In musicals it is all about the connection of the elements. A story that is too thin dissolves when mixed with the songs. Too heavy a story won’t let the songs gain momentum. In order to get the right carbonation mix, the balance has to be perfect.
That’s not the case with Mira Nair’s “Monsoon Wedding,” which premiered Monday in an always busy, sometimes touching but oddly bland production at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse. The chaotic storylines (taken from Nair’s 2001 film of the same name) and Indian pop/marching band-meets songs, while very interesting in their own right, don’t build on themselves or each other, leaving behind an intertwined history of Love and commitment to unravel as fast as it spins.
Not that the film was a landmark clout. The arranged marriage of the rich “girl from South Delhi” Aditi Verma (here played by Salena Qureshi) and the US-raised Hemant Rai (Deven Kolluri) was just one strand of a multi-family and generational story, which is presented in a wild collage of small , colorful figures arranged scenes. It didn’t matter how many went nowhere; the editing was everything.
The musical attempts to retain this fast-editing effect while simultaneously compressing the material into a traditional musical theater format. Nair told the New York Times that she was inspired by the example of “Fiddler on the Roof,” a classic that, like “Monsoon Wedding,” embraces a family’s marital chaos as part of a community’s encounter with tradition and change.
But “Fiddler” is based on a collection of short stories about a strong main character and not a film about many. The difference shows. Arpita Mukherjee and Sabrina Dhawan’s musical book is everywhere, and given that it was staged by Nair in an abstract courtyard directed by Jason Ardizzone-West, you rarely know where it is. The staging appears to be thinking in camera terms, as if a lens is still drawing the audience’s attention, when in reality there is nothing.
I’m not sure if anything could. In addition to the frantic preparation for the huge celebration, the musical, like the film, involves a secondary comic romance between Dubey, the wedding planner, and Alice, the Vermas’ maid in disguise. The marriage of Aditi’s parents (Gagan Dev Riar and Palomi Ghosh) is also addressed, as are the romantic notions of a little cousin and gay brother, would-be in-laws, other relatives, local workers and (sometimes it seems) all of Delhi.
Nair creates a musical-like structure by pushing some of these stories forward and pushing others back. The issue threatening Aditi’s marriage – she is yet to get over her affair with a married man – has receded so much into the background that it’s practically disappeared behind the scenes, removing any serious tension from the crisis. In its place comes the milder issue of being uprooted as she has to move to Hemant’s home in the US: Can she learn to love New Jersey?
The problem threatening the marriage of Dubey (Namit Das) and Alice (Anisha Nagarajan), on the other hand, has been escalated from an almost indecipherable problem to a truly serious problem in the film: in a country mired in a bitter division, be it ethnic or religious Art born into divisions – he is Hindu and she is Christian – can be heartbreaking. The resolution is simple (“The heart never lies”), but at least it’s in one song.
This song, which Dubey’s mother (Sargam Ipshita Bali) sings to her overwrought son, is beautiful, one of the few with a clear personality among the 22 in a score that all too often feels like a hodgepodge of snippets. In one, the beautiful “Madhaniyan”, Aditi’s father bids her farewell on the eve of the wedding, pulling the same threads as “Far From the Home I Love” in “Fiddler”. (Well, not quite the same strings; the excellent eight-piece band is punctuated by a sitar.)
But great or not, the score (music by Vishal Bhardwaj, lyrics by Masi Asare and Susan Birkenhead) is absolutely fine, as is the script. When the style, whether American or Indian, occasionally fits the characters and the situation, the direction makes the moment stand out. A ludicrous production number called “Chuk Chuk” (for the sound a train makes when Dubey is chasing you to win Alice) sounds straight out of Bollywood and fits with its cinematic projections (by David Bengali) and frenetic choreography (by Shampa Gopikrishna). ). the dramatic moment in a way that excuses its utter lack of logic. It’s a white horse.
Otherwise, the musicalization feels both overconfident and indecisive, like a passing parade. (There are rarely buttons on the songs that tell you they’re done, leaving the audience wondering if they should applaud.) In only one song is there a concerted approach to the dramatic experience. The song is about Aditi’s orphaned cousin Ria, who grew up with her as her sister. Serious and diligent, Ria (Sharvari Deshpande) plans to attend New York University, primarily to escape the marital expectations that Aditi, a spoiled princess — “even your panties are pressed” — is all too willing to fulfil.
The fact that Ria, too, is escaping a social atmosphere that tolerates the sexual abuse of girls is a theme that Nair emphasizes much more strongly here than in the film. But as powerful as that is, especially in Deshpande’s performance, it’s also destabilizing. It’s hard to make the leap from her late act two ‘Be a Good Girl’ squeal to the happy ending, complete with exquisite saris (by Arjun Bhasin), a celebratory remix and the requisite double wedding.
How Ria became the central character here – her number being the only solo number on the show – is a bit of a mystery, as if “Fiddler” decided to put Chava, the rejected daughter, above the title. Longer scenes (some as short as three lines) might have helped explain the change, or shifted our expectations to the character explicitly not wanting to get married in a show called Monsoon Wedding.
Still, one must be grateful that Ria elicited their most powerful writing from the authors. In “Leaving Means Returning,” sung to her by Aditi’s father, lyrics encapsulate the enticing if ambivalent family embrace in a beautiful phrase: “We are your comfort and your court.” Likewise, the genre is a place of Security, but also a kind of prison. Also “Monsoon Wedding” does not escape completely.
monsoon wedding
Through June 25 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.