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So during the quest when we set our eyes on Pratibha she looked quite suitable for the part. It’s actually a very unique skill set to possess. “ For the role of Umrao Jaan, we were looking for someone who could sing, act and dance live. What made it more difficult is that fact that the person was also required to be a good singer and a dancer. Once the idea was in place, the biggest challenge was to find someone who could essay the character of Umrao Jaan. So that’s how we got the idea of adapting Ruswa’s novel into a grand musical production,” adds Sulaiman Merchant. “There was also this thought at the back of our minds that we are not getting to hear our traditional forms of music such as folk, ghazal, khayal, and thumri in movies and on radio as much as we should. So there was a deep desire to replicate something similar for the Indian audiences,” explains Salim Merchant.
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But what differentiates Broadway and West End-style music is that the actors themselves sing, dance and perform live. And since we had good training we were able to use it to our advantage in our work for Hindi films. During our early training we were taught both Indian classical as well as Western music.
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Musicals such as ‘Phantom of the Opera’, ‘My Fair Lady’, ‘The Lion King’, ‘Wicked’, etc. “Right from a very young age we have been watching plays, both in India as well as abroad. The composer duo previously collaborated with Goswami on “Beyond Bollywood”. The musical features live music by Salim - Sulaiman Merchant who are also the presenters of the play. But I must tell you that having a writer and lyricist like Irfan Siddiqui in our team is really an added advantage,” adds Goswami. Now, I can understand Urdu and even appreciate its nuances but unfortunately I can’t read Urdu and so I had to rely on a Hindi translation. “It was a big challenge to adapt a 19th century story for the stage. Now every director likes to bring a unique vision and so we have tried to present it keeping in mind the 21st century audiences but without diluting the source material,” reveals Goswami who has previously directed another musical“Beyond Bollywood”.īut dealing with an epic work like “Umrao Jaan Ada” was no cinch for Goswami. “It is one hundred percent pure adaptation, completely inspired by Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s book. The musical is helmed by the noted choreographer Rajeev Goswami who had the clarity from the world go that the theatrical rendition wouldn’t be a remake of the Muzaffar Ali classic. The project titled ‘Umrao Jaan Ada - The Musical’, featuring singer-actor Pratibha Singh Baghel as Umrao Jaan, is being staged in New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru Weightlifting Indoor Stadium. Only this time it’s meant for theatre and not cinema. Almost four decades later, Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s magnum opus has received another major adaptation. Over the years, the novel has had several film and television adaptations in both India as well as Pakistan – the most famous being Indian filmmaker Muzaffar Ali’s 1981 film “Umrao Jaan” starring Rekha in the eponymous role of a Lucknow-based courtesan in desperate search of true love. To understand the evergreen actress better, journalist/film commentator and author Yasser Usman came out with a biographic on the diva, ‘Rekha: The Untold Story’, which chronicles her life and days in Bollywood, with everything little secret revealed from her alleged affair with Amitabh Bachchan to the suicide of her husband Mukesh Agarwal to why she wears sindoor and mangalsutra everywhere.īut as the sultry actress turns older today, take a look movies that made her so popular today.When Mirza Hadi Ruswa would have penned down “Umrao Jaan Ada”, which is widely regarded as the first novel written in Urdu, around the turn of 19th century, he wouldn’t have imagined that one day it will become the emblem of the Lucknow’s rich courtesan culture for the posterity. In 2003, when film journalist Anupama Chopra, visited Rekha, she wrote that while tabloids had portrayed her as a reclusive woman twisted bitter by lecherous men and loneliness, in reality Rekha was none of that she described her as chatty and curious, excited and energetic, cheerful and almost illegally optimistic. Very few know about how the actress is in real life. But you can’t deny that she is a fierce, sexy, elusive actresses with a kind of a vulnerability that she showcases through her roles. Most of the world know Rekha as Amitabh Bachchan’s life-long lover (thanks to the rumours and their chemistry in ‘Silsila’, ‘Muqaddar Ka Sikandar’, Mr Natwarlal’ to name a few).