Bombay Dreams opens in London today

Entertainment Showbiz Pakistan , Bollywood & World Entertainment
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http://www.bombaydreamsthemusical.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/showbiz/newsid_2053000/2053167.stm

Bombay Dreams hopes to dazzle

Bombay Dreams took three years to develop

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s eagerly-awaited new musical Bombay Dreams has its first night in London’s West End on Wednesday.
Tickets for the show have not sold as fast as some had expected and the composer will be hoping the fashion for Indian-themed entertainment will rub off on his Bollywood-inspired production.

Bombay Dreams has been three years in the making and has a reported budget of £4.5m.

The show, which is being performed at the Apollo Theatre, is a love story set against the backdrop of Bombay’s world famous film industry.

Reviews

With seats still available for performances as early as next week, Lord Lloyd-Webber has admitted sales are not matching those of other big-budget productions.

We don’t have the huge advance bookings of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or the Queen musical

Lord Lloyd-Webber
But he insists tickets for weekend shows are selling well and expects interest to grow once the word spreads.

He said: "We don’t have the huge advance bookings of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or the Queen musical.

“It’s about the same as when Cats began and no-one had any idea what it was all about.”

The comparison bodes well as Cats, which closed in London last month, holds the record for the longest-running musical ever staged in either the West End or New York’s Broadway.

British audience

In putting together Bombay Dreams Lord Lloyd-Webber has assembled a heavyweight team, whose members have previously enjoyed great success in their own right.

Shekhar Kapur, director of the Oscar-nominated film Elizabeth, helped him devise the production.

The show is a love story set in Bollywood

The show’s script was written by acclaimed comedian and author Meera Syal, who is best known for her role in Goodness Gracious Me.

And the music has been written by A R Rahman, who has written more than 50 Bollywood soundtracks including the recent box office success Lagaan.

The stars of the show will also be familiar to many members of a British audience.

The heroine, Priya, is played by actress Preeya Kalidas, who has previously appeared in hit films Bend It Like Beckham and East Is East.

The cast also includes This Life star Ramon Tikaram.

Lord Lloyd-Webber is clearly hoping Bombay Dreams will be popular with members of Britain’s Asian community, with ticket information available in Hindi, Gujarati and Punjabi as well as English.

Exhibition

The opening of Bombay Dreams follows greater mainstream success for the Indian arts.

Films like Lagaan and Monsoon Wedding have enjoyed box office success.

And Devdas, the most expensive Bollywood movie ever made, is expected to break records when it opens later this year.

Department store Selfridges has just finished a month-long Bollywood celebration at its London and Manchester stores and the Victoria and Albert museum is showing an exhibition of Indian film posters.

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My guess is that this will be quite mediocre. Certainly there has been plenty of hype and it has got a lot of attention from the national media. But Lloyd Webber probably has little understanding of the desi mindset, and Meera Syal who is I think the script writer or something - is pretty clueless as well.

I think it's largely aimed at the London desis who are, let's face it a plastic bunch on the whole. Indians will flock to see it and that should guarantee at least some success. It reminds me of the promoter who spotted large asian crowds supporting Naseem Hamed and tried importing Indian boxers to the UK to see if he could cash in.

Maybe we could have a Pakistani theatre show in Bradford called Lahori Lufangays? But I can't see our lot actually paying for tickets though which might be a problem.

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I have to agree with Xtreme on this.

Although Goodness Gracious Me began as a successful series, it has since suffered at the hands of horrible writing.

With Meera Sayal at the helm of the script writing, I have to be skeptical. After bumping into her one afternoon in Southall, I was encouraged to pick up her book, "Life is not all Ha Ha, Hee Hee" (or something to that effect). I had the worst time trying to finish reading it. It had difficulty with plot and continuity....the characters weren't developed well and the whole thing left me wondering why I had bothered to see it to the end.

Knowing how the Indian community flocks to such events in Britain, though, the show will likely get a bit more popular before it hits obscurity.

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Here are the reviews from British Press
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,343-332728,00.html

Bombay Dreams: the critics’ verdict

Lord Lloyd-Webber has invested £4.5m in Bombay Dreams, the extravagant new musical based on the Bollywood film industry. It opened last night in London to mixed reviews. While the critics applauded the attempt to bring Asian music to the West End for the first time, they were unconvinced by certain elements, most notably the script and the lyrics. Overall the music got the thumbs-up.

Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph writes that Meera Syal’s script is a “mess” and says the action is allowed to “drag disgracefully”.

