Mira Nair on Bringing 'Monsoon Wedding' to the Stage

Nair discusses the importance of bringing her most popular movie to the stage and more.

A raucous Indian wedding brass band draws the audience to their seats at St. Ann's Warehouse, heralding the start of Monsoon Wedding. As you might expect, despite some last-minute detours and the spilling of unexpected secrets, all's well that ends well in a swirl of marigold and crimson, exuberant dance, and the cathartic deluge promised by the title.

The stage musical is the new incarnation of Mira Nair's 2001 movie of the same name. Nair, who also directs this eye-catching production, rose to fame in 1988 with Salaam Bombay!, an unflinching look at street kid life in Bombay. Since then, She's enjoyed a distinguished filmmaking career with such works as Mississippi Masala, The Namesake, and Vanity Fair.

I recently spoke with Nair about the importance of bringing her most popular movie to the stage, its unique marriage of styles, and more.

It's been more than two decades since the movie Monsoon Wedding came out. When did you start to work on a musical theater version?

I’ve been working on this deeply and actively for 12 years, making some films alongside, but never letting go. It does take a long time to create songs, and this new musical form is something for which I really needed to have many wonderful collaborators. After a [workshop] production at Berkeley Rep [in 2017], we were all set to open in London in June 2020 and then we were hit by three years of shutdown from the pandemic. But I’ve never let up.

Can you tell us something about the Punjabi community you depict in the musical?

I’m Punjabi, so I set it very much from the kind of family I come from. And Sabrina Dhawan [who wrote the movie and is co-bookwriter on the musical] is also Punjabi. Delhi was created largely with the Punjabis. [When the Punjab region] was divided between India and Pakistan, a lot of Punjabi refugees came from what is now Pakistan to Delhi. These are the families that built this capital city—starting literally from nothing and creating it to become, now, a pretty globalized city in the world. As I wrote in the program notes, we Punjabis are known as the party animals of India, but we are also the workhorses of India; we just never say die. And with that largesse comes this spirit that will hug a person before they even know their name.

But, of course, there are a lot of other sides to that city life. The way women have been treated and the violence against women is much more notable in northern India than it is in other places. That, too, has become a very sad part of the aggressiveness of living in Delhi. And it's very much the case, as it is in Monsoon Wedding, that sexual abuse comes from a most dark spot: the family itself. There was a taboo of never mentioning it, but in today's Delhi, it's blown wide open. The musical tries to reflect that in an updated way. We won't take silence as we have for generations. The musical reflects not only the Delhi of the poets of old, but also the Delhi of today—of struggle and protest within our homes and on our streets.

That theme is very resonant today, and I believe you first touched on it way back in your 1985 short film about striptease dancers, India Cabaret.

My work doesn't ignore the challenges and the struggles in the world, but I hope that it does it in a way that invites you to become part of this grappling of old and new. So, yes, this isn't news to me. I used to joke that I’m not good at Sunday-afternoon pleasant movies. You know, I became a filmmaker, and a theater director, to shake things up. I yearn to stir it up and to hold this mirror up so that, in some way, we can see ourselves in that world.

Monsoon Wedding's bride, Aditi, is referred to as "South Delhi girl." Can you explain what that means in the context of this community?

It's where the new money is. And [that's the case now] more than ever, with a globalized India, with the malls and the Pradas and the brands. I live between New York and Delhi and it's extraordinary each time I go back, [to see] how depraved it is between rich and poor, and how confident it is in manifesting all these signs of wealth. I came from a socialist family where you hid any notion of wealth. Now it's all about displaying it. So a South Delhi princess is exactly what we sing about, which is a life that's devoted to consumerism and capitalism, where it's a full-on display without any regard to the inequities that surround it.

I’m curious to know your thoughts about Jason Ardizzone-West's set design.

The film was shot in a very modernist home, partly designed by Charles Correa, our greatest modernist architect. He [incorporated] the principles of the stepped well and the kund [or stepped pond] from ancient times into a very modern establishment. And we all know, also, that Le Corbusier designed [the Indian city] Chandigarh, and he left a strong influence amongst those of us who have this love of architecture. Anyway, after several avatars, the set that you see is the fruition of that modernist, Corbursier-esque, and also middle-class Delhi [esthetic].

