Titled 'Mumbai Musicals' the Prithvi Theatre festival 2007 featured 12 Mumbai theatre companies and their take on the big 'M' of the Musical. As Bollywood courted Brecht in this contemporary re-visioning, it may well worth be a trip down some of these musical alleys of the theatre.

Our immediate association with the word Musical is rooted in a definitively Western context and particularly so in the grand and touristy spectacles of London's West End and New York's Broadway. Musicals like Sound of Music, Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables and others have been running for years on end. A visit to the half-price ticket booths in Leicester Square in London will reveal the Industry in motion.

These Musicals are presented as perfected pieces of technical savoir-faire in which a large ensemble of actors is thorough with all the singing and dancing that is required of them. It is their sheer scale that wins them their audiences' adulation. While the spoken word retains its presence, it is greatly attenuated to the razzle-dazzle in which the drama is more or less compromised.

While theatre in the West has been able to isolate the Musical from other genres of the theatre, it is still not quite the water-tight compartment that we make it out to be. The form is open to exploration and has the potential of imbibing different modes of presentation. After all in both the East and the West, music and dance have always been an integral part of drama. India's ancient civilization and the emergence of diverse folk and classical traditions; many of which are deeply entrenched in our socio-cultural landscape are all testimony to the prevalence of song, music and dance in our theatre.

M.L. Varadpande in his book 'Traditions of Indian Theatre (1979) talks of 'the primordial dance-drama with ritualistic overtones� [as being] part of indigenous tribal culture.' Rarefied as it may be, we have an eclectic and a highly evolved tradition when it comes to music and dance. This tradition, which spans different regions and styles, has been absorbed in our theatre.

The Yakshagana of Karnataka, the Jatra of Bengal, the Tamasha of Maharashtra are all examples of folk traditions that mix drama, dance, song and music. Classical traditions like the Kathakali of Kerela are referred to as dance-dramas. These are perhaps the better known ones but in actuality there is a wide and a diverse array of forms such as Kuchipudi, Therukoothu, Koodiyatam, Chau, Pandavani, Nacha, Bhaona and Bhavai. All these are dramatic by nature, even as they may be more particularly identified for their dance or story-telling techniques.

Bharata's Natyashastra, which is comparable to Aristotle's Poetics, has detailed explanations about the use of music and dance in drama. It also emphasizes on how the spoken word can be recited or sung or how movement can aquire dance like dimensions. Its theories on abhinay (performance) and rasa (aesthetics) draw on our rich traditions of dance and music and have been explored more pertinently in the classical Sanskrit theatre of playwright-poets like Kalidasa and Bhasa.

As a result of these ancient traditions, our understanding of a Musical is more free-flowing as against the conventional Western definition. The closest counterparts to the Western definition may however be found in the Parsi theatre of the late nineteenth century, in the Sangeet Natak plays of the Marathi theatre or in the Bhangwadi days of the Gujarati theatre. The Sangeet Natak and the Bhangwadi plays have acquired a hallowed place in the histories of both Marathi and Gujarati theatre.

Kirloskar's Shakuntal (c. 1875) is widely acknowledged as the first Sangeet Natak in Marathi. According to Shanta Gokhale, the play while following the structural features of Kalidasa's orginal Abhignyanam Shakuntalam was equally influenced by the Parsi play Indrasabha. She further adds that the Sangeet Natak unlike early Marathi plays, used its songs to individualize the character and placed them in such a way so as to enhance the total effect. Around 209 songs were used in Shakuntal and music styles ranged from the keertan and ovis to ghazals, dadras and thumris and even to Hindustani and Carnatic ragas like Bihag and Leelambari.

Bal Gandharva, the famous Marathi actor known for essaying women characters played the part of Shakuntala. The Sangeet Natak may no longer be performed in its original form but its influence has percolated way down to our modern and contemporary theatre. Satish Alekar's Begum Barve and Mahanirwan can well be regarded as modern Musicals. Yet another famous example of a modern Marathi Musical is Vijay Tendulkar's Ghasiram Kotwal. These plays belong to the seventies and the eighties.

