burgeoning queer romance, a rarity in Western popular media set in the Middle East. Liberation is seemingly within reach. The students drink, kiss, dance, dream, gossip, and (of course) sing together.
For the creative team of We Live in Cairo, showcasing Arab humor, warmth, joy, and individuality on an American stage feels as radical as any of the story’s political discourse. “The Arab culture is one of hospitality and of love,” said Daniel Lazour. “That is often kind of hushed or buried in the narrative.” In the second act, of course, joy and optimism yield to more complicated emotions for these young activists.
Gathered for a group interview, almost all of the show’s performers describe the experience of encountering the show for the first time as surprising, surreal, emotional, even mystical—because they had never gotten the opportunity to play contemporary, multi-dimensional, empathetic Arab or Egyptian characters in a musical. “I think the story they’re telling is one that hasn’t been heard before,” said actor Drew Elhamalawy, who plays Hassan, an idealistic working-class street artist caught between his family’s expectations and his romantic connection with Karim. “Being Egyptian, and my dad being from Cairo, I felt like the show was calling me in so many ways. Also, being gay and getting to a play a gay Egyptian onstage—I don’t think it’s ever been done on a New York stage.”
This humanization might help American audiences form an emotional connection to these young Egyptian characters. A little musical theatre star power may not hurt either.
“It feels like a bridge that audiences are able to look and say, ‘Oh my God, I loved that dude in The Who’s Tommy,” said John El-Jor, referring to his castmate Ali Louis Bourzgui, who played that title role on Broadway earlier this year and in Cairo plays Amir, a Coptic Christian musician who becomes YouTube-famous for his performance in Tahrir Square. “Or, like, ‘Oh my God, that’s Regina George!’” El-Jor added, gesturing to castmate Nadina Hassan, who plays Layla, a young Muslim photographer, and who led the national Mean Girls tour. That kind of familiarity, he imagined, might make an audience think, “Oh, that’s my friend who I’ve gotten drunk with and who I’ve cried with and who does crazy things, and, like—oh God, they should not have kissed that boy!”
Bourzgui and Hassan, whose characters fall in love, both acknowledged the emotional challenges and costs of embodying these roles during a moment of profound grief for many Arabs and Arab Americans.
“It feels unlike any other job I’ve ever experienced,” Hassan said. She described feeling a “civic duty” to do right by her character, a sense of both honor and obligation—and inescapable sadness. “Just coming in and doing a show about this, where there’s not really a happy resolution, after reading the news, it’s just…really, really challenging every day.”
Added Borzgui, “There’s such a danger in the fact that almost everyone in America only sees numbers always, or just one generalized blanketed idea of one population.” By focusing on six distinct characters, he hopes that We Live in Cairo shows audiences “these are the people we are talking about, and these are also the people that are dying currently. It’s not just numbers. Remember that these people are humans with entire lives and entire love stories.”
Michael Khalid Karadsheh, who plays Amir’s pragmatic, perceptive brother and songwriting partner, mentioned that the cast had been watching The Square, an Emmy-winning documentary from 2013 about the Egyptian revolution and the subsequent leadership crisis. “Every time I revisit it, I’m hit with an extreme weight of the responsibility we all bear to tell the story, and to tell it in a way with nuance,” Karadsheh said. “But also, we are working within a container of, you know, musical theatre. It’s a beautiful, beautiful challenge.”
The classic American musical usually offers a palatable balance of humor and darkness. But We Live in Cairo is recounting real events—often tragic and dangerous—which are often difficult to leaven with glamor or jokes. Most American musicals also chart a journey with a clear beginning, middle, and end, and people often leave with a message. We Live in Cairo instead ends in uncertainty. After all, how can we be certain of the outcome of a recent historical event with ongoing consequences?
Of course, We Live in Cairo does not purport to be the definitive story of the Egyptian revolution. As is true for the representation of many marginalized groups, if Arab and Egyptian stories were more common in the American theatre, it’s unlikely that audiences would expect any one story to represent every Arab or Egyptian experience. Even so, We Live in Cairo does set out to offer a message: a perspective on activism that audiences may recognize from experience. The story of these six young friends suggests, poignantly, that building something new and better is often a much longer and harder process than tearing something down, and that even one person’s smallest act of bravery—sharing an idea, saying a prayer, holding up a photograph, bringing a friend food—can be revolutionary.
I saw We Live In Cairo with a full house during early previews a few weeks before Election Day and observed a lot of crying in the audience during the second act. After the show, someone in the lobby joked that the show could sell signature souvenir boxes of tissues, like the recent Broadway production of The Notebook. But are tears, an innovative score, a familiar structure, and the common experience of living under misogynistic, xenophobic, regressive leadership enough to make audiences relate to the struggles of student activists from 13 years ago and 5,600 miles away?
For Kharadsheh, building audience identification with the characters remains the most difficult challenge of working on We Live in Cairo—and the most important metric of the show’s success.
“The urgency with which I feel the story is that I want to shake the audience and say, This is about you,” he said. “We’re doing it through a musical theatre lens, but in my heart, what I want to say is, Look at me. This is about you.”
Nikki Massoud is an Iranian Canadian American writer, performer, and audiobook narrator based in Brooklyn. She currently holds play commissions with Atlantic Theater Company, The Acting Company, and Noor Theatre, and is a 2050 Fellow at New York Theatre Workshop.
