Zinga Zinga Roses

Yahoo Yago!


If children (and accompanying grown-ups) were to vote for the most popular stage villain at the summer season of children’s plays this year, they’d undoubtedly pick Yago from Zinga Zinga Roses, played by Neil Bhoopalam in a strange Star Trek meets Michael Jackson outfit, with cheerful abandon and a weapon as deadly as stinky armpits.

Written and directed by Trishla Patel, the play was about the adventures of little Zinga from Planet Sesor, who has to travel to Earth, and with the help of his robot Pi and some Earth kids, save the Rose that can save his planet from evil Yago.

Trishla pulled out all stops for this one, with a large cast, live music, elaborate costumes, animation and a wacky imagination that hit the target.  As the children on stage dash about all over the world, with Yago in pursuit, children in the audience enjoyed the madness. A bit too long for today’s abbreviated attention spans, it did nevertheless have kids coming out speaking like Sesorians, with an ‘it’ added after every word.

This was one of the few children’s plays that had a some kids in the cast and that always works better than grown-ups in shorts and frocks imitating children.  (Manav Kaul pulled it off brilliantly in his Laal Pencil, managing to find actors who looked like children without much effort. Om Katare’s school going boy in Listen to Me Please was hopelessly miscast.)

The Bureaucrat

Babu Diaries

That Mumbai audiences are partial to comedy was proved once again by the packed shows of Rahul da Cunha’s new play The Bureaucrat, written by Anuvab Pal, who is a wiz with comedy and a regular on the city’s stand-up comedy circuit. Rahul da Cunha teams up for the second time with Pal, after Chaos Theory. The Bureaucrat grew out of a short piece Pal wrote for Rage’s production One On One, which in 15 minutes or so encapsulated what went wrong with Nehru’s India. The full-length play is more about today’s India without much patience for nostalgia. 

A fabulous cast, led by Bugs Bhargava Krishna as an old bureaucrat (with Aseem Hattangady playing his younger self-cum-conscience) kicked downstairs by the home minister (ably played by Jaswinder Singh with a Haryanvi-Dilli accent) reminded audiences of corruption in high places, amidst a society changing so rapidly that a 31-year-old VJ Dhishoom (Nein Bhoopalam) finds that he can’t keep up with the new teen lingo and attitude. The mantri-babu scenario immediately brings to mind the brilliant TV series Yes Minister (also its sequel Yes Prime Minister), only here the bureaucrat is not one to hoodwink the clueless politician, it’s the other way round. Pal and da Cunha must also have dropped the idea of sophisticated or understated humour for the broad, crowd-pleasing farce ofThe Bureaucrat and they hit it right in the head—the laughter often drowns out the lines. The funniest part of an opportunistic bimbo, the minister’s Girl Friday is played by Anu Menon, who rises above the stereotype of the silly secretary to nearly steal the show. But those expecting something deep or thought provoking (and comedy can be that too) might be disappointed.

Jungle Book

Animal Tales

Rangbaaz Group’s Jungle Book, directed by Shivani Tanksale and Sumeet Vyas with a supporter in Seher Latif and a backstage team that pulled out all stops to make the production enjoyable, plus actors who had kids in the audience go a little wild with excitement, is an example on how huge budgets are not needed when imagination is in overdrive.

Umbrellas painted in fluorescent colours make for an enchanted forest (Sunil Pandit, wow!), where a “man cub” Mowgli (Mayur More) is raised by wild animals.  The animal costumes with masks (by Shawn Lewis) and the creation of puppets (Pavitra Sarkar) for the garrulous vultures, and it is easy for a child to imagine Rudyard Kipling’s classic coming alive on stage. The cheeky monkeys with orange bottoms and red tails were delightful enough, but the star of the show was Faezeh Jalali playing the serpent Kaa—an instant hit with children who gaped as she slithered down on red cloth and did her mallakhamb moves, dressed in a gold body suit.  “I say hiss, you say Kaa,” she crooned and had kids screaming “Kaa” and by the end of the show totally besotted by her.

The Hindi was a bit difficult for very young children to follow (for instance, how many kids would know what gorakh dhanda means?), but for the story of Mowgli’s identity crisis, his friendship with Baloo and Bagheera and his fight with Sher Khan language was no barrier. Children understood the story,  and going by the demands of clicking pictures with the characters after the show, they had a great time.

Theatre for children is getting better and better as so many groups mount productions specially for kids during summer vacations.  And it is heartening to see that city children’s taste is not jaded by a glut of films, TV, video games and internet sites—they are still taken in by the magic of a live performance.  So many children must have seen Jungle Book cartoons, but they did not take away from their experience of watching on stage. 

Maro Piyu Gayo Rangoon

Global Gujarati

Mumbai's Gujarati audiences got a play that is totally different from the domestic dramas and comedies that abound on stage, and they rose to encourage and bestow full houses on Sunil Shanbag’s musical Maro Piyu Gayo Rangoon,  based on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.

