Now in its final week, Seven.11 Convenience Theatre’s sixth season is still great fun. Desipina’s experimental As-Am theater series is not as groundbreaking as in its first few seasons, and the format has become a touch ossified. The closing musical number about how desis can’t hold their liquor was hilarious, but the first musical season […]
Courtesy of the Love Guru press flacks, Jessica Alba and Krystal Kiran Garib (Bombay Dreams, Lord of the Rings) sway in saris. Alba buys into Shakira’s idea of desi dress (not that I’m complaining) and revives Whitney Houston’s hair net from The Bodyguard. And in another scene, Manu Narayan and Mike Myers lip-sync a duet […]
Playwright David Mamet’s directorial debut, Redbelt, is a mixed martial arts flick using a hoary Karate Kid structure, but it’s quite fine. In one climactic hour, all of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s intimate relationships flip. It’s an engrossing tragedy, masculine to the bone, smeared in some obvious cheese. Said AnonAndOn:
Mamet being masculine is like Jhumpa Lahiri writing […]
Achinta McDaniel’s LA-based dance company fused Lewis Carroll with Bollywood elements for last fall’s Paheliyan (Riddles): The Story of Alice:
Take one part ballet, toss in bits of tap, jazz and hip-hop, then blanket it all with a variety of Indian movement. You get Bollywood-Tech…
The original story remains intact, but there are changes. For […]
Rafta, Rafta… (Slowly Slowly) is the first (relatively) big-budget desi play I’ve seen in New York, maybe the first ever. And that is notable in its own right. The production has enough funding to splash out on an eye-catching set. It’s a play, not a Bombay Dreams-style musical, though DJ Rekha contributed the bhangra. The […]
These giant opera puppets are some of the craziest things I’ve ever seen — Westchester billionaires meet Burning Man. They’re from Satyagraha by Philip Glass, an opera at the Met, and they represent Indian collaborators with the British.
The libretto is comprised of Bhagavad Gita chants in Sanskrit, without subtitles. Hindu weddings really are like German […]
Annie Zaidi has a very nice review of Baghdad Burning, the National School of Drama play by the theatre group Aaranjan, based on Riverbend’s famous blog. I saw the play at the NSD a few days ago and was thinking of writing about it, but Annie has cov…
The gods in A Midsummer Night’s Dream quarrel over a kidnapped Indian princeling whom Oberon wants to turn into his henchman, which I assume involves nothing less than a reach-around. Oberon was apparently the Mogambo of the forest (thanks, louiecypher):
Robin: The king doth keep his revels here tonight. Take heed the queen come not within […]
Photos
… Con Edison… buys a quarter of its manhole covers… from India… the workers at one of West Bengal’s many foundries relied on strength and bare hands rather than machinery…. flames, sweat and liquid iron mixing in the smoke like something from the Middle Ages… men, often shoeless and stripped to the waist, waited with […]
[Guest post by Arjun Moorthy]
On Wednesday night I saw the world premiere of The Leopard and the Fox, a play by Rajiv Joseph, directed by Giovanna Sardelli. The story is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the coup in which Zia Ul-Haq overthrew popular prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979.
I expected a largely paan-eating desi […]
In the middle of Sleuth, a three-act drama about a rich man and his cuckolder toying with each other in an airless lair, Jude Law and Michael Caine go toe-to-toe over the name of Law’s character, Tindle:
Law: Tindalini… He’s Italian… Or perhaps Tandoori.
Caine: Of the Bombay Tandooris?
This Kenneth Branagh film is great theater, a tense, […]
Check out the new off-Broadway musical Queens Boulevard, a romance between a desi man and a Japanese-American woman, based on a Kathakali drama (via SAJA). It looks ostentatiously multi-culti, with a poster inspired by Maps for Lost Lovers and many references to the Queens Museum’s Edge of Desire desi art exhibition:
On his wedding day, a […]
Having set a million hearts aflutter on Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at Number 42, Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar are spreading their dark wings across odd little Bollywood cameos and great roles in Asian plays. I very much regret missing Rafta Rafta (Softly Softly), an old British family comedy (Bill Naughton’s All In […]
Last night, due to a curious set of circumstances involving a peroxide blonde in a sundress, I found myself at a low-budget audience participation musical in the red light district by Madison Square Garden. It wasn’t quite dinner theater in Omaha, and there was no tossing of rice, but The People vs. Mona encourages the […]
Aasif Mandvi, Rita Wolf and Rajesh Bose star in a staged reading of one of my favorite not-love stories, my friend Anuvab’s wordplay romance Chaos Theory. Wolf and Bose have done a reading of this play before:
Chaos Theory begins at Delhi University in 1965 and traces the lives of Sunita Sen and Mukesh Singh as […]
In case you missed Anuvab’s play The President is Coming at the Writers Bloc festival , you can catch its small yet crucial commercial run starting this Sunday. It’s quite funny, and some of the actors are brilliant. I often rib Anuvab about how playwrights lose control of the final production compared to novelists, but […]
My absolute favorite, gimmick-constrained desi experimental theater series is moving up in the world with $18 tickets and what may be a larger location than the railroad apartment-sized microtheater in ‘05.
Eleven-minute plays set in a convenience store… [include] superheroes on a quick snack stop, a Bollywood superstar promoting the latest Slurpee flavor, a historical tour […]
Actress Sarita Choudhury and the side-splitting Debargo Sanyal will perform staged reading of my buddy Anuvab Pal’s new comedy in Manhattan on Monday, President’s Day. There will be wine and samosas afterward. The President Is Coming is probably Anuvab’s most light-hearted play to date. Debargo has marvelous comic timing. Do check it out:
The President […]
The decorators at the Prithvi Theatre café in Juhu clearly dig horror flicks.
My friend Anuvab Pal’s new comedy The President is Coming is premiering at the Writers’ Bloc festival in Bombay next week. An unnamed dim bulb of an American president is coming to India. The local embassy is winnowing down MBA students in an Indian Idol-like contest to meet the man and shake his hand.
I can […]