'Maybe they weren't ready then but they are now and it's been so gratifying to be part of a show that is so unabashedly and unapologetically South Asian.' 'There was a lot of concern about whether the audience was ready for what we are bringing to the table,' Nagarajan says of the new show. It's been so gratifying to be part of a show that is so unabashedly and unapologetically South Asian.Īnisha Nagarajan, who stars as Alice, the family maid in the new Monsoon Wedding musical, played one of the leads in Bombay Dreams. There was a lot of concern about whether the audience was ready for what we are bringing to the table. It was criticized for, among other things, trying to appeal to a broad audience in a way that felt inauthentic to South Asian stories and viewers.

Set in the neon spectacle of Bollywood, the 2004 production was a critical and commercial failure that closed in less than one season. The first big Indian musical to reach Broadway was Bombay Dreams and it remains the last. While this is an off-Broadway production scheduled to run through this summer, the team hopes for a Broadway run. In a crowded and competitive New York season, the piece is an ambitious experiment in bridging Indian musical styles with a Broadway-style songbook. So now, after almost 15 years in development, Monsoon Wedding has opened as a musical at Brooklyn's St. Everyone here looks at their stories in different ways on the stage but where are our stories? Where are the brown folk, where's the Verma family?' ' 'But when I had the idea to make my film into a musical, I did think 'everyone here flocks to Fiddler on the Roof. 'I cannot say that I was a huge fan of American musicals,' she says.

But even as Nair has continued making films including The Namesake and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, she says she became consumed following the global success of the film with the idea of turning the fictional Varma family wedding into live musical theater.

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