All this song and dance

So I admit it. I slept through bits of Zangoora. Zangoora is a highly-publicised, SRK endorsed Bollywood spectacular for the stage, being performed at an entertainment complex called Kingdom of Dreams in Gurgaon.

It is a Dharam-Veer type story: good king killed by bad vazir, good vazir rescues baby prince who is brought up by banjaras and then usual sorting out ensues, with love interest and occasional comic scenes. Standard, old-fashioned story which ought to work fine.

When my American friends try to explain Hindi movies to their other American friends they always sayu00a0-- all their films are musicals. I always interject saying, no, they have songs, but they are not musicals. Well, Zangoora has decided to make all of us right. It has songs and it is a musical in the American sense, that it is told almost completely through songs and dances.

One thing is for sureu00a0-- we've never seen effects on stage like we see in Zangoora. A huge elephant pops up on stage, its six trunks moving beguilingly. A princess arrives on lotus boats floating down from the sky-ceiling, a gypsy prince is carried down in an eagles' talons. Video effects create enchanted forest fantasias, night time fairytale skies, rooms of fire.

In a dream sequence the hero and heroine float upwards, sing their song and descend softly to earth. The lighting, movable stage pieces and the effectsu00a0-- these are spectacular indeed. The Kingdom of Dreams itself is oddly dissatisfyingu00a0-- being merely a shiny gold and mirrors Siamese fantasy rather than a piece of wild imagination. But one can go along with it in the spirit of enjoying a fabulous fake with good humour. You aren't going there for a tasteful experience but for a taste of kitsch anyway.

Why then, is Zangoora, well, still kind of boring? Because it has the problem of every bad Hindi movieu00a0-- no script. There are no funny or clever lines; it's the most flaccid writing you can imagine. Nor are the songs cleverly woven in, for instance, the way they are in the ABBA musical.

There's a dreadful lumping together about the content that makes it hard to feel involved. It also has a demerit you can never accuse Bollywood of: the dances are deadly dull. It's just a group of people waving their hands around seventy percent of the time. In a two-and-a-half hour extravagnza, you need more than three stand out dances. It's like they bought the choreography at wholesale prices, in which case why should the tickets cost between Rs 1,000 and Rs 6,000?

Zangoora is yet another demoralising example of how, even when we have a smart idea and lots of cash, we don't respect skill and love nepotism and royalty. Why should people who know how to choreograph for the screen automatically be presumed to know how to choreograph for the stage? Ditto the dancers.

Hussain's six-pack is admirable and Gauhar Khan is cute but there's a vagueness about their body language which has none of the craft needed for a good stage performance. This becomes more striking because there are other dancers and an occasional actor clearly trained for the stage who show up the main performers.

People excuse this sort of tackiness saying it's not to be taken seriously, but would they eat a half baked pastry for fun? Of course, we're fobbed off with mediocrity,u00a0 we refuse to ask for more. As one who can watch two hours of Hindi film songs, I feel licensed to complain. Come on, Zangoora wallas, don't just show me the money, show me the love.

Paromita Vohra is an award winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with
fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevi.com.

The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.

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