Night Side Songs is making its world premiere at Philadelphia Theatre Company from February 21 through March 9, 2025, following a two-week tour of hospitals, community centers, and houses of worship around Philadelphia. The one-act musical, written by brothers Patrick and Daniel Lazour, gives voice to doctors, nurses, patients, and caregivers as it explores experiences of illness, mortality, community, and healing. Performed with the audience seated on stage and sometimes singing along, the communal music-theater experience follows one fictional patient’s journey through the health care system. The story is informed by interviews the creators conducted with doctors, nurses, and patients, many of whom are from Philadelphia.
“One of the main reasons we wanted to write this piece is that so much of these experiences that are so integral to living, were so private,” Daniel Lazour told WHYY in a recent interview. “They were spoken in whispers in a bedroom or in the hospital room. With Night Side Songs, we wanted to bring it out into the open.”
Night Side Songs is produced in collaboration with the American Repertory Theater, where the show will be performed March 27-April 13, 2025, and is directed by Taibi Magar, co-artistic director of Philadelphia Theatre Company. The Obie Award-winning director centers her work “at the intersection of imagination and social justice.” She took some time before opening night to talk with us about the development of the work, the local tour, and the importance of talking about illness.
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What was the initial inspiration for this project? Why did you want to pursue it as a director and eventually bring it to Philadelphia Theatre Company?
The Lazours had some family members going through a cancer journey, which sparked a curiosity about the subject. I myself had lost my father to cancer when I was young, so we found a real alignment in wanting to tell a story about it. For me the theater is about being in a big dark room, reckoning with big unknowable questions with other members of your community. Nothing does this more perfectly than Night Side Songs. In the piece’s celebration of the caregivers and caretakers, it felt so exciting to bring it to Philadelphia, the city of “eds and meds.”
You’ve collaborated with the Lazours over several years to develop this work. What is important to you in fostering a creative, collaborative relationship?
There are two important things: the first is that you have to want to spend large amounts of time with each other, because that is what happens when you’re developing something together! The second is that everyone has something different to offer the process. Daniel, Patrick, and I have overlapping tastes, but also challenge and build off of each other’s ideas.
What has the experience been like during the community tour, where you brought the show to local hospitals, community centers, and places of worship?
It’s been the most satisfying experience of my artistic career. Tyler (my co-artistic director at PTC) always says that theater historically has felt like a country club, when it should feel like a community center. It was amazing to take Night Side Songs directly to the people who had informed it—for free.
Night Side Songs explores experiences of caregiving, illness, and mortality through the form of a musical. What do you think music uniquely brings to this story and to the audience’s experience?
The 18th century German poet, Novalis, said: “Every disease is a musical problem. Its cure, a musical solution.” Many ancient physicians were also musicians. They were concerned with rhythms, tonalities, discords, and concords of the body and the soul. There’s something so fundamental about the body and breath and singing. It lends itself beautifully to these experiences of beauty and mortality. It heightens our embodied presence, and therefore the thematic interrogation of the work.
Has the development process for this piece uncovered something new or surprised you? What do you know now that you didn’t know when you started?
I didn’t realize how much we needed to talk about cancer. Our culture is still programmed to avoid using the “c” word. It’s slightly better now than it used to be, say in the ’60s, but it’s been a real joy discovering that people want to process their cancer experiences with each other. And we all have some relationship to this! A parent, an uncle, a sister, or a friend. It’s been so refreshing to provide an experience that people really need.
