Adapted by Sudha Bhuchar & Kristine Landon-Smith
Based on Rajshri Productions' film 'Hum Aapke Hain Koun'. Starring Pushpinder Chani (Prem), Mala Ghedia (Nisha), Rehan Sheikh (Lalloo), Sameena Zehra (Bhagwanti), Ajay Chhabra (Arun), Shiv Grewal (Kaka), Shammi Aulakh (Rajesh), Meneka Das (Pooja), Harvey Virdi (Kamla), Archie Lal (Professor). Directed by Kristine Landon-Smith. Adapted by Sudha Bhuchar.

The latest Tamasha Group production is a bit of a song & a dance. Well fourteen songs, two weddings and a funeral to be exact. Parodying the title of hit film 'Four Weddings & A Funeral', the musical is based on the Hindi movie 'Hum Aapke Hain Koun'. Being one of the few Asians who have not seen the Mumbai Blockbuster, I came expecting Bollywood and that's exactly what I got. Only in English!

The play starts with a musical dirge and then steadily progresses downwards. Despite the strong miming (singing?) abilities of the actors, the songs are bland.

The production is also over choreographed. Actors flit on and off stage and even the depiction of a short car journey seemed to require a life-size car as a prop. Naturally, this might be exactly the effect director, Kristine Landon Smith and designer, Sue Mayes, had intended. After all, Bollywood films are a formulaic mix of love, melodrama, song and dance shot in exotic locations. The dances in such movies even have several costume changes mid sequence!

On stage, however, mimicking this grandiose effect is disastrous. The set features a dual staircase with scenes taking place on the upper landing and at ground level. In several scenes, actors sit on the upper landing dangling their legs over the un-balustraded platform with nearly a ten-foot drop below! Pooja, one of the key characters, in a scene reminiscent of Sue Ellen in TV show Dallas, trips down the staircase and lands in a 'dead' heap at the base. Sadly this elicited an inappropriate laugh from the audience who had not realised that her death was a focal point in the plot.

Sudha Bhuchar's adaptation has butchered a thin plot. Rajesh, the son of a wealthy industrialist, marries Pooja, a professor's daughter. Most of the first half is devoted to the build-up to the wedding and in the very next scene we see Pooja nine months pregnant! That has to be pure Bollywood. The child duly arrives whilst characterless Rajesh is away at a Star Trek convention, or a business meeting, I forget which.

Pooja tries to unite her younger sister Nisha with her extrovert brother-in-law, Prem. Both younger siblings are in love but too shy to declare themselves to each other. Pooja however had not figured on tripping over her sari 'pallav' and ending up dead. In a bizarre twist, the mourning parents of each plot another marriage, this time between Rajesh and Nisha. One simply cannot let a 'marriageable' catch go, can one? Needless to say, there is a tear or two shed before a happy ending is reached.

As a musical, 'fourteen songs' is abysmal. For entertainment value it is relatively harmless fun. It is sad that there are so few Asian productions with which to compare it. But most will agree that is not a patch on Tamasha Group's earlier production of hit show 'East is East'

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