Bollywood blitzkrieg: The Big Fat Punjabi Wedding Musical

A spanking new stage extravaganza, that dubs itself ‘The Big Fat Punjabi Wedding Musical’, has been running at Bandra’s Bal Gandharva Rang Mandir, for around a month now (Thursdays and weekends only). Balle Balle! is directed by Viraf Sarkari, one of the founders of Wizcraft, the entertainment agency that has completed 30 years in the business. Including 2010’s splashy Zangoora , long housed at Gurgaon’s opulent Kingdom of Dreams, this is their fourth venture into Bollywood-style entertainment retrofitted for the stage, and the very first to premiere in Mumbai, the de facto capital of the Hindi film industry.

Bollywood on stage can be double-edged — the tried-and-tested tropes of masala cinema are both derided and embraced in equal measure. Since Balle Balle! plays out both as a send-up and a homage, it tries to ensure both sides are buttered. The premise is certainly formulaic. An authoritarian Papaji (Arun Premchand Khiani) is marrying off one of his two corn-fed desi daughters, Isha (Jasleen Kaur), to an expat rap artist, Swag (Hriday Gattani), from Canada. Quite predictably, it’s an arranged match, and their credentials have been squared up by a wedding planner, Nikhil (Hitesh Malukani), seeking to clear the way for his own nuptials with the second daughter, Nisha (Shona Sharma). The musical chairs of grooms and brides comes good in the end, but only after several regulation production numbers (including the sangeet in which each character gets to jive to a signature tune).

Balle Balle! dispenses with the Bollywood convention of lip-synching that would’ve anyway been disastrous for a stage musical. The songs are sung live and the arrangements seem fresh, but they are not original compositions. Instead, they have been culled out of recent industry hits, with a few numbers of an older vintage (like 1995’s

DDLJ ) tossed in for good measure. Playing it safe allows the show to coast along on easy song recall but arguably a roster of all-new tracks could have proved to be an even bigger selling point. Singing live does have its pitfalls because the actors, anxious about running out of breath, cannot invest into the bump-and-grind quite as whole-heartedly, unlike their cinematic counterparts whose reliance on playback allows them to be Energizer bunnies on speed. However, the initial lassitude does give way to more invigorating performances in the second half.

Writing collaborators Sarkari and Vekeana Dhillon whip up a not unfunny script that’s an awkward melange of nouveau-riche prattle, NRI one-liners, and good ol’ homegrown melodrama; but there are also edgy missives with some bite that remind us that wit and subtlety can also go well with masala, if only

Balle Balle! wasn’t as adamant on spreading its net so wide. Blockbusters blame their wares on the beleaguered ‘masses’, but given the nicheness of a stage spectacular perhaps more depth and less glitz could have been in order. One nice touch is that the characters each speak in their own flavourful pidgin, with all accents on board, and none of it grates. And if the excesses can be taken as guilty pleasures, then perhaps ways can be found to gorge on this confection, especially since it is an enterprise that doesn’t seem to be lacking in good intentions.

What ultimately shores up Balle Balle! is the sincerity of characterisation. The three women in Swag’s household are certainly shrill and outlandish, but anchored in gravitas. Grandmother Medha Paranjape is an acquired taste, and equally quickly an audience favourite, while Amishka Sood as the spinster aunt is coquettish, but never in a reductive sense. The women fail the Bechdel test spectacularly because all their conversations revolve around men even in a household shorn of a patriarch, but ironically their battle cry of “Swag Swag Swag” signals not some inbred lout but Gattani’s refreshingly sensitive man with a soulful voice and a gay best friend (Abhinav Sharma as Joe) to boot, with Malukani taking care of the swagger and the strut. They’re leading men with chinks on their armour, and land feisty women who show agency in their love lives despite wanting to take the pater horribilis along, à la DDLJ .

Even Joe finds himself a guileless

desi munda (Gaurav Amlani). Amlani is good for some fun Punjabi-style bonhomie, while Sharma is a true natural who has crafted a turn with an unapologetic flamboyance, even if the weight of his drawl can sometimes seem too much for an actor looking to soar, especially during a bravura rendition of ‘Manali Trance’. He comes equipped with his own fag hags whose exaggerated femininity wonderfully offsets his fluid persona. These are the kind of progressive touches one might be loathe to find in the actual Bollywood movies that provide

Balle Balle! its inspiration. However, what comes across as insensitive is a sub-plot that trivialises honour killings that’s all the more glaring because the closeness of live performers always make us hope that they might make something better of their complicity, unlike their celluloid cousins who must necessarily remain oblivious to the obvious.

It is a curious mix of sensibilities that informs almost everything in Balle Balle! . The production ballads are played against crystal-clear LED backdrops but the visuals can sometimes come across as over-produced. There are no ushers here to goad you to clap or sing along, so the undeniable on-stage joie de vivre can come up against a stolid audience that gives nothing back. The sprawling ensemble numbers are well choreographed, and while the group singing isn’t topnotch it has the flavour of a large-hearted community that has everyone’s best interests at heart, even if it doesn’t seem like that at first.

The writer is a playwright and stage critic