West End Musicals
Review of Bombay Dreams
First Night reviews
June 20, 2002 Musical Bombay Dreams by Richard Morrison Apollo Victoria
Exotic Indian recipe, but just where is the meat? BECAUSE the heart wants Bombay Dreams to succeed, this is a hard review to write. Heaven knows, the musical theatre badly needs fresh ideas, and Lord Lloyd-Webber's £4.5 million baby is nothing if not brave and different. It is the West End's first Indian musical, and thus showcases a host of British-Asian talents. The personable young leads - Preeya Kalidas as an ambitious Bollywood director; Raza Jaffrey as the slumboy-turned-superstar who steals her heart; Raj Ghatak as a eunuch doomed to unrequited love and a nasty death - will surely go on to better things. And the show also introduces London to the fertile musical imagination of the phenomenal A.R. Rahman, the "Mozart of Madras". True, his zappy, pop-sheened score has about as much connection with the authentic ragas of the sub-continent as a chicken tikka masala has with traditional Indian cuisine. But it's incredibly catchy, full of soaring ballads (the best of them, The Journey Home, kept till last) and - when the drums stop pounding - gilded with beguiling instrumental colour. Nor is Bombay Dreams short on spectacle. Mark Thompson's sets incorporate more tricks than the Magic Circle. Monsoons splash down. Bulldozers crash in. The villain escapes, as in Bond films, on a helicopter ladder.
What's more, thanks to the choreographers Farah Khan and Anthony Van Laast, the show brings to the West End a dance style - frenetic and self-mockingly lascivious - which will be familiar to every Bollywood fan, but is a welcome change from the tired jazz steps that normally patter around Shaftesbury Avenue. But the good news ends there.
Consider the writing talent that Lloyd-Webber assembled for this show: the film director Shekhar Kapur; the veteran lyricist Don Black; the Goodness Gracious Me creator Meera Syal. Then consider the results. Scenes that lurch into each other like blind elephants. A plot that disintegrates into a ragbag of sitcom skits on Miss World, women's lib and the like. The lamest ending in West End history. Trite lyrics. Cardboard characters. Dialogue that would test the patience of Mother Teresa. Too many jokes that produce a polite titter. "Moral dilemmas" - slum clearance, grinding poverty - treated with insulting superficiality. And then weep. What a missed opportunity to revitalise the clapped-out "blockbuster musical" by tapping into the rich heritage of India.
The main problem is a fatal waywardness of tone in Steven Pimlott's production. The story is simple to the point of naivety: homeless boy makes good in movies, dumps old friends, comes up against all-too-predictable forces of evil (corrupt property developers, bent lawyers), and ends up rejecting the tinsel dream for gritty integrity on the streets. Bollywood provides the context, and it is clear that some sequences - notably the blissfully over-the-top Shakalaka Baby (gamely delivered by the vibrant Ayesha Dharker amid jets of water) - are deliberate send-ups of the Indian film industry at its most garish. But little else is clear. Some clunkingly earnest stretches of dialogue invite us to take the preposterous story seriously. But then the villainous Raad Rawi lets rip a horror-movie laugh, or a fight sequence is accompanied by pantomime drum thwacks, and we are in a style of ham melodrama not seen since the days of Sir Henry Irving. Postmodern irony? No, just miscalculation. I won't say the show is sure to flop.
If Shakalaka Baby takes off in the clubs, if the Asian community rallies round, and if enough pulses race at the thought of gyrating damsels in wet saris, Bombay Dreams may yet stagger through the cricket season. But to turn this mishmash into a hot ticket is going to take more than a spoonful of curry powder.
WET SARI MEETS WEST-END HIGH-TECH.
