Review: In ‘Monsoon Wedding,’ an Arranged Marriage of Musical Styles

In musicals, the wedding of parts is every thing. A narrative that’s too skinny will dissolve when blended with the songs. A narrative that’s too heavy gained’t let the songs raise off. To get the suitable fizzy mix, the stability should be excellent.

That isn’t but the case with Mira Nair’s “Monsoon Wedding,” which opened Monday in an at all times busy, generally touching, however unusually delicate manufacturing at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Its shambolic plot strains (drawn from Nair’s 2001 movie of the identical title) and Indian-pop-meets-marching-band songs, although filled with curiosity individually, fail to construct on themselves or each other, leaving the intertwined story of affection and obligation to unravel as quick because it spins.

Not that the film was a landmark of pith. The organized marriage of the wealthy “South Delhi girl” Aditi Verma (performed right here by Salena Qureshi) and the U.S.-raised Hemant Rai (Deven Kolluri) was however one strand of a multifamily, multigenerational story organized in a riotous collage of small, colourful scenes. It didn’t matter what number of went nowhere; the modifying was all.

The musical tries to keep up that quick-cut impact whereas additionally squeezing the fabric into a standard musical theater format. Nair informed The New York Times she’d been impressed by the instance of “Fiddler on the Roof,” a traditional that, like “Monsoon Wedding,” encompasses one household’s marital chaos as a part of a group’s encounter with custom and alter.

But “Fiddler” was tailored from a group of brief tales a couple of robust central character, not from a film about many. The distinction exhibits. The musical’s e-book, by Arpita Mukherjee and Sabrina Dhawan, is in every single place, and as staged by Nair on an summary courtyard set by Jason Ardizzone-West, you not often know the place that’s. The manufacturing appears to assume in digital camera phrases, as if a lens have been nonetheless directing the viewers’s consideration when the truth is nothing is.

I’m unsure something might. Along with the frenzy of assembling the big celebration, the musical, just like the movie, encompasses a secondary comedian romance between Dubey, the marriage planner, and Alice, the Vermas’s put-upon maid. The marriage of Aditi’s mother and father (Gagan Dev Riar and Palomi Ghosh) additionally will get a glance, as do the romantic concepts of a tweenish cousin and a gayish brother, would-be in-laws, different relations, native employees and (it generally appears) all of Delhi.

Nair does create musical-like texture by pulling a few of these tales ahead whereas pushing others again. The drawback that threatens Aditi’s marriage — she isn’t but over her affair with a married man — is recessed thus far it basically disappears upstage, depriving the disaster of significant rigidity. In its place we get the milder drawback of deracination, since she must transfer to Hemant’s house within the States: Can she be taught to like New Jersey?

The drawback that threatens the wedding of Dubey (Namit Das) and Alice (Anisha Nagarajan) has however been upgraded from virtually indecipherable within the film to very critical certainly: In a rustic born in bitter partition, ethnic or spiritual divides of any kind — he’s Hindu and she or he’s Christian — could be harrowing. The decision is facile (“the heart never tells a lie”) however at the very least it’s in a music.

That music, sung by Dubey’s mom (Sargam Ipshita Bali) to her overwrought son, is gorgeous, one of many few with a transparent persona amongst 22 in a rating that too typically seems like a group of snippets. In one, the beautiful “Madhaniyan,” Aditi’s father bids her farewell on the eve of the wedding, pulling the identical strings as “Far From the Home I Love” in “Fiddler.” (Well, not fairly the identical strings; the superb eight-person band is highlighted by a sitar.)

But beautiful or not, the rating (music by Vishal Bhardwaj, lyrics by Masi Asare and Susan Birkenhead) is, just like the script, in every single place. When the model, whether or not American or Indian, sometimes matches the characters and state of affairs, the alignment makes the second pop. An absurd manufacturing quantity referred to as “Chuk Chuk” (for the sound a practice makes as Dubey chases one to win Alice) sounds straight out of Bollywood, and with its cinematic projections (by David Bengali) and frenetic choreography (by Shampa Gopikrishna) it suits the dramatic second in a method that excuses its utter lack of logic. A white horse is concerned.

Otherwise, the musicalization feels each too assertive and too inconclusive, like a parade passing by. (There are not often buttons on the songs to inform you they’re accomplished, leaving the viewers questioning whether or not to applaud.) Only in a single music is there a concerted method to the dramatic expertise. The music includes Aditi’s orphaned cousin Ria, raised together with her as a sister. Serious and studious, Ria (Sharvari Deshpande) plans to attend New York University, principally as a method of escaping the marital expectations that Aditi, a pampered princess — “even your panties are ironed” — is all too keen to fulfill.

That Ria can be escaping a social environment that tolerates the sexual abuse of ladies is a theme that Nair emphasizes rather more strongly right here than within the movie. But highly effective as that is, particularly in Deshpande’s efficiency, additionally it is destabilizing. It’s onerous to make the leap from her late-Act II outcry, “Be a Good Girl,” to the blissful ending, full with beautiful saris (by Arjun Bhasin), a celebratory remix and the requisite double marriage ceremony.

How Ria turned the central determine right here — hers is the one solo quantity within the present — is a little bit of a thriller, as if “Fiddler” determined to place Chava, the disowned daughter, above the title. Longer scenes (some are simply three strains) may need helped clarify the change, or shift our expectations in a present referred to as “Monsoon Wedding” to the character who particularly doesn’t wish to get married.

Still, you must be grateful that Ria has elicited from the authors their strongest writing. In “Leaving Means Returning,” sung to her by her stepfather, a lyric encapsulates in a lovely phrase the tempting if ambivalent embrace of household: “We are your comfort and your courtyard.” Just so, style is a spot of security but additionally a form of jail. “Monsoon Wedding” doesn’t fairly escape both.

Monsoon Wedding
Through June 25 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 2 hours half-hour.