‘Monsoon Wedding’ full of color, feeling
There’s nothing subtle about “Monsoon Wedding,” and that’s exactly as it should be.
Adapted from the 2001 film, the world premiere musical paraded into its Friday, May 19, opening night at Berkeley Rep with feelings so extravagant they, in one especially glorious moment, can be expressed only through a galumphing horseback ride and a whole jiggling crowd on a speeding locomotive. Directed by Mira Nair, who also helmed the hit movie, the show’s sheer hugeness, with its 20-person cast, should charm even melodrama’s staunchest skeptics. One of the primal joys of live theater, after all, is spectacle, the way it can transcend
mere work of art and become a lavish event. At the giant transcontinental wedding of Aditi and Hemant, who meet and must reconcile their worldviews and expectations all within days before they wed, you’re not just voyeur but co-conspirator.
Rendered in broad strokes, characters come quickly into focus. There’s Lalit ( Jaaved Jaaferi), the put-upon, buffoonish patriarch with a heart of gold; Aditi (Kuhoo Verma), the bride with a checkered past she’s not sure she wants to leave behind; Hemant (Michael Maliakel), the groom from New Jersey who in some ways is more traditional than his Punjabi bride; PK Dubey (Namit Das), the scheming, smoothtalking event planner; and a slew of meddling mothers and aunties all bragging about children’s Ivy League pedigrees and hankering vociferously after grandchildren. Throughout the exorbitant multiday wedding, Arjun Bhasin’s vibrant costumes help keep these relationships straight. You can track the whole plot of the musical by whether the two families’ outfits clash or match or eschew color altogether in any given scene.
Less helpful are Susan Birkenhead’s lyrics, which too often are as static as pop songs, trafficking in cliches and easy rhymes that would be unworthy even of that genre. An early groaner: “Let the music fill the air/Happiness is everywhere.” Others overexplain, as in, “You’re not who I thought you were.” At times, Nair’s direction makes lyrics all the more literal. In a song about Partition, as the lyrics go, “The land was split in two,” and the chorus sings, “Partition! Partition!” a giant piece of fabric divides the stage. Just in case you didn’t get the point, a map of India and Pakistan gets projected.
Still, a few lyrics go deeper, giving the actors something more complex to play, as in the lovely, “Could you have loved me?” And although the singing is uneven, a few standouts, supported by a seven-person live band, more than make up for the more mediocre voices. As Hemant, Maliakel has a baritone so tender that your eyes well. As the servant Alice, Anisha Nagarajan trills bewitchingly among microtones. And as Aditi’s troubled cousin Ria, Sharvari Deshpande has the pure but weathered tone of a young Joni Mitchell.
Ria’s woeful subplot turns out to be one of the evening’s delights. The musical pares away some of the film’s myriad story lines, and at first Ria’s backstory of abuse by a male family member seems more chaff than wheat, shoehorned in to force some darkness into a show that might otherwise be too brightly lit.
But here’s the thing about melodrama. It might follow an age-old formula, but when you allow characters and audience to take seriously, to truly feel its dangers — be they a careening train or the insidious evil of patriarchy — it gets at us as no other art form can, save for perhaps a wedding itself.