Darling Song Bollywood

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Jackie Bullinger

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Aug 3, 2024, 5:37:55 PM8/3/24

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Monsoon Wedding, which came out in 2001, was an indie darling turned international box office success. Director Mira Nair has been working on a musical adaptation for nearly 15 years. Milan Moudgill hide caption

But even as Nair has continued making films including The Namesake and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, she says she became consumed following the global success of the film with the idea of turning the fictional Varma family wedding into live musical theater.

"I cannot say that I was a huge fan of American musicals," she says. "But when I had the idea to make my film into a musical, I did think 'everyone here flocks to Fiddler on the Roof. Everyone here looks at their stories in different ways on the stage but where are our stories? Where are the brown folk, where's the Verma family?' "

So now, after almost 15 years in development, Monsoon Wedding has opened as a musical at Brooklyn's St. Ann's Warehouse with Nair as director. In a crowded and competitive New York season, the piece is an ambitious experiment in bridging Indian musical styles with a Broadway-style songbook. While this is an off-Broadway production scheduled to run through this summer, the team hopes for a Broadway run. It is not the first such effort.

The first big Indian musical to reach Broadway was Bombay Dreams and it remains the last. Set in the neon spectacle of Bollywood, the 2004 production was a critical and commercial failure that closed in less than one season. It was criticized for, among other things, trying to appeal to a broad audience in a way that felt inauthentic to South Asian stories and viewers.

There was a lot of concern about whether the audience was ready for what we are bringing to the table. ... It's been so gratifying to be part of a show that is so unabashedly and unapologetically South Asian.

Anisha Nagarajan, who stars as Alice, the family maid in the new Monsoon Wedding musical, played one of the leads in Bombay Dreams. "There was a lot of concern about whether the audience was ready for what we are bringing to the table," Nagarajan says of the new show. "Maybe they weren't ready then but they are now and it's been so gratifying to be part of a show that is so unabashedly and unapologetically South Asian."

Monsoon Wedding is certainly arriving in a very different era. The success of Hamilton, A Strange Loop, and others has shown that leaning into cultural difference can work, both commercially and creatively. Masi Asare, who co-wrote the lyrics for the current production and is a professor of musical theater at Northwestern University says she wants to "push the envelope" with Monsoon Wedding. "We have a beautiful score that doesn't sound like your typical American musical ... it's really exciting to see the form grow and stretch in other directions."

"We are the combination of the traditional and the modern. We don't let go of our values and yet we dance in tandem with the West," says Indian composer and filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj. Above, a still from the film Monsoon Wedding. Criterion Collection hide caption

Integrating those forms has meant years of drafts and revisions. The play's associate director Arpita Mukherjee says the process wasn't about "taking our Indian tradition and just pigeonholing it into the musical theater where it doesn't work. It's really a melding and that's taken a lot of careful time."

The musical was first staged in Berkeley, Calif., in 2017. It was described by a Variety critic at the time as lacking the charm and subtlety of the film. Since then it has been rewritten dramatically and workshopped in New Delhi, London and most recently in Doha during the World Cup. "It's almost needed international development to find that right marriage in the orchestrations," Mukherjee says.

Director Mira Nair says she always thought of Monsoon Wedding "as an accordion: Something that expands your heart and then squeezes it." Above, Deven Kolluri, left, and Salena Qureshi in the musical Monsoon Wedding. Matthew Murphy hide caption

Essayist and critic Pico Iyer wrote the accompanying liner notes for Monsoon Wedding's DVD release as part of The Criterion Collection. He describes Nair as a "queen of bridges" who closes the gap between her many cultural identities and artistic inspirations, the high and low, the comedic and the dramatic, the joyful and tragic. "I invoked Shakespeare," he says "because of the way that Shakespeare drew on all of the commercial tools of theater which has to do with broad comedy and storytelling and things that are attractive to the crowd and yet would infuse that with a subtlety and sophistication which made it something much larger. [Nair] has that rare gift that every artist craves and it comes to its finest conclusion in Monsoon Wedding."

"It's been a rollercoaster getting here but I feel genuinely excited," she says, noting that when they began searching for a cast in 2017 "South Asian actors were full of talent but not enough experience to carry ... a whole show." But, she says, things have changed since then and she is "genuinely excited."