A WEDDING IS A NATURAL SETTING FOR A MUSICAL: You immediately have a love story to work with as well as an opportunity for subplots about family feuds, generational tensions, and more. It’s all the better if you’re looking at an extravagant event like the one in Monsoon Wedding, an arranged marriage taking place in Delhi over the course of several days, which comes with the extra stresses of class anxiety, the pressures of globalization, and the vagaries of weather. The film version of the story, directed by Mira Nair and released in 2001, even has a few diegetic musical performances, so it seems natural that, just five years later, Nair and screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan started work on turning it into a stage musical. But even after a decade of development, the version that’s made it to a stage in Brooklyn still looks and sounds like a work-in-progress. Nair and her collaborators have captured a lot of the energy of the film, but what seems like a natural fit for the genre ends up revealing the difficulty of making any story sing.
This story is from the June 05 - 18, 2023 edition of New York magazine.
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This story is from the June 05 - 18, 2023 edition of New York magazine.
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