Ali Louis Bourzgui & More to Star in WE LIVE IN CAIRO at New York Theatre Workshop

New York Theatre Workshop revealed the full cast & creative team for We Live in Cairo, featuring a book, music & lyrics by Jonathan Larson Grant winners and NYTW Usual Suspects The Lazours (Night Side Songs), choreography and movement direction by Ann Yee (Next to Normal), and direction by Obie Award winner and NYTW Usual Suspect Taibi Magar (The Half-God of Rainfall). We Live in Cairo will begin previews October 9, 2024, at New York Theatre Workshop, with opening night set for October 27, for a run through November 24, 2024.
 
The cast of We Live in Cairo will include Ali Louis Bourzgui (The Who’s Tommy), Drew Elhamalawy (Cupid for Christmas), John El-Jor (Mean Girls), Nadina Hassan (Mean Girls National Tour), Michael Khalid Karadsheh (The Ally), and Rotana Tarabzouni (Alien of Extraordinary Ability).
 
We Live in Cairo will feature scenic design by Tilly Grimes (Shucked), costume design by Dina El-Aziz (Selling Kabul), lighting design by Bradley King (Hadestown), sound design by Justin Stasiw (Lempicka), and video design by David Bengali (Here There Are Blueberries). Orchestrations are by Daniel Lazour and Michael Starobin (Suffs), with vocal arrangements by Madeline Benson (Walk on Through). Madeline Benson is the Music Supervisor, Mona Seyed-Bolorforosh (Terce) is the Music Director, Xavier Clark (The Three Musketeers National Tour) is the Voice and Text Coach, and Jeff Brancato (Girl from the North Country) is the Production Stage Manager. Casting is by Claire Yenson. We Live in Cairo is produced by special arrangement with Madison Wells Live.
 
Inspired by the young Egyptians who took to the streets amidst the throes of the Arab Spring, We Live in Cairo follows six student activists using their street art, photography and song to overthrow a regime older than they are. Winner of the Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater, this soaring new musical from Jonathan Larson Grant winners and NYTW Usual Suspects Daniel & Patrick Lazour journeys from the jubilation of the Tahrir Square protests through the aftermath of the years that followed. As escalating division and violence lead to a military crackdown, the young revolutionaries of Cairo must weigh the cost of how—or even whether—to keep their dreams of change alive. Obie Award winner and NYTW Usual Suspect Taibi Magar (The Half-God of Rainfall) directs.
 
The world premiere of We Live in Cairo was produced by the American Repertory Theater (Diane Paulus, Artistic Director; Diane Borger, Executive Producer). We Live in Cairo was presented at the National Alliance for Musical Theatre’s Festival of New Musicals in 2016. We Live in Cairo was developed during a residency at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Music Theatre Conference in 2015 (Preston Whiteway, Executive Director; Paulette Haupt, Artistic Director). We Live in Cairo was developed, in part, at SPACE on Ryder Farm. This production was developed in part during a New York Theatre Workshop residency with the Theater Department at Dartmouth College, in collaboration with Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Arts.