Merchants of Bollywood!!!

Yes, as you can see from my title, I have gone to see the musical and my verdict?

I LOVED IT!!!!!

Granted that I'm not as discerning as the journalist from Life! newspaper who ALWAYS is sent to cover anything related to Indian culture and is ALWAYS reviewing the hindi movies, HOWEVER, I'm still an audience member and I can still have SOME valid points, thought I do know that I use capital letters too much.

Anyway, let me start talking about the show. The dancers were perfect, with so much of energy and they were absolutely in sync, ALL THE TIME! The costumes were so colourful and even mimicked the original costumes from the movies. The dancing, my gosh! I LOVED the dance moves!! The were so complicated, more so than the ones in the movies, because naturally, the ability of the trained dancers is much higher than that of the Bollywood actors and actresses. The theme of the story is something that I've contemplated before myself, traditional versus modern dance styles, especially since my mother is always complaining about the "vulgur hip thrusts" in all the songs nowadays. I didn't realise till now that, actually the show's story, while it has nothing directly to do with me (I don't have a famous choreographer as a grandfather), but if you think about it, it sort of does. While I'm always saying that I'm a crap dancer, I can't deny that i AM a dancer. Its interesting cuz I've been learning classical for so long, and still learning(sort of), and yet, I'd love to learn the Bollywood style of dancing too!

What I loved especially about the show was that during the entire musical, the dancers on stage would be whooping and yelling and cheering while they danced and they always made it a point to tell the audience to clap along! It made it feel almost concert-like. At some point, 2 of the dancers came off the stage to dance with some of the audience members and I could see, at the front, the guy the dancer asked to stand up actually did start dancing with him! It was so cute and spontaneous and the audience member was so willing! I loved the fact that the audience itself was cheering and clapping so I felt that the performers were getting their just dues.
At the end of the show, the 4 main characters were signing autographs, and even though they had run out of programmes, I queued up (it wasn't a particularly long queue), and got all 4 of their autographs on the tickets. On the whole, The Merchants of Bollywood was an incredible experience and even though I had been looking forward to it for so long, it totally exceeded my expectations(sometimes, you wait so long for something to come and when it finally does, it falls a litle flat)!!!! I loved loved it and sigh, wishI could see it again!!

love love,
shini