That Old Feeling: Isn't It Rahmantic?

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Just to be perverse, I'll pick as the best of his ravier numbers I Wanna Be Free from last year's Tehzeeb. The song, with lyrics by Blaaze, is widely reviled even by Rahmaniacs. "What in the world went wrong with 'I Wanna Be Free'?" asks Narbir Gobal on the Planet Bollywood site. "I understand Rahman's urge to experiment, but really this sounds more like a drug induced trip rather than a 'song.' Skip it!" So of course I love it.

One reason is the sheer ballsiness of the enterprise. The movie is about a strong woman (the great Shabana Azmi) and her estranged daughters Tehzeeb (Urmila Matondkar) and the mentally distraught Nazu (Diya Mirka). Toward the end of the film Nazu rushes into her bedroom, clamps on headphones and listens to the technopoppy I Wanna Be Free. The picturization shows how moving convulsively, desperately to the funky beat, turning ever more agitated, until we wonder what she wants to be free from: free from her domestic vise, or free from life?

The song's vocalists, Anupma and Mathangi, get Fs from the Bollywood swamis; I think they're swell and scary. One spits out the chorus ("I wanna be free I wanna be free / Break the chain and let me be / Free like a bird and free like a plane / I wanna be free from all the pain") in fine percussive style; the other wailing the verse ("Break the shackles" in Hindi) like a stoned goddess who's seized control of an airport P.A. system. Then, as Rahman finally introduces two new chords, and a backing female chorus, she soars into a majestic, anthemic "Freeeeee-dom." She's a bird, she's a plane, she's Superplaybacksinger. And on the screen, the criminally beautiful Mirza (Miss Asia Pacific of 2000), listens to the Freedom chorus and slowly lifts a gun to her head.


BOLLYWOOD OR BUST

Bombay Dreams begins with Hindu, Moslem and Zoroastrian prayers, but its heart is as secular as its definition of a Bollywood production number: "cuties shaking booties." The 2002 London version was stocked with references to Bombay films and luminaries, from the 50s hits Aan, Devdas and Mother India to the modern holy trinity of Hrithik, Shahrukh, even Amitabh. Scripter Meera Syal had fun creating full-of-themselves movie actors, like the sexy star Rani, of whom it is said, "She cries 17 times in the first number, though it's a comedy." Rani declares her aspirations as a serious actress. She wants to be in an art film, but she also wants to be recognized: "Can't I be a simple peasant girl — in a very tight blouse?" When the serious picture is completed, one observer says to its director, "I think you've made an important and beautiful film. Of course no one will notice until you're dead."

The tone of address toward Bollywood was one of affectionate scorn, as personified by the bitchy gossip reporter Kitty de Souza, who encourages one old man: "Please tell us how you feel — in song, if you must." Kitty notes that the hero is "shooting 15 movies at the same time" and, when he launches into a noble platitude, snides: "I smell another actor ripe for politics." Everyone is disdainful of the airs the hot new kid is putting on. "When you start getting the kidnap threats," the show's villain says to him, "then you can behave like a star." The musical has all the generic prerequisites: star-crossed lovers and love-crossed stars, betrayals and murder, a wedding scene and an all-singing, all-dancing happy ending. As our hero notes, "Can't end on a car crash or something." And if it steals as greedily from Bollywood films as they do from Hollywood ones, it does so without shame. As one thieving director in the show states: "Copyright means the right to copy."

The theatrical wit on display here might not be at the level of a Shaw or a Stoppard. But it was knowing; and Syal, a writer and performer on the Anglo-Indian sitcom Goodness Gracious Me, could assume that the London audience would be knowing too — they'd be familiar enough with the genre to get the jokes poked at it. Bollywood films get a fairly wide release in the U.K., often making the weekend box-office top ten. Because the South Asian community is proportionately larger in Britain than in the U.S., the Bollywood culture more deeply permeates the official culture. Indian films can gross millions in the States and not be seen by anyone outside the subcontinental diaspora.

The challenge for a Broadway Bombay Dreams, as its producers saw it, was that a New York audience would be ignorant of Bollywood's conventions and thus not understand what was satire and what was just silly. So Thomas Meehan, who had co-written the books for The Producers and Hairspray — two successful shows that parodied old movies and musicals — and charged him with translating into Broadwayese a culture that was not only foreign but obscure. Essentially, he had to write a primer on Bollywood: explain the genre, then rack some jokes about it. Most of Syal's best lines vanished. The show became soft and lumpy. The New York Bombay Dreams was a desperate, failed reworking of the London version — as, 16 years before, the Broadway edition of Chess had been in comparison to the West End original.


FROM BOLLYWOOD TO BRITAIN TO BROADWAY

In my catalogue of Rahman film favorites, I didn't mention some of his best-known songs, because they went into Bombay Dreams. They were plucked from their original movie context (usually), given English-language settings (mostly) by lyricist Don Black and sung by (generally) different artists,

Many of them are sensational; I did say that his score was up there with the immortals. Of the oldies imported to the West, two of the best are from the 1999 inside-showbiz film Taal: everyone's favorite ballad Love's Never Easy (Ishq Bina) and the dreamier Closer Tan Ever(Nahin Samne). The sexy, dancey Shakalaka Baby is from Nayak. The girl-group Ohh La La is an Anglicizing of Ek Bagiya from Sapney. Happy Endings, with all its movie-lore references, was originally Rangeela Re from Rangeela.

If one song triggered Rahmania among non-Indians in the West, it was Chaiyya Chaiyya, from another Ratnam terrorist tragedy, the 1998 Dil Se. Shahrukh Khan stands atop a speeding train and (using the thrilling voice of Sukhwinder Singh) performs this update of a Sufi chant, with lyrics by the esteemed poet Gulzar. Andrew Lloyd Webber happened to hear Chaiyya one Saturday when Britain's Channel 4 broadcast Dil Se, and the song convinced him that the West was ready for Rahman. It remains Rahman's most pulsing, irresistible song, which gets me juiced and happy any time I put it on RealPlayer. When Chaiyya opened the second act of Bombay Dreams (with Singh, on disc, still vocalizing), it had audiences stamping their feet and cheering. Not after the song — during it.

In the 80s, Chess was misidentified as a rock score (when pop-rock was just one element in a broad table of genres). This year Bombay Dreams was tabbed as Indian, and that frightened people away. The prejudice was that the music would be too spicy for general tastes; the majority, who don't like musical curry, would scurry. That's a pity, for the show, and for those who didn't get to see or hear it. Rahman doesn't even write what's thought of as world music. He writes a world of music — so broad and deep, so instantly likable and lastingly satisfying, it is the whole world. I hope that, sometime soon, our part of the world catches up with Rahman. Until we do, an important part of our internal juke box will be bereft.

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