Skip to content 
Search

Latest Stories

Monsoon Wedding and A Suitable Boy set to charm audiences

By Amit Roy

MIRA NAIR looks set to usher in an Indian summer with a musical version of her 2001 film, Monsoon Wedding, while BBC One will show the filmmaker’s sixpart adaptation of Vikram Seth’s magnum opus, A Suitable Boy, at around the same time.


“The story of Monsoon Wedding the musical is very, very close to the film,” the Indian-American director confirmed.

Nair shot the film in New Delhi in 2000 and premiered it at Cannes in 2001. Made on a relatively modest budget of $1 million (£763,057), it took $30m (£23m) at the box office. The movie told the story of a boisterous Punjabi wedding, where the bride was from Delhi and the bridegroom, also Indian, was from America. However, Nair gave the tale a dark twist by introducing sexual abuse into the other joyous celebrations.

At a press event in London last week, Nair said the musical would take its cue from the film, which was about several kinds of love, starting with “the love of a couple married for 25 years”. This was a reference to Lalit and Pimmi Verma, played in the movie by Naseeruddin Shah and Lillete Dubey.

She added: “There is falling in love for the first time. And then love that is not material – the love of the maid (Alice, played by Tillotama Shome) with the tent man (Vijay Raaz played the character of PK Dubey) who fall in love over a marigold flower.

“And there is also twisted love – the sick love – that was 20 years ago never even spoken of.”

Nair, who lives in New York, talked about the genesis of the musical 10 years ago. “My agent at the time, the legendary Sam Cohn in America, said to me one day, ‘Why not make it a musical for the stage?’ I thought the white folk have their Fiddler on the Roof (a Broadway musical from 1964) and we have so much gana bajana (music), so why can’t we have our own Fiddler on the Roof?”

Monsoon Wedding the Musical will be staged at London’s Roundhouse from July 17 to August 29, after a run at the Leeds Playhouse from June 17 to July 11.

“I consider the Roundhouse to be the world premiere,” said Nair, who was at the north London venue last Thursday (5) to talk about her theatrical debut in London. “Once we do it right here, we can take it to the world.”

She is currently casting for the musical and expecting to recruit most of the company from the UK.

The book for the musical has been written by her former student from Columbia (university), Sabrina Dhawan, who did the film’s screenplay, along with Arpita Mukherjee. The musical director is Vishal Bhardwaj, a distinguished Bollywood director in his own right. The lyrics are by Masi Asare from New York, while the orchestrator will be Jamshied Sharifi, a Tony award winner.

“We now have a new show with close to 20 songs. It’s all about the songs and the music leading the story rather than dialogue and then song,” said Nair.

She first put the musical on in 2008 for 99 shows over four months at the Berkeley Theatre in California, but now refers to that piece as “a good first draft – it needed some revisions”.

Nair admitted that recruiting the cast in the US was not easy. “We had a very tough time in north America. It took me three years to cast the musical properly because we don’t have enough opportunities as south Asians to really get on stage. Now it’s a little bit better.”

Nair has also done a workshop at a New Delhi factory.

“We are casting now all over England,” she said. “The cast (for the musical) is very different from the film as it has to be. It is 20 years later and it is musical theatre. People have to sing and act and dance – it is very different from having Naseeruddin Shah, aged 69, prancing about on stage.

“We have updated our musical to 2020. It is about a globalising India but is equally about the dream of the west – America, in this case, because the groom comes from America. It is very much reflecting the politics of now. It is ridiculously and painfully timely because of the whole Me Too sexual abuse coming to life. Then it was a complete taboo.”

Both the Leeds Playhouse, which has just completed a £16m renovation, and the Roundhouse, intend using the musical for a wider promotion of British Asian culture – as happened in the halcyon summer of 2002 when Andrew Lloyd Webber broke the mould of West End productions with Bombay Dreams.

Marcus Davey, artistic director of the Roundhouse, said the venue would be “projecting the south Asian community in London and further afield. We want the Roundhouse to be at the crossroads of many different cultures.”

