Actor James Rana (center) ends his run in the play "The Band's Visit" at the Altria Theater July 26-31.(Photo by Evan Zimmerman)
Actor James Rana has been with the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical “The Band’s Visit” since the beginning. He was an understudy for the original Broadway cast in 2017, which featured Tony Shalhoub (“Monk”) in 2017, and he has been touring around the country country since 2019 as Simon, a member of the titular band.
Most actors on Broadway spend a year at most with a show and then move on, but given the opportunity to tour as Simon, Rana decided to stay on, allowing him to have consistency playing one character in the show. Rana has been with “The Band’s Visit" for five years, but he still finds something new in Simon during every performance.
“Telling this story is so beautiful, it still touches me,” Rana says. “And getting to be in the midst of an audience, many of them experiencing [the show] for the first time, is such a privilege.”
When he takes the stage at the Altria Theater for performances from July 26-31, this will be Rana’s final run donning his bright-blue jacket, pants and hat — the staple costume for most of the actors in the show. He’ll be ending his stint on the same stage where some of the first rehearsals for the touring show were held during the height of the surge of the COVID-19 pandemic’s delta variant.
“The Band’s Visit” tells the story of an Egyptian police band that is supposed to play a concert in Petah Tikvah, Israel, but due to a language barrier at the bus station, the band ends up in Bet Hatikva, a fictional town in the middle of nowhere where everything is “Blah. Blah. Blah.” Even though the members of the band stay in the town for only a day, they breathe life back into the desert community, and the townspeople leave a lasting impact on the band.
The show has been praised for portraying characters of Middle Eastern descent in a positive light. Although Rana is South Asian, he says that when he started his acting career he would “make a lot of money playing cab drivers and terrorists.” But he wasn’t discouraged. Rana got his start as a street performer and clown, and for many years he would walk in the Coney Island Mermaid Parade as Uncle Sam. In 2001 Rana received his MFA in acting and playwriting. He put his degree to use writing and narrating the radio documentary "Poe: A Celebration" for NPR about poet and Richmonder Edgar Allan Poe. In 2017 he was cast in “The Band’s Visit,” a show that celebrated people with brown skin and didn’t put them in a box.
“ ‘The Band’s Visit’ is one of those rare opportunities in my life, where I was welcomed with open arms, and I got to be part of a show that celebrated the people of the East,” Rana says. “And these characters carry themselves with dignity. And we’re not playing any stereotype, we're playing human beings."
During the show’s rehearsals at the Altria Theater during the last week of September 2021, the actors had to get back in the groove of performing again after a year and a half of quarantine. Every day when Rana walked to the theater, he became witness to a rebirth in Richmond, with the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue and the reawakening of theater and music.
“I think there’s something beautiful about it, very poetic that we, in a sense, started [the show] in Richmond,” Rana says. “And now we're going to complete the story in Richmond, which I think is a really beautiful thing.”
“The Band’s Visit” is onstage at the Altria Theater July 26-31.
