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Seats fill up quickly Bea Bahrobia, the play that has become a cultural phenomenon, is embarking on its final tour after 11 years of entertaining packed halls. After screenings in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad and Vadodara, it will be shown at the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Hall in Pune on July 22.
“It’s an emotional moment. People come to me and say they’ve watched the video 16 to 18 times. At the Prithvi Theater in Mumbai, where we started the final run, people were repeating dialogues in front of the actors and getting ahead of the jokes,” says Atul Kumar, the company’s Mumbai-based stage manager.
Quote from William Shakespeare twelve nightsTold in the North Indian folk form of ‘nautanki’, Piya Behrupiya premiered at the Globe to Globe Festival in London during the 2012 Olympics. The cast, which includes stars like Sagar Deshmukh, Gitanjali Kulkarni, Mansi Multani and Amitush Nagpal, has remained the same till date.
The hilarious story is about lovelorn Count Orsino, the cross-dressing viola and Lady Olivia, who is grieving for her brother, and a shipwreck that has made waves of its own. It is filled with about 18 songs, including a scene in which two characters exchange insults to the rhythms of Qawwali.
The play has not only brought audiences to theaters in various places – like Kerala, Puducherry, Kolkata, Srinagar, Bareilly and Bhopal – it has also won awards such as the Mahindra Awards for Excellence in Theater and has been staged at prestigious festivals.
Among the most internationally traveled shows from the country have been staged in Canada, France, Serbia, Australia, China and Taiwan. In Chile, she did a seven-city tour, which included a show in a bullring to an audience of about 50,000 people.
Shakespeare’s story deals with several troubling issues, however Bea Bahrobia Focuses on celebrating love. “We believed in the power of love and the importance of spreading love. I don’t think I was very politically aware at the time,” says Kumar, whose recent works are several shades darker and deeply involved with the country’s social and political challenges.
“Performers have become award-winning actors in the last 11 years, and it has become difficult for us to get dates. I had to cancel almost 15 shows in the last year and a half,” says Kumar.
Quick photos
His daughter, who was six when the play opened, was doing a dance. Now 17, she sits through rehearsals and advises her father to push the envelope even further.
three months ago, Bea Bahrobia They were invited to participate in a state-run art festival in St. Petersburg, Moscow, which the director had turned down a few days earlier. “It was a decision I made after a conflict because of the war (between Russia and Ukraine),” says Kumar.
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