iHeartRadio Broadway has your exclusive first listen to “I Wake Up With A Melody" performed by Ali Louis Bourzgui off of We Live in Cairo: Original Off-Broadway Cast Recording. The cast recording will be released tomorrow October 24.
More information on the album below:
CENTER STAGE RECORDS has announced the release of We Live in Cairo: Original Off-Broadway Cast Recording in streaming and digital formats on, Friday, October 24.We Live in Cairo – which had an extended run last year at New York Theater Workshop – features book, music and lyrics by The Lazours. The album was produced by two-time Grammy and two-time Tony Award winner Charlie Rosen, with orchestrations by two-time Tony Award winner Michael Starobin. Pre-save or pre-add the album at orcd.co/weliveincairo
We Live in Cairo, about the youth movement in Egypt during the 2011 Arab Spring, was nominated for three Lucille Lortel Awards including “Outstanding New Musical,” four Outer Critics Circle Awards, and two Drama Desk Awards including “Best Music.”
The original Off-Broadway cast recording features performances by Ali Louis Bourzgui (Tommy, The Lost Boys), Nadina Hassan (Mean Girls), Michael Karadsheh (The Ally), Drew Elhamalawy (The Queen of Versailles), Rotana Tarabzouni (Alien of Extraordinary Ability), and John El-Jor, who was nominated for a 2024 Drama Desk Award for this performance.
Later this season, The Lazours’s new musical Night Side Songs will open at Lincoln Center Theater and the world premiere of their show The Lunchbox will be presented by Berkeley Repertory Theater, directed by Tony Award winner Rachel Chavkin.
“The cast recording is one of the more beautiful traditions in American musical theater,” comment The Lazours. “Not only does it capture an ephemeral art form, it provides us musical theater fans an opportunity to do what we do best: to discover. To listen to a great cast album is to step into two parallel universes. We step into the universe of the story, the characters, and the songs, but we also step into a moment in time. We hear a production that only could have happened in that year, an ensemble that only could have come together at that moment. We hope all the richness and the beautiful idiosyncrasy of this experience is on full display in We Live in Cairo. When you listen to this album, you are listening to a story of youth protest and revolution. And you are listening to a production twelve years in the making. You are listening to an ensemble exploring their heritage with urgency and vitality. It is our hope that We Live in Cairo may be a record, a mission, a catalyst. We hope it lives on. Most of all, we hope it’s an absolute blast to get into your headphones.”
The world premiere of We Live in Cairo was produced by the American Repertory Theater (Diane Paulus, Artistic Director; Diane Borger, Executive Producer). It was also presented at the National Alliance for Musical Theatre’s Festival of New Musicals in 2016, and 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). It was also developed, in part, at SPACE on Ryder Farm and during a New York Theatre Workshop residency with the Theater Department at Dartmouth College, in collaboration with Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Arts in 2018.