More recent examples of the Musical in contemporary Marathi theatre can be found in Chetan Datar's adaptations of Mahesh Elkunchwar's Haravlele Pratibimb and Rabindranath Tagore's Giribala. The latter was part of this year's Prithvi festival. Vithal Umap's Jambhol Akhyaan, which takes an episode from the Mahabharata and draws its structure from the ritualistic, folk tradition of the Gondhal, is again a modern Musical.

Just as many old-timers of the Marathi stage swear by the Sangeet Natak, Gujarati theatre veterans like Utkarsh Mazumdar are known to look fondly back to the golden days of the 'Jhooni Gujarati Rangbhoomi'. Its best known exponent, Jai Shankar Sundari is as much of an icon as its Marathi counterpart, Bal Gandharva is. Contemporary Gujarati theatre's musical forays can be seen in the work of Manoj Shah of Ideas Unlimited. His Master Phoolmani was an adaptation of Alekar's Begum Barve. His new play Huto Ane Hute�Oh Yaa!!! premiered at the Prithvi festival.

Yet another contemporary playwright and director who has successfully given the Musical his own idiom is Ramu Ramanathan. Amongst his recent plays, Medha and Zhoombish II and Cotton 56, Polyester 84 have imaginatively incorporated lyrics, music and movement as part of the narrative. His Jazz (which also premiered at the Prithvi festival) is a musical homage to a story of Mumbai 'lying buried under the colossal commercial Behemoth called Bollywood.' These modern Indian plays are quite unlike the commercialized version of the Musical and are also therefore much more interesting and provoking for their dramatic content.

Again from a Musical point of view, plays by Western playwrights like Shakespeare and Brecht have been open to various forms and techniques. Theatre scholars may be right in disputing the reduction of Brecht's plays to that of a Musical but practitioners have been known to challenge and experiment nonetheless. Brecht's plays have been performed all over India but striking examples can be found in Calcutta's theatre. Now for this year's Prithvi festival, Sunil Shanbag and Chetan Datar were inspired by Brecht's Three Penny Opera. Their version of the play takes on a Bambaiya, gangsta twang and in the lingo of the street, is quite funnily titled Mastana Rampuri Urf Chappan Churi.

Bollywood's subtle influence along with other elements of pop culture seems to define some of these contemporary Musicals that are part of the Prithvi fest. In contrast to these immediately recognizable features is a production called Me Grandad 'Ad An Elephant. Originally produced as a theatrical reading by theatre company Not Quite There, it now finds itself in a Musical avataar under Digvijay Savant's direction. A simple story is given a dramatic lease of life and it bubbles with the effervescence of light-hearted songs that work to some extent.

On the other hand folk and classical theatrical traditions are beginning to appear more and more like relics from a distant past. Living as some of these traditions may be, they are either isolated from the contemporary landscape or as in the case of Tamasha, are surviving on the fringes. In rare cases such as Girish Karnad's earlier plays and in some of Habib Tanvir's work, is there an ossification between the old and the new that leads to a gripping theatre experience that can be identified as modern or looking ahead.

At the same time we need to question the very basis of a Musical in our context. As we have seen Music has become so entrenched in our theatre vocabulary that we need to dwell on some basic concerns. When we talk of a Musical today, are we referring back to age old performance traditions or are we in the context of the urban theatre today, trying to find other new and imaginative ways of prefiguring Music and Song. Besides what do we make of theatres like that of the political activist and balladeer Gaddar or of theatrical events in which shahir-poets compete with each other? Where do these Music oriented, socio-politically driven performances stand in our vast theatre landscape?

My general feeling is that in spite of there being a lot of buzz and activity in our theatre today, there is very little of worth that emerges after the initial euphoria has died down. The old art forms have stopped being relevant as they are not being re-interpreted or experimented with while the urban theatre today simply lacks vision. It is just not painstaking enough. We may be a Musical lot but are we really innovative or avant garde? Now's that a question whose answer is long overdue.

*The writer is Editor of this site, a theatre critic and an academic interested in Theatre & Performance studies. The edited version of this article first appeared in the November 07' issue of Outlook City Limits. The writer thanks Ramu Ramanathan for his guidance in pointing out the often ignored theatre events that take place outside mainstream venues in the city and for his reflections on the Musical in our context today-Refer to second last para.