Ashes to Ashes: The Rahbani Empire

Mansour Rahbani's new musical play, The Return of the Phoenix, has the flashy production values of a bad Las Vegas extravaganza. High-kicking dancers in sequin-studded Lycra costumes traverse the stage like winged creatures in migratory formation, sometimes falling a few "flaps" behind their choreographic leader. The recorded music, piped through stadium speakers, provides MIDI orchestration and vocal backup for lip-syncing innamorati (humorless comic lovers) who sing contemporary Arabic pop about chaste, sentimental desire. The lugubrious central story—she's a princess with an overbearing daddy, and he's a poor shipwright—owes a distant legacy to the ancient Phoenician traders who lived along the Lebanese coast, but Rahbani relaxes the historical facts.

As in all fairy tales, the wholesome lovers signify a longing for a greater unrealized ideal, in this case a united Lebanon. This dewy-eyed nationalism strains the Vegas model, and despite the play's glitzy excess, Phoenix doesn't speak to Western audiences. As the only non-Arab American in the casino theatre, I felt lost amid unfamiliar references in an overly familiar genre. Rahbani's play uses national myths as a parable for modern political situations: alliances, in-fighting, and coups. And though the stories are simplistic—lost love and communal sacrifice—the plot's political intrigues often match the complexity of actual events like the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90).

To understand how and what local audiences see when they attend a Mansour Rahbani play, it's necessary to trace his family's contributions to Lebanese musical theatre and culture in the last half-century. Brothers Asi and Mansour Rahbani started constructing their dynastic cultural empire in 1946, when, in the wake of the French withdrawal from Lebanon, they began contributing their early songs to the grand nationbuilding project of Radio Lebanon. Radio was the ideal medium to address the many localities of Greater Lebanon (a colonial construct) as a cohesive nation. To celebrate a new nationalist culture, Lebanese caught the radio airwaves from the streets, cafes, and marketplaces—only one radio existed for every twenty-eight people. Scholar Christopher Stone observes in his new book Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon: The Fairouz and Rahbani Nation that a populist zeal for participation in a monolingual, monocultural enterprise swept through the cities with the proliferation of national anthems and folkloric songs. Many songwriters fed the movement, but the Rahbanis achieved unprecedented success for making the leap from radio to popular musicals. Stone argues that it was perhaps inevitable that this audience-activated culture would find reinforcement in the theatre, where stories become a live part of the inherited folklore.

Beginning in the 1950s, the upstart Rahbani dramatists—Asi composed music and Mansour arranged stories—became known simply as The Rahbani Brothers, and for the next fifty years, they popularized and preserved Lebanese folkways in song and dance. By the mid-sixties, the Rahbanis' nostalgia for a simpler, more traditional Lebanese existence culminated in a distinct genre of musical performance, "fulklur," presented, as Stone puts it, as "spontaneous and authorless material … gathered from those who remember it, and then employed in the service of the nation." The Rahbanis' ethnographic project had two aims: to reclaim classical Lebanese culture from Western colonial interests, and to express nationalist ardor without the factionalism of contemporary politics. Based on stories learned from their illiterate grandmother, the Rahbanis' musical depictions of hardy villagers in coastal or mountainous Lebanon flattered common audiences. Even President Fuad Chehab (1958–64), who was engaged in his own popular project to mollify religious and political differences, absorbed their folklore as part of the nation's rugged, romantic self-image.

Despite their appeal to shared ancestral memory, the Rahbanis' plays evinced little historical specificity or truth. The cultural ideal portrayed in musical spectacles like Days of Harvest, The Wedding in the Village, The Girl from Baalbeck, and Rings for Sale, was not inherited but constituted. When the Brothers set out to make film adaptations of their popular musicals in...