“But although there is much to admire in Bombay’s Dreams – most notably [the composer] A. R. Rahman’s wonderfully fresh, exciting and sometimes yearningly romantic score, in which traditional Indian sounds are brilliantly combined with the beats of modern dance music – there is much that disappoints.”

Richard Morrison of The Times applauds the spectacular set and choreography and says that overall the production is “incredibly catchy” but, that given the assembled talent of Lord Lloyd-Webber, writer Ms Syal and the film director Shekhar Kapur, it fails to shine.

“Scenes that lurch into each other like blind elephants. A plot that disintegrates into a ragbag of sitcom skits on Miss World, women’s lib and the like. The lamest ending in West End history. Trite lyrics. Cardboard characters. Dialogue that would test the patience of Mother Teresa.”

Michael Billington of The Guardian echoes the disappointment in Ms Syal’s writing but praises the spectacle of the production.

“[Yet] much the best bits of Bombay Dreams, and of Rahman’s score, come when the stage is given over to a choreographed fiesta. The highlight is a post-interval number, Chaiyva Chaiyva, when the stage explodes with a thrilling percussive music and a cascade of pink-turbaned dancers expertly drilled by [choreographers] Anthony van Laast and Farah Khan.”

Robert Gore-Langton of the Daily Express enthuses and singles out the cast for special praise calling them “terrific”. He writes: “Great fun, great costumes, and a refreshing change from every other West End show.”

Michael Coveney of the Daily Mail says the script is “badly handled” but that: “Once you enter the spirit, the show is a delight. Rahman’s riffs, Westernised ragas and thumping, rhythmically shifting chorales, with beautiful little vocal variations and wrenching key changes worthy of Lloyd-Webber himself at his best, is continuously beguiling.”

Kevin O’Sullivan of the Daily Mirror admits that by the interval he thought of renaming the production as ‘Bombay Nightmares’ but come the second act he changes his mind and predicts that Lord Lloyd-Webber has a hit on his hands. He said: “There can be no doubt that the wonder of the East has worked its magic in the West End.”

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/theatre/reviews/story.jsp?story=307142
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/theatre/interviews/story.jsp?story=306820
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/theatre/interviews/story.jsp?story=306154
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4444551,00.html

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Was I right or was I right about Meera Sayal's writing?

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Critics Applaud Lloyd Webber’s ‘Bombay Dreams’
Thu Jun 20, 6:48 AM ET
By Ed Cropley

LONDON (Reuters) - British critics gave theater impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest musical adventure, an extravagant version of Bollywood love story “Bombay Dreams,” a qualified thumbs up on Thursday after its London premier.

Hinting at possible blockbuster status around the corner, the Daily Express described the lavish show, which received a standing ovation from a star-studded audience, as the “best film-world musical since Sunset Boulevard.”

“Great fun, great costumes and a refreshing change from every other West End show,” wrote reviewer Robert Gore-Langton.

Many admired the show, which tells the tale of a boy from the slums who dreams of becoming a Bollywood star and falls in love with the daughter of a movie mogul, for challenging the dominance of Anglo-American musicals – even if it didn’t hit all the right notes.

“It’s a bold, inventive shot at something new that misses the target,” London’s Evening Standard concluded.

But the Daily Mirror found that after a faltering start, the love story managed to weave its infectious magic. “You can’t help being seduced by its energetic charm… There can be no doubt that the wonder of the East has worked its charm on the West End,” the paper said.

The critical approval should come as a welcome relief to Lloyd Webber, the man behind worldwide hits such as “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera” who has taken arguably the biggest gamble of his theater career with the previously untried formula.

In the role of producer this time, he has provided the motivation and the money for the musical, written by the highly successful Indian composer A.R. Rahman who is idolised at home but is hardly a household name outside the subcontinent.

“Bombay Dreams,” which has cost 4.5 million pounds ($6.71 million) to stage, has taken just two million pounds in advance bookings compared to the 10 million taken for the recent adaptation of children’s film classic “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

“We are all keeping our fingers crossed,” he told reporters before first performance, which needs to capture the imagination of Britain’s Asian community as well as the mainstream theater-going market, to emerge as a blockbuster.

But coming swift on the heels of unlikely film success “Bend It Like Beckham,” a feel-good movie about a young Sikh girl in London whose parents disapprove of her dreams of becoming a football star, the Sun is in no doubt that Britain is “in the grip of an Indian summer.”

“Bolly Good Show” ran one headline in the mass circulation tabloid.

Only the conservative Daily Telegraph struck a reserved note, saying that “although there was much to admire… there is much more that disappoints.”

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020620/stage_nm/arts_britain_bollywood_dc_1