We repositioned the spiral staircase, which is usually at the back of the house where the servants work, in a very interesting way. Also, the musicians were for me always going to be at par with the actors—so their platform is part of our drama. And then the transformation of the set. I was telling Jason, our designer, that in India we just put up a canopy to cover the filth and the pigs that are beyond it. You step on this fake AstroTurf and you let red and pink plastic lotuses emerge. That's what it is to create a wedding. It's like all these levels of kitsch and spectacle. Jason took a lot of inspiration from that idea of the canopy. It's wonderful how he epitomized all that into creations that are very theatrical but which truly transform the space, especially when the wedding happens with the [cloth] drops and the marigolds, all of that.

Given your filmmaking career, audiences don't necessarily associate you with the theater, but that's where you originally started. You conducted theater workshops for the children in Salaam Bombay! before you started filming.

It's where I started, yes. And it's not just Salaam Bombay but almost for every film. For Queen of Katwe we did theater workshops for two or three weeks before we started shooting. Because I also work a lot in my movies with unknown actors, people who have never acted before, who work opposite these film legends—Lupita Nyong’o [Queen of Katwe] or Denzel Washington [Mississippi Masala]—the principles of theater are very useful to me as filmmaker.

It's also unusual for a filmmaker to direct the stage adaptation of their movie…

I know. People were surprised that I was directing this. [They probably expected that they] would bring on the Tony Award-winning director of the last musical. But this is an unusual thing—content-wise and musical style-wise, and even [in terms of the] accents. And creating the story, we didn't just farm it out to a lyricist, [asking them to just] do a certain number of songs. We made them all together. There was a lot of imparting of what our culture is in order to even write the lyrics correctly. The music score [by Vishal Bhardwaj] is a unique marriage of several styles in the Indian musical tradition: the qawwali, the ghazal, the thumri, the raag. It reflects my sensibility and the styles that interest me, so I felt that I very much needed to do this.

What changes did you make as you adapted Monsoon Wedding for the stage?

Well, the musical form is very specific and has an utterly different structure of storytelling. It has its own canon of rules, and that's something that I’ve learned and studied with my wonderful collaborators, book writers Arpita Mukherjee and Sabrina Dhawan and lyric writers Masi Asare and Susan Birkenhead. I really have tried to understand this form but to not necessarily always obey it. We had a hit soundtrack in the film, but for a musical the songs have to propel the story. That was another incredible learning [experience]—that every lyric, every word, every reason for singing has to take us deeper into the story.

My interest was in the interweaving of the music. The Indian classic raag is the foundation of almost every song in our musical, but the orchestration involves the Punjabi brass band that meets the exquisite level of the sitar or tabla. That amalgam of Eastern and Western sound still very much defines a Delhi wedding. But how to translate it on to the stage? That's why the sitar player is lit just as the hero and heroine are—because they are commenting on each other. And then, as I said before, just updating Dhawan's wonderful screenplay for the film to reflect women speaking up to patriarchy both within the home and outside.

Was it difficult to cast this show with actors who were either Indian or from the South Asian diaspora?

When we set the show up in 2016 in Berkeley, I think it took me, without exaggeration, three years to find that cast. Now Michael Malliakel, who was Hemant [the bridegroom] in the Berkley production, is playing Aladdin on Broadway. Anisha Nagarajan, who plays Alice [the maid in the current production], was in Company on Broadway. We scoured all across India with open casting calls. Several of our cast have the heft and the experience and are amongst the best. And we also have a fully Indian company, which we took to Doha [for a production that played during the FIFA World Cup 2022 cultural activities in Qatar]. It was a journey of finding our people who can not only do the triple threat, but can also sing classical Indian music meeting Bollywood pop singing meeting American musical theater. Look at our cast [in New York]: Five people are from India and have been with us for a while now, but the rest are all from here—North American, young and already having with them that training and that confidence to leap into something of this level. I’m very heartened, and I think it's about time, really.

I assume you took a break from making movies while working on this show. I’m curious about what comes next for Mira Nair on her creative journey.

Actually, I expect to shoot my next movie, about [Hungarian-Indian avant-garde painter] Amrita Sher-Gil, in February 2024. But I’m still deeply into Monsoon Wedding. We’ve had offers from other countries, and for me the big thing is to be on Broadway with it. Right now, we’re in translation of a Hindi/Punjabi version of the show and we hope to be in the sub-continent early next year. The theater is important to me, so I want to keep this on its journey.

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Gerard Raymond is a travel and arts writer based in New York City. His writing has appeared in Broadway Direct, TDF Stages, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and other publications.

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