We Live in Cairo, which opened Sunday at the New York Theatre Workshop, pulses with the promise and enthusiasm of idealistic youth — in this case, a tight band of twentysomethings caught up in the Arab Spring movement that overthrew the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. At first glance, the cast could double for any coterie of young urban creatives of the sort that we’ve seen in shows like Rent (to which We Live in Cairo owes a great debt).

We meet a pair of Coptic Christian brothers who are budding songwriters — the cautious law school-bound Hany ((Michael Khalid Karadsheh) writes the lyrics, while the music is the product of the soulful pretty-boy rocker Amir (Ali Louis Bourzgui, who played a mean air guitar as the star of last spring’s The Who’s Tommy revival on Broadway). Their circle includes their cousin, Karim (John El-Jor), a rich dilettante who spends his nights creating anti-Mubarak street art; Karim’s protégé and possible love interest, Hassan (Drew Elhamalawy), whose family belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood; and a firebrand activist named Fadwa (Rotana Tarabzouni) who was just released from jail for her protests against Mubarak’s three-decade regime.

We also meet a young photographer named Layla (Nadina Hassan), the daughter of a journalist for a state-backed news operation, who’s all-too-quickly persuaded by Fadwa to shift her focus from still lifes and travel-section landscapes to documenting the signs of anti-government dissent percolating everywhere. In the show’s Rent template, she’s clearly the Mark Cohen, the nominal outsider framing our introduction to all the expository material on turn-of-the-21st century Egyptian history. She’s also Amir’s love interest — and the two share a handful of deeply melodic and very pretty duets together.

We Live in Cairo is the work of two Lebanese American brothers, Daniel and Patrick Lazour, who collaborated on the book as well as the Middle Eastern-inflected score and have been workshopping the material for more than a decade. The strains of that effort sometimes show. It takes a while to introduce all the characters, as well as the context of the time and place, and individual tunes don’t always effectively serve either purpose. By the second act, when our band of revolutionaries grapples with what comes after you topple the corrupt leader, the conflicts among them emerge more clearly. Fadwa, a proud secularist, wants to overthrow the new president, Mohamed Morsi, a freely elected leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, while Hany frets about what this means for a democracy for which they had previously advocated so strongly. Hassan finds himself torn by his attraction to Karim and his responsibilities to his family, and Layla questions whether she can really marry a Christian.

This is interesting, but you may yearn for more context. (Morsi did not last long enough to try to impose sharia long as his detractors feared; his successor, Abdel el-Sisi, is now serving his third term as president.) You may also wonder why the Lazours didn’t take a page from Les Misérables, another apparent inspiration, and end the show after the first revolution — or perhaps start there. Certainly, the show’s finest number is a stirring, mostly a capella second-act opener that could serve as a coda for how individual voices emboldened to come together can make a difference in the world. The after-effects of a revolution, and what happens when comrades achieve their initial aims, is an interesting subject to explore — but here it is treated in a superficial way that ultimately doesn’t go very deep.

Still, the Lazours clearly have talent to burn, and admirable ambition. One highlight is El-Jor’s second-act comical show-stopper about how a nepo baby might rule Egypt, “Benevolent Regime of King Farouk II,” a song that cunningly thymes war and Dior. Another standout is Bourzgui, with his wide-eyed expression, toothy smile and curly locks flopping onto his smooth forehead. He’s sensational as the idealistic Amir — it’s easy to see why his performance of a guitar-backed anthem during a demonstration in Tahrir Square might have become a YouTube sensation.

The show also gets a lift from director Taibi Magar’s dynamic staging. David Bengali’s video design, projected onto Tilly Grimes’s urban refuge of a set, introduces often graphic images about the events unfolding around the country as they might pop on the characters’ social-media feeds. But despite all the polish, We Live in Cairo feels like a work in progress that hasn’t been so much completed as let go.

WE LIVE IN CAIRO
New York Theatre Workshop, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes (1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through Nov. 24