Hooray for Bollywood!

It seems like recent years have brought forth a bumper crop of Broadway musicals ripe for critical scorn. Just this past season, there was Lennon, Souvenir, Lestat and Tarzan. Yet even among such palpitating targets, none has been riper than Bombay Dreams, the Andrew Lloyd Webber concoction that came fully-assembled with “bomb” embedded in its title — daring you not to include that deathly verdict in your headline.

But curiously enough, Bombay really isn’t as bad as Gotham City’s rabid critics might have you believe. Part of the reason is that this gaudy, messy, trashy, saccharine glob is as fully aware of its Bollywood foibles as its title implies.

Like a parade of evening gown contestants in Atlantic City, Bombay Dreams gives you one Bollywood cliché after another. For me, as well as legions of Baby Boomer curiosity seekers, learning what these clichés are is the essence of the fun.

Frankly, my concept of India pre-Webber came from an austere stew of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, the Beatles’ importations of Ravi Shankar, Paul Horn’s World Pacific flute albums, pappadam, and chicken corma. What a revelation to see Indians making fun of themselves, smiling and laughing amid the full vulgarity of Bollywood! Wet sari dances in every Bombay cinema classic known to man — who knew?

So, guilty as it may have been, I took enormous pleasure out of Bombay Dreams. Now I finally comprehend that deep, dark mystery: How could those sweet dusky folk ever bring themselves to nuke Pakistan? Simple, they’re devilish greedy beasts — just like us!

OK, so the songs were a little low on melodic richness and lyrical protein, mostly airy cotton-candy confections suitable for the 10-year-old whom I brought to opening night. I did cringe a tad when the marvelous Aneesh Sheth led a bevy of swishy, rouged eunuchs who idolized our hero, Akaash, played to Indian Idol perfection by Sachin Bhatt.

My music professors had assured me decades ago that castrati were all from a bygone age. Here they were, picketing a Bombay beauty pageant — a feminist protest? — and giving 10-year-old girls like the one beside me god-knows-what kind of ideas. Apparently, the fix doesn’t quell sexual desire or jealousy.

Even the erotic gyrations of the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble at this year’s Spoleto Festival USA were no preparation for the spectacle of movie goddess Rani as portrayed by the luscious, swivel-hipped Sandra Allen. Why, those Nrityagram dames were mere porcelain dolls compared to this fleshy, voluptuous, booty-licious temptress.

She was the main lower-body attraction competing for Akaash’s affection, while Priya, as played by slick and slacksy Reshma Shetty, matched Rani’s allure on a higher plane — with significantly more clothing and less expenditure of energy. Ah, but even she was not altogether pure in her braininess, inheriting her filmmaker father, Madan’s, distaste for the lower classes.

Only the upper classes are permitted among Bollywood royalty, and Akaash and his Sweetie — the eunuch destined for sacrifice and death — are from the slums. Akaash’s granny, an Untouchable, is graced with a wisdom and pacifism worthy of Gandhi, indulging even our hero’s lust for crass commercial success. Visions of Akaash wielding his power to save the condemned slum of his birth are embedded at the heart of this matriarch’s wisdom.

Equally at the heart of Bombay Dreams — the other ventricle, so to speak — was the unbridled silliness of composer A.R. Rahman’s “Shakalaka Baby.” Allen made sure we all wished to shakalaka with her more than with anyone else at Belk Theater that night, with sufficient repetition to make forgetting that darn ditty an act of righteous exorcism.

Nothing in the Rahman score resembled his Celtic new age stylings currently bombing in Toronto at Lord of the Rings. I thought we were in for a terribly long evening when the company delivered the title song. If the best we were going to get was a rehash of Les Miz pretentiousness, I wasn’t sure whether I could slog through all this. Luckily, Rahman soon settled into innocuousness worthy of the Bollywood theme.

There were even a couple of pleasant surprises in act two. “How Many Stars?” a duet between Akaash and Priya at the height of their ambivalence, struck me as a Broadway ballad with a positive difference. On its heels, the reproachful “Hero,” hurled at Akaash by Sweetie and Priya, stood apart from the other throwaways of the evening.

DEADLINE FRENZY

There I was, speeding along I-77 early Saturday morning, wondering what I would say if a cop pulled me over.

“Officer, I really wasn’t driving under the influence of alcohol. It’s the influence of deadline pressure at Attack of the 24-Hour Theatre Project!”

But I arrived at Theatre Charlotte without hearing the telltale sirens of persnickety police — three, maybe even four minutes before my 8am deadline. Yes, I was one of the six foolish playwrights — scratch that and make it intrepid playwrights — who received the first and last lines of our 10-minute plays, a postcard to inspire us, and 12 hours to fill in the blank between those two lines.

Difficult. My fellow travelers on the road to glory or shame were Marcie and Marty Kelso (“Heart Trouble” directed by Catherine McDougall), Aaron Moore (“Complete Rubbish” directed by Glenn Weyler), Ann Marie Oliva (“Natch.com” directed by Annette Saunders), Joanna Gerdy (“Someplace Else” directed by Tom Keeling), and Terry Roueche (“The Bowl of Soup” directed by David G. Holland).

The director victimized by my piece, “Circle 8,” was none other than Matt Cosper. None of the playwrights knew who would direct his or her script. Nor in this fiendish double blind did any of the directors know who had perpetrated this torture upon them and their actors.

Justice was even-handed, for the actors and director had an equal 12 hours to cast, rehearse, costume and memorize our scripts. The show began at 8pm on Saturday evening.

A stupefyingly numerous and enthusiastic throng — more so than any crowd I’d ever seen at previous editions of this 24-Hour madness at the defunct SouthEnd Performing Arts Center — showed up at the Queens Road barn. More people showed up, in fact, than could fit into SPAC without hoodwinking the fire marshals.

Our sometimes well-deserved catcalls never came. Instead, laughter and applause flowed freely, somewhat beyond the strict merit of the outcome — but in delicious accord with the stress and exhilaration all the participants experienced onstage or at our computers.

Truly a rush in more ways than one.

This article appears in Aug 2-8, 2006.