The Leeds Playhouse will also be decked out in festive colours.

Hannah Hughes, director of marketing and communications at Leeds Playhouse, said: “Monsoon Wedding embraces international collaboration and reflects the global perspectives of the world. Monsoon Wedding – wow! – one of the most successful international films of all time, introduced a worldwide audience to Indian culture.”

Nair also revealed that when A Suitable Boy was published in 1993, she tried but failed to get the film rights. So she made Monsoon Wedding eight years later as a sort of child of the film.

She said: “Now I am specially moved to have the child, Monsoon Wedding, open in the same month as the maa-baap [mother and father], which is A Suitable Boy, open for BBC One. Both the maabaap and the baccha, the parents and the child, will be opening to the world in the same month after years of work.

More For You

Modi set for UK visit to sign free trade agreement

FILE PHOTO: Keir Starmer (L) with Narendra Modi. (Photo: Getty Images)

Modi set for UK visit to sign free trade agreement

INDIA's prime minister Narendra Modi is likely to travel to the UK by the end of this month for a visit that could see both sides formally sign the landmark India-UK free trade agreement and explore ways to expand bilateral ties in the defence and security sphere, diplomatic sources said.

Both sides are in the process of finalising the dates for Modi's visit to the country by the end of July or the first part of August, they said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Rishi Sunak returns to Goldman Sachs, will donate salary to charity

Rishi Sunak. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

Rishi Sunak returns to Goldman Sachs, will donate salary to charity

FORMER prime minister Rishi Sunak has returned to the banking world as senior adviser at Goldman Sachs group, with plans to donate his salary to the education charity he recently established with his wife Akshata Murty.

The US-headquartered multinational investment bank, where Sunak worked before entering politics, made the announcement on Tuesday (8) after the requisite 12-month period elapsed since the British Indian leader's ministerial term concluded following defeat in the general election on July 4 last year.

Keep ReadingShow less
 Post Office Horizon

A Post Office van parked outside the venue for the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry at Aldwych House on January 11, 2024 in London.

Getty Images

Post Office scandal linked to 13 suicides, says inquiry

Highlights:

 
     
  • Public inquiry finds up to 13 suicides linked to wrongful Post Office prosecutions.
  •  
  • Horizon IT system faults led to false accusations, financial ruin, and imprisonment.
  •  
  • Sir Wyn Williams says Post Office maintained a “fiction” of accurate data despite known faults.

A PUBLIC inquiry has found that up to 13 people may have taken their own lives after being wrongly accused of financial misconduct by the Post Office, in what is now described as one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history.

Keep ReadingShow less
UK ramps up drought response following driest spring

The EA has begun conducting more compliance checks on high-usage industries

Getty Images

UK ramps up drought response following driest spring since 1893

Key points

  • Spring 2025 was England’s driest and warmest in over 130 years
  • Reservoirs across England only 77% full, compared to 93% average
  • Environment Agency increases monitoring and drought planning
  • North-west England officially declared in drought

Water conservation measures stepped up ahead of summer

The UK government has increased efforts to manage water resources after confirming that England experienced its driest and warmest spring since 1893. The Environment Agency (EA) reported that reservoirs were on average only 77% full, significantly lower than the usual 93% for this time of year.

The announcement came after a National Drought Group meeting on Thursday, which reviewed the impact of continued dry weather on crops, canal navigation, and river flows. Poor grass growth and dry soil conditions were noted as threats to food production and livestock feed.

Keep ReadingShow less
Norman Tebbit

Following Thatcher’s third general election victory in 1987, Tebbit stepped back from frontline politics to care for his wife. (Photo: Getty Images)

Getty Images

Former minister, Thatcher ally Norman Tebbit dies at 94

Norman Tebbit, a close ally of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and a former Conservative Party cabinet minister, has died at the age of 94. His son William confirmed the news on Tuesday.

"At 11:15 pm on 7th July, 2025, Lord Tebbit died peacefully at home aged 94," William Tebbit said in a statement.

Keep ReadingShow less