Richa Das - Page 2

April of 2023 ended with four productions of Metamorphosis Theatre and Films' latest offering - 'Morning Star'. I got the opportunity to witness one of these productions on a houseful Sunday evening at the SAPP Auditorium in Mumbai.

This edition of Prithvi's theatre festival welcomed Adishakti's long-running play Bhoomi. The play is directed by Vinay Kumar, who also adapted the play from Sara Joseph's Malayalam play titled Bhoomirakshasam. The theatre troop arrived from Auroville, and a brief glimpse at their repertoire reveals that they have always taken a keen interest in revisiting old Indian folktales and spinning them with bewildering modern twists. From Bali, Brhannalla, and Bheema to Ganpati - their plays have mastered the pastiche - bringing together the old and the new in entertaining ways. It is a loose adaptation of Bhoomirakshasam, a stalwart in the women's theatre movement of Kerala. For its form, the play draws from traditional art forms like therekoothu and yaskshagana to tell the story of violence against women.

'Every Good Boy Deserves Favour' is a political satire that arrived on the NCPA stage for a rare performance. This spectacle was written by Tom Stoppard - the story of a political dissident in the Soviet Union. The play is accompanied by a 45-piece orchestra, performed by the Symphony Orchestra of India, which itself becomes a character of the play, adding to the crests and troughs of a prison-asylum's inhabitants.

A few days ago, I had the chance to catch a screening of 'The Devil Wears Bataa' at the NCPA. I had previously seen listings of the show and stopped myself from catching a production of the same.

An eclectic group of dancers from both these groups have joined hands to put together a showcase at the NCPA in the coming week of July.

This Shakespearean gem from Julius Caesar reverberated across the halls of the Royal Opera House, Mumbai. A brand new stage production of the play by Jeff Goldberg, Farah Momin, and their excellent team at the Jeff Goldberg Studio, is all set to rejoice audiences in the upcoming weeks.

A Two- Day led by Playwright, Screenwriter, Film-Maker and Stage Director Mahesh Dattani, presented by Royal Opera House, Mumbai and Avid Learning.

An adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Streetcar Named Deire

Vayam-the Performing Arts Society begins with its 5th edition of 'Taaleem' this June. Taaleem is a platform for all theatre aspirants who want to live their passion for theatre.

From fresh to radical to hysterical, everything about Kunal Kamra's thoughts is different from what we have been exposed to in Indian comedy so far.

Veterans Rakesh Bedi and Ananth Mahdevan lead this well-written Abhishek Patnaik comedy "Last Over", one of the many selected plays put up in the esteemed Delhi Theatre Festival.

'George's Marvellous Medicine' and once again one could all but marvel at the storyteller. The play is championed by its excellent use of the modern technically equipped stage in addition to effective background score, building a darkness that fit the characters just like Dahl does it.

Not enough people have bothered about Indian movies enough to revisit them and create visual spectacles out of them in other mediums. Growing up in this almost dystopian temporariness of televised art, it was refreshing and all the more exciting to sit through three hours of extraordinary story telling that Feroz Abbas Khan's Mughal-E-Azam the play engaged in. The experience is loaded with generous music, the purest of Urdu writing, remarkable production value and most importantly, an overwhelming ensemble of actors and dancers that bring India's most remembered cinematic episode live on stage.

The five meter long Indian drape has across epochs defined several aspects of an Indian woman's existence. 'The White Sari' is a tremendous and if I may say a very colorful attempt at understanding the several shades of cultural control over women.

The mesmerising NCPA venue, the holiday season, the best of rock and roll and Broadway put together- surely makes for a million dollar quartet. This Christmas, Mumbai was host to a touring Broadway production of the Million Dollar Quartet, written and created by Colin Escott, Floyd Mutrux and Ian Talbot. India's fascination for the west and its long withstanding history of rock and roll were optimized to the maximum as full house weekends and roaring crowds embraced the musical.

Our fascination for R K Narayan and his world of innocence is never ending and it is precisely this nostalgia that brings out the best of 'Malgudi Ke Gaon Se'. Rahul Saini's Malgudi is resplendent with the same old charming characters from a colonial India, fighting and finding easy resolutions for their daily hassles.

An ambitous poetic dance drama brought out by Vayam Performing Arts Society in New Delhi, India. The play sketches out the trials and tribulations of the good old artist, confined in the shroud of a capitalist world that cannot decipher his artistic pursuits.