Review Roundup: MONSOON WEDDING at St. Ann's Warehouse; What Did the Critics Think?

St. Ann's Warehouse presents Mira Nair's musical theater vision of her endlessly resonant and romantic love story, welcoming audiences inside the frenzied leadup to an arranged marriage beset by modern tensions. Monsoon Wedding, the Musical is Nair's joyful and triumphant love song to family, Punjabi culture, and her home city of Delhi.

Two families converge on Delhi for an arranged marriage and what promises to be a glorious union. As festivities unfurl in song and dance, expectation and reality collide. The bride and groom are not who they appear to be, and dark family secrets begin to surface. Chaos ensues, and as the nuptials draw closer, so do the wedding planner and the house maid. Together they find love over a simple marigold flower. As the city pulses with the promise of relief from the heat, the ancient and unbroken ties of family are further tested, asking the question: how do we redefine love in a rapidly evolving world?

Read the reviews below!

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Jesse Green, The New York Times: Otherwise, the musicalization feels both too assertive and too inconclusive, like a parade passing by. (There are rarely buttons on the songs to tell you they’re done, leaving the audience wondering whether to applaud.) Only in one song is there a concerted approach to the dramatic experience. The song involves Aditi’s orphaned cousin Ria, raised with her as a sister. Serious and studious, Ria (Sharvari Deshpande) plans to attend New York University, mostly as a way of escaping the marital expectations that Aditi, a pampered princess — “even your panties are ironed” — is all too willing to meet.

Peter Marks, The Washington Post: It’s lovely to look at, courtesy of David Bengali’s virtuosic video wall and Arjun Bhasin’s gorgeous costumes. Vishal Bhardwaj’s melodies are consistently sprightly, and the show boasts some appealing performances, especially in Salena Qureshi’s Aditi and Deven Kolluri as her banker husband-to-be, Hemant, from Hoboken, N.J. Still, there’s something pat about the whole enterprise, redolent of the canned characters and contrived plot twists of a vintage family TV comedy, that stops “Monsoon Wedding” short of specialness.

Robert Hofler, The Wrap: How good a musical theater director is the film director Mira Nair? “Monsoon Wedding” fails even to turn the bride’s entrance in her wedding dress (a gorgeous ensemble by Arjun Bhasi) into an event worth stopping the show. Much more damaging, Mukherjee and Dhawan’s book lifts fragments from the movie without bothering to meld them into cogent scenes, and Nair’s slack direction only emphasizes the disconnect. She often lets one character slowly exit the stage while others take their time to move into place.

Tim Teeman, The Daily Beast: The families mingle and bustle, but-without camera close-ups and cuts—it all feels stiff and belabored on stage. There is no sense of high-stakes, or even low-stakes for Aditi, Hemant, or their families; no narrative grist around them making this decision for a set of truly convincing reasons, or asking what they really want. Theirs is a woefully under-conceived central relationship to base a musical around. When they sing the duet “Could You Have Loved Me” it rings not just implausible but pointless; they never seemed that into each other. There is no yearning or mystery or intrigue. They seem pretty dullsville as a couple.

David Cote, Observer: The generic quality of the music is compounded by earnestly dull lyrics full of lazy rhymes. When the servant Alice (Anisha Nagarajan, adorably hangdog) learns that her Christianity is a problem for Dubey (Namit Das), she laments, “So I am not a Hindu / Why does it matter to you?” The arranged fiancés Aditi (Salena Quereshi) and Hemant (Deven Kolluri) muse on what life in America would be like if they actually did marry. She: “If I missed home, you’d buy / samosas, bring me chai.” He: “I’d love you more each day / if this were not goodbye.” Frequent Hindi phrases lend the score a whimsical vibe, but straining to understand what’s being sung while not really caring about the song itself makes you wish Nair had conceived of a drama that incidentally drifted into song, like the film.

Jackson McHenry, Vulture: The songs tend to idle in neutral, repeating ideas already established in dialogue, never opening up into something more. You can see this happen in many movie-to-musical adaptations where, in retaining too much fidelity toward the original, the music is treated more as an ornament than an engine of the storytelling. Compare the “play the hits” approach of something like Almost Famous to the broadening effect achieved by slowing down and expanding the perspective of the story in The Band’s Visit (where it perhaps helped that the film was unfamiliar to some audiences). The buildup to Monsoon Wedding’s intermission forces a quartet (Hemant and Aditi and the wedding planner and his love interest played by Anisha Nagarajan) that fails to bring out much underlying emotional similarity between the two couples’ predicaments. Later on, once much of the musical’s drama has been resolved, it shifts focus to a story line about an abusive uncle. On film, Nair could establish the character Ria’s discomfort in a series of close-ups during other scenes. Onstage, her solo (though well performed by Sharvari Deshpande) comes after bits of dialogue in other scenes have telegraphed her past but without grounding in the score, where it might well have developed out of a reprise of some other idea. It’s the result of starting in one genre and not considering the entirely different possibilities of the grammar of another.

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