A much-shortened version of this appeared in The Hindu on the 11th October. This in my opinion is the actual shorter version because I could have written twice as much. : )
The creators of Sing India Sing talk about what it takes to make a musical from the ground up
Deep in Bhandup, enough removed away from the perpetual traffic jam called LBS Marg that the incessant horns and engine rumbles do not percolate through, in the furthest corner of a somewhat derelict factory compound, the sounds of music being pumped out of an evidently high quality sound system pulse into the stultifying afternoon air.
On one side, there is a shamiana; inside there are tables and plastic chairs, and the steel serving bowls you’d see at any buffet. No one there, though. Ahead is in one of the few structures that isn’t a shed. Two rows of doors stacked on each other, with paper signs that say things like ‘Production,’ ‘Costumes,] and mystifyingly, ‘Hashtags.’ The music is coming from what one of the warehouses or sheds that has seen better days. On the dented metal walls, bedraggled posters extol a union leader. A small iron door opens into a dark, cavernous space with a gleaming two-story stage sprawled across its width. Above it all, from rows of girders, spotlights pivot and swirl light around, and huge ducts pour cool air into the void. Eyes still adjusting to the darkness, one sees that a wide table ahead, with an array of electronic equipment, monitors glowing. In plastic chairs, an assortment of shadowy figures are murmuring to each other.
This is where the cast and crew of Sing India Sing replicated the stage that the curtains will go up on this Friday, at the Jamshed Bhabha theatre, NCPA, before the musical moved to St. Andrew’s in November. The idea is to simulate, as much as possible, the setting of the actual theatres.
Rahul daCunha is one of those figures in the shadows. He has spent something like three decades in theatre, with a strong reputation as a director and nurturer of talent. But for this show, though he was initially listed as co-director with Nadir Khan, he is billed only as co-writer, with Bhargava ‘Bugs’ Krishna. Which perhaps explains the semi-recumbent position he manages to achieve despite the plastic chair being distinctly not a lounger, while Khan is seemingly everywhere: behind the console, murmuring instructions on the microphone; on stage doing pull-ups using a bar on the set while mouthing the lyrics as the singers sing; unlit cigarette dangling from his fingers, conferring with the wardrobe handlers and the team behind the sound deck; doing a scene-by-scene analysis over a mobile phone recording with the choreographer.
The story behind the story, daCunha says, starts in 2009, with an idea about a musical on singing contests. “We had never had an original musical that had come out of the country,” daCunha says, “One that had no previous source material. We had Broadway shows.” Bharagava joined him on the project in 2010. But the time it took for the two busy professionals (neither of whom has theatre as his day job, but both of whom have the stage as an intrinsic part of their day) to actually write it was like a gift from god, he says. “Every two years, something new would come into the country that would change the plot.” Bigg Boss convinced them that show must be have a reality television aspect: not just singers singing for points, but cameras on them everywhere. From there, it morphed to seeing the show from behind the scenes rather than what a TV audience would see. Then came the learning that young people don’t watch TV any more: they view shows on their phones; that led to making it more interactive, a “younger musical that fed into the Internet.”
Along the way, the duo decided that rather than the Rogers and Hammerstein (or Hindi cinema) model — songs as interludes — they’d rather do something more like traditional opera, or more contemporarily, the work of Webber and Rice: an entire story told only through song. “Dialogue becomes very clunky if it is not superb sub-textual dialogue, it is exposition, forming the bridge between the songs. We said, f*** it, let’s do away with dialogue. Which was a f***load of work. Every song must have content, intent, take the plot forward.”
What took them so long? “Hard to find rhymes,” Krishna says, chortling, before getting serious. The challenge, he says, was marrying the serious theatre vision he and daCunha share with a musical, character with shades of grey, with motivations driving actions, what he calls creating complexity without complexity. Was it tough telling a story only through lyrics? “It’s really simple if you follow the basic rule of writing a musical: a song takes the plot forward from point A to point B, rather than being an interlude or interjection as in a lot of Hindi cinema, show a character’s intent, allow other characters to experience the intent and have their own reactions.”
The eponymous reality show within the show has four finalists: Vishnu, a rocker from a small town, Kitty, a bar dancer who has worked her way up from the Dharavi slums, Jaishankar, son of a Chennai temple priest who, after seeing Jay Z on TV, rechristens himself Jazzy, who sings a blend of Carnatic and rap, and the wild card, Shweta, a mystery woman from Kashmir who wears a mask because she’s an acid attack victim. The channel the show runs on is owned by ‘Channel,’ a smooth, ruthless media magnate, with Dolly, a former investigative journalist who uses her skills now to dig up the dirt to make it into a story, and Rocky, a washed-up music maestro, who Channel gives a second chance. Channel has also given them each a 20% slice of the action. Then there are The Hashtags, who are a sort of cross between the traditional Greek chorus and the voice of the people as made possible by social media. And the audience, the ones who will be in the theatre, play a part too: each show night, around a thousand people (assuming full houses) will vote.
That ending, daCunha and Krishna both say, is organic, not gimmick; it flows from the subject and the narrative. “The story is completed in terms of the drama,” Krishna says, “but the audience [the fictional TV show’s viewers, but also the actual posteriors in theatre seats] are part of the ending.” It will be fascinating, they say, to see how each night, new people process the happenings they witness. Will the singing influence them? The behaviour? How will they pick a winner? “It’s going to be a study for us,” Krishan says. “We get feedback later usually. Here we will know every night.”
