Word: bombay
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...billboard outside the Broadway Theatre reads, A R RAHMAN'S BOMBAY DREAMS. That name may mean little to musical-theater devotees, but in the rest of the world it's golden. Like Gershwin or Lennon-McCartney, the name stands for melody, quality, energy, instant hummability--a sound both personal and universal, devouring many older forms and transforming them into something gorgeously...
...which makes Bombay Dreams a big risk for Broadway: a $14 million musical with no stars, a score by a composer famous in most of the world (see box, below) but not in the U.S., and a story set in the Bollywood milieu unknown to Broadway's conservative audience. Producer Andrew Lloyd Webber hired writer Thomas Meehan (The Producers, Hairspray) to cut a lot of in-jokes, pump up the mother love--domesticate the Bollywood beast. Will the transplant work? The show has a $6 million advance; and at a preview last week, the audience, perhaps 25% South Asian, seemed...
...Bombay Dreams needs to fill only 14,000 seats a week. How do you get millions to see an Indian movie? For a true crossover, you need a movie that just happens to be Indian, that pours a familiar tale into an Indian milieu. That's Marigold, the story of an American starlet, stranded in India, who works in a Bombay movie to get airfare home and falls for her Indian leading man. Bollywood is not the genre here; it's just the backdrop for a fish-out-of-water plot. Says Steve Gilula of Fox Searchlight, which distributed...
...most part, Indians are more successful behind the camera than in front of it. M. Night Shyamalan made the megahits The Sixth Sense and Signs. Mira Nair, director of Salaam Bombay and Monsoon Wedding, is making an Indian-infused take on Vanity Fair, with Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp. And Nair has a three-film slate for her company, International Bhenji Brigade, financed by an Indian businessman...
Rahman, who has been jetting from his home and studio in Madras to New York City (for Bombay Dreams) and London (where he is preparing his West End musical of The Lord of the Rings), is a world traveler from way back. Born A.S. Dileep Kumar, he began playing piano at 4, and when his father died five years later, the precocious child hit the road, touring the world with tabla maestro Zakir Hussain. The family converted to Sufi Islam, and Dileep took the name Allah Rakha Rahman...