Monsoon Wedding people saw their own family on screen”

— Filmmaker Mira Nair tells QH as Doha braces up for the musical

World renowned filmmaker Mira Nair’s award winning work Monsoon Wedding is coming to a theatre near you. This time in a musical, it promises to set the stage alight like never before at Souq Waqif. Brought to you by Qatar Creates, the action gets underway on November 17 and runs until the 27th.

In a chat with Qatar Happening, Mira Nair spoke glowingly of her award-winning work, her thoughts on theatre as an art medium and the love and patronage she found bringing it to Doha. Excerpts:

Where does Monsoon Wedding figure in your personal list of favourites? Take us back to the feeling of getting a Golden Lion as the first female filmmaker?

Monsoon Wedding is an intimate family film. Initially, I thought I was making a small film on my family but then it became the biggest hit I ever made. I think it was a very proud and unexpected moment when (I received) the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival where (I) left small but became the “queen of the festival”. To see the reaction at the festival was extraordinary …had never expected it and it kept growing in millions of hearts around different countries because (I think) people saw their own family on screen or they wanted to be part of this loud, loving, close but crazy Indian family.

Five years after the film I had this idea about making a musical. I started my work as an actor in theatre when I was 17 or 18 in India and so theatre is home to me and Monsoon Wedding the film had in its bones great music. To make the Wedding musical seemed the right thing to do . Also, I was tired of watching just Western musicals on the Broadway. We should also have our own (musicals) and if we don’t make them no-one will for us. So it is a journey of making an eternal story of Monsoon Wedding (come alive on stage)

What do you have to say about theatre as an art form and its current standing?

Well, the art of the musical is actually an ancient Indian art. It’s called nautanki, jatra …it’s called many things. But the art of live singing into drama is dying out in many ways because of playback singing, movies and so on. Monsoon Wedding the musical is trying to go back to the ways of telling stories through songs and music – through live musicians responding to drama on stage. But at the same time, it is also making it highway bound Broadwaystyle. It’s musical theatre and very alive . It takes a lot actors, who can sing, dance and act at the same time to live music. So it’s a very beautiful form of electricity we create on stage of liveness.

Monsoon Wedding is now on the shores of Qatar. How do you want theatre-goers to see

it?

Her Highness Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad Al-Thani has loved the movie but also supported the inception of this musical over several years from New York to India to here. So it is very fitting for me to bring it to Qatar for world premiere of this stage. I also think people of Qatar from everywhere…they have united so many countries and their cultures to make this wonderful “Qatari culture” which is very much at the heart of the story of Monsoon Wedding