Going Bollywood: can kathak dancers stop the show in Bombay Dreams?

It's happened with some regularity: I'll be chatting with an Indian of Pakistani taxi driver when traffic suddenly stalls as we approach the theater district. He tells me he doesn't understand the holdup; I tell him it's Wednesday afternoon--matinee time. He has no idea what I'm talking about.

New York's South Asian population has been growing for years--you can buy an imported sari of try authentic Madras cuisine in dozens of neighborhoods, But you wouldn't know it on Broadway. This vital element in New York's melting pot has been pretty much invisible on both sides of the footlights. Until the arrival of Bombay Dreams.

The show is a pop culture landmark: the first Broadway musical about contemporary India, centered on--and freely borrowing from--the thriving "Bollywood" film industry. It tells the story of a starstruck young man who trades the Bombay slums for the glitzy existence of a film star, and its creative team is as bifurcated as its hero's life. Andrew Lloyd Webber (whom you know) and Shekhar Kapur (an Indian film director) came up with the idea. Meera Syal, who writes for British television, and Thomas Meehan, who wrote Annie, did the book. A R Rahman--a musical superstar in India--and frequent Lloyd Webber collaborator Don Black wrote the songs. And Anthony van Laast and Farah Khan collaborated on the choreography. The show is a marriage of Western musical theater, which has no counterpart in India, and commercial Indian cinema, which has no counterpart in the West.

Those not lucky enough to have access to a South Asian cable channel will have a hard time imagining exactly what "Bollywood" films are like. They ale produced in Bombay by the hundreds, and are enjoyed by a vast, often desperately poor audience. This audience, by and large impervious to Hollywood products, expects three hours of pure escape: beautiful, glamorous stars: romantic, happily-ever-after stories; exotic locales; and lavishly staged song and dance extravaganzas. Some 12 million people go to these films every day--Bombay dreamers all.

Although the show was greeted with mixed reviews when it opened in London in 2002, it quickly became a West End hit on the strength of its Bollywood-style production numbers, with fountains and fantastic sets and an East-West style of dance that had never been seen in a musical before.

That's where Tara Rubin comes in. She is the casting agent for the New York production of Bombay Dreams, now at the Broadway Theatre. It was up to her to populate it with performers who would look and sound right, and dance convincingly in both Indian and Broadway styles. She's been casting for fifteen years--her previous musicals include Contact, The Producers, Mamma Mia! and Oklahoma! But Bombay Dreams presented her with a novel challenge. "We wanted all of our casting as authentic as it could possibly be," she says. "And there were no Caucasian characters at all in the show." And although Rubin had hundreds of dancers on file in her mental Palm Pilot, not one of them was ethnically Indian.

Last summer, using the Internet to find South Asian communities in North America, she embarked on a five-city tour to audition hopefuls. Typically, an open call for Equity dancers in New York yields more than enough potential hires for a new Broadway show. But for Bombay Dreams, she sent flyers to ethnic dance studios, handed them out on street corners in Indian neighborhoods, and made contact with the South Asian communities in New York, Toronto, Chicago, Vancouver, and Los Angeles Although she got the best turnouts--500 Of more dancers--in New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles, she says, "We ended up hiring someone in every city we went to."

It wasn't easy to find what Khan, van Laast, and director Steven Pimlott were looking for "The various traditional dance forms of South Asia are very much alive in South Asian communities," Rubin says. "But we found that many of the most experienced dancers--beautifully schooled in the South Asian tradition--weren't able to do our choreography. The ones who were most successful for us had also studied ballet and jazz."

The show's choreography, she says, "combines Bollywood-style dancing with the structure of a Broadway number." Khan, a veteran of Bollywood, contributed the first; van Laast, who did Marrana Mia!, was responsible tot the Broadway end of things. Van Laast came to the United States last summer to sit through some of the auditions with Rubin. "He trained my eye," she says. "He showed me how much traditional theater dance and ballet technique dancers needed to do the show."

Khan's assistant, Geeta Kapur, says that the dancers with whom she worked in Bombay could manage most, if not all, the choreography in Bombay Dreams. Because versatility is critical in Bollywood, too, Kapur began training in bharat natyam at age 3 in Bombay. When her teacher left the city, Kapur switched to Indian folk dance, and then studied kathak as well. Her eclectic schooling turned out to be the perfect background for performing Khan's choreography. "Bollywood dancing is a fusion of all kinds of styles," Kapur says. "There's folk and classical, as well as lots of Western-style dancing--it's meant to match the moods and moments of the film. So it's very difficult for anyone who's been rigidly trained in a certain style of dance."

Broadway audiences are also trained to expect a particular style of dance and dancer, and Bombay Dreams subverts those expectations. In London, the East-meets-West aspect of the choreography has been echoed in the Anglo-Indian make-up of the audience. Perhaps the show's presence in New York will enlarge the usual theater audience by enticing some of those New York cabbies--not to mention their friends and families--into a Broadway theater for the first time. At the very least, Kapur says, the show is bringing something new to local dance floors. "Now when the dancers go to clubs, wherever they ate, they start doing Indian dancing!"

Sylviane Gold has written about theater for The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, and The New York Times.