By Khalid Hasan
WASHINGTON: Going by the reviews which if bad, can sink a show, the much-hyped Bombay Dreams which opened on Broadway last week has gone “belly up”.
The New York Times and Washington Post have both ridiculed the $14 million Andrew Lloyd Webber musical extravaganza with music by Indian music director A. R. Rahman. The New York Times in a scathing review, while noting its splash of gorgeous colour, said “yet such is the perverse spell cast by this friendly, flat and finally unengaging tale of glamorous movie folk and lovable untouchables that everything seems to melt into one neutral blur before your eyes, like a monochromatic symphony in the key of beige.” Noting that the advertising of the show had promised that the audience would be taken somewhere where they had never been before, quipped that “even theatergoers who have never seen a sari or eaten papadum are likely to find Bombay Dreams as familiar as this morning’s breakfast. It takes more than color, evidently, to be colorful.” Ben Brantley, the NYT reviewer, called the musical “an expensive model of blandness.”
“Bombay Dreams,” he wrote “tries to translate with a wink the formulas of Bollywood musical melodramas. But the effect is of the wide-eyed, helpless stare of something trapped in a listless limbo between tipsy spoof and sober sincerity. That was more or less the verdict of many critics in London when the show opened there two years ago, but Bombay Dreams went on to become a fat, nose-thumbing hit. A similarly defiant success in New York is not assured, however, since London has a much larger and more culturally conspicuous population of South Asian descent than New York does.”
The review observed in conclusion, “For a Broadway show set in Bombay that has arrived by way of London, this musical winds up suggesting another provenance altogether: Las Vegas, land of the flashy floor show and simulacra of foreign metropolises, where live entertainment exists mostly as lavish background noise.”
The Washington Post ran its review by Peter Marks under the headline ‘Belly up in Bollywood’ review began with the cynical comment that Bombay Dreams “is not without value to the cause of international understanding. In fact, it makes an important contribution to the advancement of global culture: the wet sari.” In the shows big number ‘Shakalaka Baby,’ jet sprays shoot columns of water high into the air as the dancers gyrate into the fountain and emerge drenched. “It’s a dose of the subcontinent by way of Caesars Palace,” wrote the reviewer.
The “hyperkinetic dancers,” the paper wrote “of this colorful, twitchy, witless exercise” pump elbows and thrust pelvises, music-video style.” The “wet sari” number, wrote Mr Marks, is “such a bubbly piece of kitsch, such a torrential downpour of showbiz cliché, that it almost qualifies as a lark. Almost. What denies it guilty pleasure status - what sends the show spinning, spinning down the drain - isn’t the terminally dumb plot (a parody of the filmic conventions of Bollywood) or the insipid characters (stock figures from every romance you’ve ever seen). It’s a tone deafness in the humour, a comic cluelessness that’s hard to fathom.”
The review went on the ridicule the show even further with the observation that “this musical makes the Broadway season’s other towering misfires, Taboo and The Boy From Oz, seem like worthy candidates for literary analysis by Renaissance scholars. The dialogue of Bombay Dreams … lands with a relentless thud … The musical traffics in such shallow images of India that you are surprised to discover the concession stand isn’t serving plates of tandoori chicken … Lacking satirical bite, the story exists to be endured, like a bad date.”
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_2-5-2004_pg7_56