Director Mira Nair stood inside the St. Ann’s warehouse last week, pointing to a marigold-covered archway being assembled near the entrance. Aware that wedding photography frequently takes place right outside this space, she chose to present her work at the theater located along Dumbo’s waterfront, just a stone’s throw from her eastern location. We were talking about a musical adaptation of the 2001 movie Monsoon Her Wedding. confluence of the Hudson River. “That’s what our show is about,” she said. “Join.”
Like the film, the drama centers around an arranged marriage that brings together two disparate Indian families: a wedding planner and a domestic worker. In the musical, a joyful and chaotic wedding takes place through true glamour (the bride has to deal with a scorned secret lover), diaspora (parties, especially New Jersey-born grooms from all over the world), and relationships. form a mosaic of problems. Beyond caste and religion.
It premiered at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in 2017 to critical acclaim. various reviews, the show took a “beautiful trip” to New York, as Niall put it. (Actually, it’s a comeback of sorts. Rehearsals for the first production took place in Manhattan, with Anisha Nagarajan reprising her lead role as the bride’s maid and Palomi Ghosh as the aunt. ) Since then, “Monsoon Wedding” has been reworked, with new choreography, movement directions, and scenic design. Additional writers were brought in to help write the book, and Shaw held a workshop for friends and family in New Delhi in 2019, in which Gagan Dev Lia participated as the father of the bride. Plans for a 2020 UK performance were canceled due to the pandemic, but last year it was performed in Doha as part of the Qatar World Cup cultural programme.
Last Thursday, two days before the musical premiered, Susan Feldman, the theater’s artistic director, walked by at one point. While she still cares to step into a piece of her wedding tent that she’s still putting together, she voices that the piece has “pushed the warehouse farther than ever before.” I shot it.
Visual proof of that claim may be Jason Ardizon West’s striking Brutalist set spread across a vast performance space. “It’s a holistic design in terms of how the audience interacts with the landscape,” Ardizone-West said in a video call earlier today. He added that the set was inspired by home courtyards in India, “inspired by ancient stairwell structures and modernist architecture, especially Le Corbusier, who owns many buildings in India. ‘, he added.
Niall explained that he always wanted his audience to feel like guests at a wedding, calling the new landscape design “the fruition of many people’s dreams”.
“In India, when you get married in a house, it pops out in the courtyard, under the canopy, under the tent,” she says. “There were open doors open to the community to celebrate this wedding and that was the feeling I was hoping for.”
The tangible majesty of the set, which the audience must traverse to reach their seats, is balanced by Arjun Bhasin’s colorful and culturally distinctive costumes. (“India is like Japan,” Niall joked, “everything is encrypted.”) For example, men’s turbans are a special lilac, traditionally worn on the eve of a wedding. The bride is never seen alone. Bhasin, who worked on the film, considers himself “one of the oldest members of the production,” but said the key to preserving that DNA was to keep the focus on the characters.
“Once you eliminate the close-ups and get to these tableaus, it becomes about people,” Bhasin explained. “This show is about the interactions between these people. Upstairs and downstairs, the bride’s family and the groom’s family, all these different love stories.”
Work on the film began in 2006, with Naia and the film’s screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan working with composer Vishal Bhardwaj and lyricist Susan Birkenhead. Nair said she was inspired by the 2004 Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof. This show is a show built around cultural traditions that have adapted to survive. Like the musical, the film touches on the effects of the partition of India in 1947, highlighting the religious, social and economic differences among its characters.
“In a way, we made our own version of the movie,” Nair said. “It’s about our family, but it’s a very universal, essential story of understanding society as a whole and movement through a very personal story.”
That idiosyncrasy meant weaving into the adaptation the notion of jugal bandi performance, a type of Indian duet. This is felt not only in the score, which also features lyrics by Masi Asare (who also received a Tony Award nomination last year for “Paradise Square,” which also deals with cross-pollination of cultures), but also in the placement of the band on the side. be done. of stage.
“I think of it as a call and response between the music and the actors, and that’s what really shaped the piece,” Niall said. “That’s why the musicians are equal to the actors, and you’ll also see sitar players and trombones. This is a true combination of the heavy sound of a brass band and an Indian wedding, distilled and very exquisite.” “
The book’s co-author, Arpita Mukherjee, was Nehru’s assistant before being promoted to associate director and dramaturge during a production at Berkeley. She immigrated to the United States from Delhi at the age of 12 and brings an understanding of the immigrant experience to Dhawan’s latest book, reframing her groom’s family as second-generation Indian-Americans.
“When the movie was released, there was still a very outdated conception of what India was, and we didn’t understand what a globalized India looked like,” Mukherjee said in a video call. said in “There’s a great story here about what home and belonging mean,” she continued. “What’s really exciting is that there are different types of brown people who have very different experiences with brown because of their class and upbringing.”
Naia’s work, like Mississippi Masala, an interracial romance between a black man and an Indian-American woman, explores cultural differences and the drama of children’s lives, Salaam Bombay. !” never hesitated to explore the underexposed side of his native India. in the slums.
For the musical, this quest to reflect the times meant revising one of the film’s subplots about grooming and the sexual abuse of two young family members by relatives. In the film, the family grants the wealthy patriarch some amnesty, but in the musical he is condemned.
“We have done everything in our power to make women question patriarchy and speak up,” Nile said. “Other characters plagued with this issue don’t use it as a cover. They make decisions in their lives that reflect their unacceptability of such behavior. but we’ve never had it before.”
Mukherjee echoed that sentiment, calling women “the custodians of new ways of thinking and living.”
“They all have a voice within the show and are looking at what they can do with the musical format to express the spirit of the film, but we’re looking deeper,” she added. “Music is at its core. Who can sing, who can voice? There’s a big theme of wanting things to be different than previous generations, and it’s all led by women.”