Andrew Lloyd Weber, king of the West-End Musical, was so enchanted by the music of Bollywood's hottest composer property A.R. Rahman, that he was more than happy to tie up some of his own money in a lavish production bringing Bollywood's inimitable masala to the West End musical stage. The result is an impressive and lavish product that might have the average West-End musical-aficionado gasping for breath. But for those of us who have grown up with Bollywood and seen its evolution from a tacky painted scenery job in Black & White to present-day song sequences in which real-life locations - ranging from Niagara Falls to the Swiss Alps - change at every other musical phrase, it doesn't come across as anything spectacular or different, except, that it is LIVE. Putting aside all the tricks that cameras and nifty film editing can do and transporting the dream-like action to the limitations of stage, is a wondrous, and commendable act. And, just like real Bollywood, there is also a loose story line consisting of all of Bollywood's regular masala ingredients. A slum-boy dreaming of making it into films, a beautiful girl mixed up with Mafia style dons, a coquettish and buxom film heroine, a eunuch, and even a crippled beggar playing slum-philosopher. The climax scene has a fisticuffs routine that seems to be as carefully and elaborately choreographed as the dances, complete with live "dhishum-dhishum" sound effects.
"Bombay Dreams" might appear to be a merging of two distinct genres, but since the original Bollywood format is that of a musical anyway, (albeit on celluloid rather than live on stage,) this is not so much a "fusion" of styles, but more a straight transportation from one medium to another. If anything, the real wonder lies in West-End stage technology and many Indian Indians would be absolutely astounded at how smoothly everything seemed to work in terms of scenery shifts and technical wizardry, complete with a rain machine to achieve the wet-sari cliché of Indian cinema. In the past, when film directors were not allowed to show kissing or too much bodily contact between people of the opposite sexes, the wet, clinging sari showing the heroine's body, was a life-saver. Nowadays, although they can show whatever they like, (as long as the heroine remains a virgin) the wet-sari remains intact, almost as a kind of self-conscious parody.
One of A. R. Rahman's greatest and most memorable hits "Chaiyya Chaiyya" which was performed atop a real, fast-moving steam train in the 1998 film "Dil Se", is re-enacted with a pretend-train-like construction on stage. But, honestly, the original Indian dancers on the real train had more balance and elegance than the British-Asian dancers who attempted to recreate the same. And it was something the choreographers had noted. One of them, Farah Khan, who choreographs most of Bollywood's dance routines and also did the original train sequence for "Dil Se," says it is very strange that although the British-Asian dancers are highly trained, and are doing the exact same steps as per her instructions, they are completely incapable of replicating the body movements of the original Indian dancers. This could be an interesting evolutionary point. Maybe those Indians who are born and brought up in Britain have developed a completely different body language? Maybe walking (and talking) differently has caused some kind of stunted growth when it comes to undulating the belly and gyrating the hips?
The songs of Bombay Dreams are by and large re-workings of all of Rahman's hit tunes over the past ten years, with one essential difference: the lyrics are in English by Don Black, capturing the spirit of the original songs but making the meaning accessible to non Urdu-Hindi speakers. The only exception are two tunes: "Chaiyya Chaiyya" and "Wedding Qawwali." For both of these, Rahman admits to being inspired by Sufi Urdu/Punjabi lyrics and these original lyrics were retained. Judging by the audience response to these numbers, it was clear that the largely non-Urdu speaking audience preferred these songs just as they were and appeared to not need a translation. I was reminded of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (with whom Rahman had done one collaboration) and how he always asserted that Sufi music and poetry is a language in its own right and has the ability to cut across the brain and go straight to the heart.
On leaving the auditorium after the show, I overheard various people saying to one another: "Amazing costumes! Unbelievably elegant costumes!" They'd only have to go to Wembley or Tooting during any one of numerous Indian festivals or weddings and they would see many of the same - some even more elegant. Indian dress is still very much part of Indian life, especially for formal occasions; it is by no means something that is only reserved for films or stage shows. Clothes shops have already been full of Indian fabrics, mirror-embroidered cushions, skirts made out of saris. I have a feeling we'll see a lot more of these in the days to come.
Jameela London-UK