Accompanists at centre stage

In a charming musical set-piece plonked somewhere in the middle of Atul Tiwari’s Taoos Chaman ki Myna, a little girl named Falak Ara is taken on a whimsical ride through the alleys and firmaments of old Lucknow (circa 1857) by her new found pet, a mynah who has taken to calling herself Falak Myna. The namesakes are played by two very young actors, Vianca Verma and Afsana Ahmed respectively, and they participate in two spirited musical numbers together. Often their singing is accompanied by a more robust voice emanating from the so-called musical sidelines, that of a spirited Subasri Bhatt providing backup vocals.

While it is possible to get through entire musical productions without stealing a glance at the accompanists, here it is hard to disregard Subasri’s irrepressible joie de vivre, as she elevates the proceedings considerably with her rousing display, singing full-throated, keeping beat, providing rhythm. As if on cue, the actors themselves appear to raise their performances by several notches. Playing stolidly alongside on the harmonium is the singer’s husband Amod Bhatt, who has also composed the play’s music. A recent awardee of the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship in 2014, Amod is one of the more ubiquitous faces on the Mumbai theatre scene. His plays as principal accompanist, Sunil Shanbag’s Stories in a Song and Atul Kumar’s Piya Behrupiya, have completed more than a 100 shows apiece. The latter is still going strong, both nationally and internationally, and as recently as last week, it has completed a run of a dozen shows in Vancouver’s York Theatre.

In India, orchestration for musical plays still relies on ye olde instruments that have been the staple of the form for more than a century. Old rickety harmoniums can be found in many theatre homes, often with keys missing, but good enough for several rehearsals. Common percussion instruments in vogue are the tabla, the dholak and the pakhawaj. The accompanists are a particularly important feature of Shanbag’s productions, that can be credited for reviving Hindustani music in experimental theatre in a big way. Usually seated on the left, they are not expected to participate in the ‘acting’. They do tend to watch the proceedings with an air of polite bemusement, carefully providing the scales that allow the singers to hit the right notes, and injecting that occasional bolt of adrenaline when the energy on stage appears to be sagging. For instance, percussionist Sada Mulik is known for his thaap, a quick burst of sound from his dholak that allows actors to get back into their stride. Live music feeds into an actor’s performance in a way that recorded sound can never quite manage. Others who are more recognisable by their faces than their names include Vinod Padge, Tushar Deval and Jayesh Dhargalkar, all of whom make subtle contributions to the musical texture of the play, setting the pace of action with their wind instruments.

In plays like Piya Behrupiya and Gagan Riar’s Ishq Aaha, the accompanists are swept up into the flow of performance and placed centrestage as meta-musicians who operate both within the play’s universe and outside it. They prick up their ears, exchange knowing glances and provide musical phrases as dramatic interjections. The ‘mandali’ of performers assemble around them rather than backstage, entering and exiting the performance area as required. The keeper of the harmonium (usually Bhatt, and in Ishq Aaha, young talent Rahul Sharma) becomes the centre of this universe, the fount of musical wisdom that keeps the play in steady waters.

In a play like Purva Naresh’s Ladies Sangeet, an accompanist is even enlisted to service a romantic sub-plot, his jazz style ballads (performed as part of a wedding band) serves to serenade the young woman in the balcony. There is some delicious meta irony in that his object of affection is played by songbird Trisha Kale, who has herself been a vocal accompanist in countless plays (more than 20 running productions at one time) before taking on bonafide singing parts in plays like Hidayat Sami’sUmrao and Ladies Sangeet. Kale and Sharma, alongside guitarist Rohit Das, recently presented a concert of melodies, An Evening Unplugged, at one of Malad’s newest cultural spaces, CLAP, signalling the coming of the accompanists in some way.

As the trend of musicals continues unabated, perhaps it is just a matter of time before musicians become household names in their own right, and not just in theatre circles, where they are already quite revered.

The writer is a playwright and stage critic