Aside from the large plot and structural changes, the lyrics went through perhaps 30 drafts, including after composer Clinton Cerejo entered the picture in early 2017. Cerejo, ironically, does not like musical theatre, he says. “I like the music of musical theatre, and I like theatre. But when I watch a musical play, I get lost in the music and lose track of the story. I joke to [daCunha, Krishna and the others] that I’m just composing; I don’t have to watch it.” The challenge was irresistible, he says, the chance to work on a show with so many facets, to meld diverse genres into a cohesive whole, a two-hour musical landscape that segued from song to song — which would need to be sung to, live, every night — and, moreover, where every character had to be a distinct person, each contestant a messenger of a certain kind of music. One song is the ask in microcosm: daCunha and Bhargava decided that rather than give each contestant an introduction, ‘Vote for me,’ would introduce all of them at once. Cerejo’s music smoothly integrates their genres, going from a hard rock riff to dhols forming a bridge to a catchy ‘item’ song before mridangams segue to Carnatic-infused rap, and then to ballad, and it still remains a single song.
He found it no impediment to come into the creative process some just over six years after the writers began working on the show. “I like having some boundaries. The lyrics help outline characters, help me give a musical character to the roles.” When he would ask for changes, for instance, asking them to rewrite am entire song around two lines he liked, they would oblige. His self-set objective: a soundtrack that would tell a clear story even if you did not see the play. The hard part is for him, a self-described control freak, stepping back now, leaving the show and his music in other hands. “But working in something like this, you have to trust every HoD [the other lead creators] to do their thing, to trust Nadir to put it all together. It’s a mix of attachment and detachment.” While the show’s final edges are being smoothed, he’s going back to his studio to put together the album version, where some of the songs will be remixed for separate release, what he sees as a kind of audio book.
Casting, daCunha says was simple: “We didn’t hold open auditions. We were quite specific about what we wanted. We went for the best singers possible, then put them through auditons we had tailor-made for them.” The cast then also worked with vocal coach Marianne D’Cruz Aimen, and also on their acting skills with Shernaz Patel. And of course they’ve all been working hard with Khan, to deliver the vision in his head.
When talking about Khan, the behind-the-scenes creators are uniformly effusive. Krishna sums it up: “He’s already done a lot of good work, but not at this scale. I think Bombay is seeing the birth of a huge director.” Khan had been involved first in an ambiguous ‘being around’ kind of way, the, since February, as co-director in February, running rehearsals and helping build the show, before daCunha decided that it was in the better to hand over all the reins to him. The task of building a musical is, Khan says, a dream, a directorial ambition. “The scale is beyond anything I’ve ever done. But I have a clear handle on it in my head, about what should happen. Now it’s about getting as close to that as possible — though you’ll never get as close as what you expect, whether it’s a three-characters and a box production or a full-scale musical — so that’s the push. The great thing is I have learnt so much, and had fun. If you’re not having fun, it’s not worth it, that’s my motto. I’m a huge consumer of music, but doing this, being able to see music from the other side, that’s priceless.”
He inherited a set-up, he says, with music done, casting done, which has two sides. For one, much work has been done, but then as director, he is more used to being involved from genesis point. “There are expectations already set, and you’ve got to weave yourself into that, find the best way to fit in, align your thoughts to what’s already established and merge it into an organic whole. As much as it’s my baby, it’s more theirs [daCunha and Krishna] than mine. I’m birthing their baby. I’ve known them for years, and we’re good friends, as most people in the small community of theatre are. There’s a huge responsibility that goes with that, to make sure I am treating it well, that it comes to fruition in a way that they feel good work has been done on their dream. It’s been ten years in their heads, eight years in talking, four years in writing, two years in composition, a huge journey for them, and they’re trusting me with that.”
Khan has no problems with what he’s inherited. The cast is “f*****g amazing, and I’m learning from them.” Some of that learning comes from the fact that the cast are mostly professional singers. “It’s that barter: they have given me new tools, new ways of understanding. There’s so much more to singing than singing the right note. And I have been able to push in character and intent: what you want to achieve with a line rather than what you want to do with it, which has been quite mind-broadening, from what they have told me.” A musical theatre wisdom says it’s far easier to get a singer to act than teach an actor to sing; Khan does not quiet subscribe to that. “There is no one who cannot act. There are people who can access a particular truth and make me believe it. Convince me in whatever way you can do best, and you’ve got me. If you’re honest and activated that truth, you’ve acted it. Yes, it’s difficult to do both if you’ve done only one for a long time. There’s no way an actor could learn to sing the way these guys can over just a rehearsal period. And no way to learn to act the way a Naseer or a Shernaz Patel would, over the same rehearsal period. Where they are is a result of years and years of diligence and practice and work. I would expect an actor made to sing to sing truthfully and hit the right notes, and I expect a singer being made to act to be as honest about it as they are with their music.”
His task, then, has been to take these multiple truths — those of the characters, but also of the writers, the composer, the vocal trainer, the acting trainer, the choreographer, the technicians, all the moving parts of this enterprise — and funnel them through his own head. “It has to be one vision. Those individual responses must be of one world. Aligning them all is the final edge you’re walking on. It has to be many hands but one mind working. Or ten minds working homogenously.”
What will audiences take away, hopefully?
“It’s a tale about where India is today,” daCunha says, “about jealousy, deceit. A modern tale in many ways: where we are, what society is, the voyeuristic nature, surveillance, that we live pretty much on the Internet. It tries to capture the essential questions, how far is our limit? Where is the gap between moral and immoral? Is there even right and wrong anymore? How far will you push for success? Sleep your way to the top, kill your way to the top?”
Khan phrases only slightly differently: “It’s a pop culture comment about how important social media is in our lives. On a human level, it’s just about ambition and aspiration. It’s how about far you will go to achieve what you want to achieve, and also how much you will yourself to be controlled by social media.” But that aside, he adds, “I have learnt that here is nothing wrong with being entertained. It’s nice to have some sort of social context, or a thematic element running through, statement you’re trying to make. But there’s huge merit in just having an engaging evening.”
