The beast behind the beauty

So the RangaShankara festival for 2015 has settled on the theme of Youth Yuga; showcasing the work of different young directors under the age of forty. By some mischance, one of our works is also being featured tomorrow at the Bangalore festival – A Peasant of El Salvador. The line up for the festival is exciting, soulful, hard-hitting and often ground breaking.

Therefore I am excited to watch the work of geniuses like Mohit Takalkar and the rest. In a sense we represent the non-commercial theatre, making work based on the artistic impulse. Therefore we are often slightly patronising towards commercial theatre, because that is work based on the audience impulse and often because of the themes it engages with as well as the shallow performance choices.

However on the other end of the spectrum, there is an under-forty director like Vikrant Pawar. I first encountered him during Thespo 2000, when he played one half of an adulterous couple in the romantic comedy Cheaters.

While his ‘theatre schooling’ has been the same as most of us, he seemed to march to the beat of his own drummer. And unlike another peer, Rehaan Engineer, who went further into the esoteric ‘arty’ theatre, Vikrant went the other way. The drum beat that he heard, was one of light entertainment. He wanted the audience to have a good time.

So while, directors like Neel Chaudhary, Mohit Takalkar and I were wrestling with our artistic demons, Vikrant was almost anonymously directing feel-good hits like Sure Thing, Clogged Arteries, Anything But Love, Laughing Wild, and Conditions Apply. His plays are simple and clean. Devices or comment never dilute the clarity of the narrative. In his early directorial career, he was ably supported by Raell Padamsee. She produced his plays, and took the burden off him, allowing him to concentrate on the vision itself.

This is an idyllic scenario for a director. Most directors are also producers of their own work, and releasing advertisements and finding sponsors often distracts from the primary job at hand, which is making the show as strong as possible.

In spite of his commercial success, Vikrant is still director with an ‘experimental’ bent. He is always trying to push the envelope. His passion has been in trying to get an audience to pay more than the price of a cold coffee for live theatre; so that actors and theatre makers can be suitably compensated for their effort. Perhaps that’s why his early work features actors that audiences would gladly to pay to see, such as Darrshan Jariwala, Samir Soni and Mandira Bedi.

His belief in live theatre and obsession with trying to make it viable took him to Delhi where he got to play in the Disneyland of Indian Theatre -Kingdom of Dreams. He was an

instrumental force in the mounting of the behemoth Zangoora and then directed the follow up, Jhumroo. Therefore it was no surprise that Vikrant was entrusted with Disney’s first foray into live entertainment, Beauty and the Beast. While conventional logic tends towards hiring of a ‘foreign’ director for the project, the faith in Vikrant has really paid off. The show is a spectacle unlike any other, and under his stewardship he has coaxed better performances from virtually every department. Actors have excelled themselves, particularly Meher

Mistry (Bella), Hitesh Malukani (Gaston), and Tavish Bhattacharyya (Lefou). The choreography and dancing is excellent and the singing is superb. The sets magnificent and the staging quite mind boggling.

Vikrant, however, is no singer, and certainly no dancer. His strength lies in his casting, and in assigning the right people to do the right tasks. He surrounded himself with the perfect team to execute his vision; and what an incredible vision it is.

The show travels to Delhi in December and probably returns to Bombay next year. It looks like Vikrant is well on his way to achieving his aim of making a viable live theatre ecosystem. Who says commercial theatre can’t be good...for all of us.