There have been a few Bollywood musicals on the London stage and some readers may have seen Bombay Dreams – a Lloyd Webber production – and Merchants of Bollywood – which we saw at the Peacock Theatre. With the recent launch of Beyond Bollywood at the London Palladium it was not an event to be missed.
The audience was pleasingly quite mixed. Indian / Asian families and couples were in the majority, and it transpired later many were Gujaratis who whooped at the Gujarati dances. In addition, there were many African-Caribbean and white families too, perhaps getting their first taste of Bollywood.
The plotline is quite simple: with the death of her mother, Jaswinder, a theatre owner and Kathak dancer, Shaily, a jazz funk dancer, leaves her home in Germany to find the roots of Indian dance in India and so save the theatre from aggressive promoters.
At each stage the audience are taken through various styles of dance from the Kathak of Jaswinder, jazz funk, and following Shaily’s journey through India in Rajasthan, Punjab, Gujarat, Orissa and discovering the dances around the Hindu festival of Holi, and using the Sufi tradition of Qawwali singers.
It was good to see the production embrace Indian regional differences and styles, as well as the main religions of Islam and Hinduism. Anyone familiar with contemporary Bollywood will recognise the dance styles and the costumes
The four main leads: Ana Ilmi as Shaily Shergil, Mohit Mathur as Raghav, a Bollywood choreographer, Sudeep Modak as Ballu, his assistant, and Pooja Pant, as Shaily’s mother, Jaswinder Shergill, were all outstanding. Indeed one wishes Pant had been on stage longer; her movements and gestures were sublime. The accompanying chorus lines were also outstanding with barely a foot wrong in the whole production; they had to master a range of styles with fast costume changes necessary on occasion.
The music was a mix of familiar songs e.g. Jai Ho, from Slumdog Millionaire, and songs written especially for this production. And almost without fail the music literally hit the right notes, from the ballads to the more upbeat numbers. The sets were amazing, using backlit screens, and easily transported the audience from Europe to India, and the various regions of India.
Beyond Bollywood embodies the spirit of modern Bollywood: the vibrancy, energy, costumes and music, and in particular, the ensemble dances as well as the virtuoso dances. My only criticisms would be that the show could have gone on for a further 5 minutes and perhaps would have benefitted from an encore that the audience’s standing ovation demanded. For me the production went far too quickly and kept me spellbound.
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