ネタ | ザ★美人堂道場 | ファッション | まにあ道

Nearly 16 years after its silver screen release, Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding had its world premiere as a stage musical at Berkeley Repertory Theatre on Friday night. The musical is headed to Broadway after its run in San Francisco’s Bay Area, long considered the ideal testing ground for cinema-inspired plays.

When the film came out in 2001, it quickly achieved cult status for the way it held a mirror up to Indian society. The story unfolds around an arranged marriage in Delhi, between Aditi, a seemingly well-to-do Punjabi girl, and Hemant, the son of a family friend who lives in Texas, a man she barely knows. Their families descend on Delhi from all over the world for the wedding, bringing along a lot of emotional baggage. But it turns out that the bride has been having an affair with a married man, and her family’s finances are a mess. The film’s subplots also explored important issues that are still considered taboo in public discourse in India—such as sexual abuse, and interclass relationships. An older relative is found to have molested the bride’s cousin as a child, and the eccentric wedding planner falls in love with the family’s maid.

See more at sexy wedding dress

While mainstream Bollywood films were typically escapist fantasies, glossing over the darker aspects of family relationships and everyday life, Monsoon Wedding tackled them head on.

"When the film came out, it was almost the first portrait of globalisation that people outside India had seen… now, we've got a different world,” Nair recently said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "Now, in the time of Trump, the doors are literally closing between borders. What we are bringing to you in Monsoon Wedding, the play, is a portrait of two things: an India that is complicatedly becoming a sort of real power, but also a portrait of America, since half our story is about America — an America that may not even let us in."

Nair has collaborated with some of the best creative minds from India and the U.S. on the stage adaptation. The songs are composed by Bollywood filmmaker and composer Vishal Bhardwaj and choreographed by Lorin Latarro with lyrics by Susan Birkenhead. Bharadwaj has long been celebrated for his rethinking of Bollywood conventions. Even in his films, he uses music to advance plot, rather than simply as an entertaining interlude. The costumes are designed by Arjun Bhasin, one of India’s most accomplished costume designers, who has worked on international projects as varied as Life of Pi and the HBO series Divorce, starring Sarah Jessica Parker.

The story is by Sabrina Dhawan, who wrote the screenplay for the film. She was a student at Columbia University at the time, and drew from her own understanding of the Indian immigrant experience in writing the script. For the stage adaptation, she has tweaked certain moments to be more relevant to the contemporary socio-political context of India and the U.S. Nair is the director, as well as one of four producers on the show, with Margo Lion (“Hairspray”) and Stephen and Ruth Hendel (“Fela!”). The cast features over 20 actors, and has drawn standing ovations during the previews at Berkeley Rep.

Nair's film sure seems to have all the right ingredients to translate into a lavish stage musical. One of the hallmarks of live theatre—and coincidentally, also of Indian weddings—is after all, spectacle, the way an idea can become an immersive experience of epic proportions. And the audience on opening night seemed to agree.

According to one review in the East Bay Times, “the infectious score and bewitching choreography” and the “costumes, a shimmering sea of silk and sequins in saffron hues, never cease to dazzle the eye.” Another review in SF Gate read, “here’s the thing about melodrama. It might follow an age-old formula, but when you allow characters and audience to take it seriously, to truly feel its dangers... it gets at us as no other art form can, save for perhaps a wedding itself.”

Also see: www.sheindressau.com