The original, which is lightweight and a bit silly-- considered one of Shakespeare's problem plays-- has been adapted so beautifully by Mihir Bhuta, that it could easily pass off as a play written for the Gujarati stage.  And then, what a line of singer-actors Shanbag has managed to get; add to that lovely costumes (Maxima Basu), melodious music (Uday Mazumdar), simple yet elegant stage design (Nayantara Kotian) and the production syncs perfectly with the taste of the Gujarati audience looking for an enjoyable theatre experience.

Helen/ Heli  (Mansi Parekh), who does all she can to bag the man she loves, is a spirited young woman who is spurred by the challenge thrown at her by the feckless object of her affection—Bertram/Bharatram (Chirag Vora).  Bharatram, encouraged by his wicked friend Parolles/Parvat (Satchit Puranik), dreams of travel, adventure and wealth with the help of his Mumbai-based uncle Seth Gokuldas Gandhi  (Utkarsh Mazumdar).  He leaves behind his kindly mother (Meenal Patel) and Heli in the village.  The latter follows him to Mumbai, wins his hand in marriage, and when he runs off to Rangoon, goes there too, and schemes with Burmese princess Alkini (Nishi Doshi) to fool him. Archan Trivedi as thesutradhar and Laffa bhai, and Ajay Jairam as the Seth’s loyal servant complete the very able cast.  However, it’s Utkarsh Mazumdar who brings a special energy to his scenes, as a sick old man, and later a brook-no-nonsense aristocrat.

Even those who don’t know the Shakespeare play would find the plot simple and predictable, the charm lies in the ebullient staging.  And if a few more plays that break the mould of popular commercial Gujarati plays come up,  it might just help get rid of the TV soap like productions that continue to be offered to audiences, thus ensuring that young people stay away from watching or doing Gujarati plays.

Ok Tata Bye Bye

Women On The Verge

Purva Naresh’s Ok Tata Bye Bye, directed by Rabijita Gogoi (part of the Writer’s Bloc Festival) speaks in a brave female voice that challenges socially accepted gender equations.

A pair of filmmakers (Ahlam Khan Karachiwala-Jim Sarbh) come to a North Indian village to make a documentary on a caste that initiates its women into prostitution. Settled next to the highway, they cater mainly to the transient trucker population.

Seema (Prerna Chawla—brilliant), the bright, chatty young woman they hope to make the focus of their film, takes them on a merry ride, but by the end of it, she questions the middle-class city assumptions about her chosen line of work, about female empowerment and sex as a bargaining force between men and women.  According to Seema, she has a better life than many of the married women of her class, and certainly better than the tentative, no-name, no-commitment relationship between the filmmaker and her white boyfriend.  “We are same to same,” Seema insists and dares anyone to contradict her. The NGOs who tell her to give up her profession for the sake of self-respect get a tongue-lashing too.

Even if the play overlooks the child abuse and exploitation angle of the flesh trade, Purva creates characters like Seema and her more manipulative friend (Nishi Doshi), who know what they want and despite all the odds their low caste, poverty and lack of adequate education places before them, they reach their goals.

The language is colourful, the interactions between the women and the cheerful truck driver (Gagan Riar) caught in the battle not of his choosing, open and piquant. The audience probably emerges with some of their ideas of morality a bit shaken.

Pereira’s Bakery at 76 Chapel Road

Ode to the City


For those who grew up around the predominantly Catholic settlements of Bandra and Santacruz (in  Mumbai), Ayeesha Menon’s Pereira’s Bakery at 76 Chapel Road is like a shot of pure nostalgia.
Over the years, the fairytale cottages and close-knit communities have given way to impersonal highrises, and even though the Pereiras and their neighbours are fighting a losing battle, you root for them. Hidayat Sami plays Pereira with a straight-backed dignity that also seems to have been lost when the landscape of these areas changed.

In Menon’s evocative play (part of the Writers’ Bloc Festival), directed by Zafar Khan Karachiwala, Vincent Pereira, his wife (Deepika Amin), daughter Annie (Ahlam Khan Karachiwala) and neighbours try to stand up to the might of the builders, who want to demolish their home to build a car park for the large shopping mall coming up on the neighbouring plot. The sounds of drilling and hammering of new constructions punctuate their day.

Menon has created her characters lovingly and without turning them into broad caricatures.  The crabby, sharp-tongued Pinto (Darius Shroff is a revelation!), the deaf old Colonel (Sohrab Ardeshir), an Indian Idol aspirant (Nisha Lalvani) and her mother (Tahira Nath). They speak in the lilting tones of old Bandra and treat each other as family.  All this is about to end, and there is no help forthcoming – neither from the media, nor NGOs or community groups. The bakery with its traditional recipes handed down from father to son, is also losing out to mass-produced chain food stores.

The drama of love, betrayal and breaking of bonds is played out on fabulous set of a crumbling old tenement.  Many in theaudience admitted to have been moved to tears.