Breaking the sound barrier

Why did the chicken tikka cross the road? To get to the other side and conquer all those palates out there, stupid! It now appears that another product of the Great Indian Melting Pot is getting set to strike a lively tune on the international stage. We refer, of course, to the musical offerings of the one and only A.R. Rahman, whose first musical Bombay Dreams prepares to take the bow at London’s Apollo Victoria Theatre next month. The storyline of this extravaganza is thin and it’s Rahman’s music that is expected to make it fly. Thirty per cent of the bookings so far — which has already touched œ700,000 — have been made by Asians. That, of course, is entirely to be expected given the prominent Asian presence in London. What should really concern us here, however, is how the possible 70 per cent of non-Asian theatre-goers will take to the masala medley that is Rahman.

The observations of the celebrity producer of Bombay Dreams may provide a tentative answer to this question. There is, in fact, very little about the musical as a genre that Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber does not know, having created some of the largest grossers on Broadway, from that divine concatenation of feline sharps and flats, Cats, to the Phantom of the Opera, believed to have grossed $3 billion worldwide. Webber believes that Rahman will bring a ‘‘different kind of musical production in the West’’. It is this dream of taking a type of music familiar in one half of the hemisphere and transporting it to the other half, that got Webber to spend two years conjuring up the Bombay Dreams project. If it works, it will be a first, not just for him, but for the 35-year-old musician whom he considers ‘‘brilliant’’ and ‘‘very creative’’ and who has provided the music to hundreds of Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam films in this country.

If Bombay Dreams does well in London, it will only be a matter of time before it crosses the Atlantic. The multiplier effects of the Bombay Dreams experiment are already beginning to make themselves felt, with the ultimate global dream factory, Hollywood, eliciting an interest in Rahman’s work. He recently indicated that he has got an offer from Columbia Pictures as well as another Hollywood company and if the deals work out, this could mark an important transition, not just for Rahman but for the Indian film industry. There was already a sliver of interest in Bombay film music created by the ‘Chamma Chamma’ sequence in the Oscar-winning film, Moulin Rouge, with kids in New York discos swinging to its exotic beat for a spell. The late Pakistani singer, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, had also put a distinct Sufi stamp to the musical score of Dead Man Walking. If, however, Rahman does make it to mainstream Hollywood, that would mark an entirely new phase of the East-West encounter in that magically darkened cavern known as the movie theatre.