Review: Feroz Abbas Khan's MUGHAL-E-AZAM at JLN Stadium

Viewers have not bothered about Indian movies enough to revisit them and create visual spectacles out of them in other mediums. Growing up in this almost dystopian temporariness of televised art, it was refreshing and all the more exciting to sit through three hours of extraordinary storytelling in Feroz Abbas Khan's Mughal-E-Azam on stage. The experience is loaded with generous music, engaging dialogue, remarkable production value, and most importantly, an overwhelming ensemble of actors and dancers that bring India's most remembered cinematic episode live on stage.

It is obvious that the production is high-brow and engages with the most elite of Delhi audiences, thus finding easy comparisons to Broadway. The stadium is packed and hardly thirty minutes into the play, the crowds were singing along to the musical genius of Mangeshkar and Naushad. It is blasphemous to talk about the play and not discuss the musical experience it is equipped with. Neha Sargam and Aashima Mahajan shine as they take to battle their wits as Anarkali and Bahar with their live vocals, charm, and delightful stage presence. The dialogue is crisp and even within the done-to-death paradigm of Romeo-Juliet, socially relevant themes of class, gender, and the perils of war are brought out with ease.

Manish Malhotra created the most picturesque costumes for the ensemble as they undergo multiple transitions in very short periods of time - enhancing the period-drama vibe of the play. The art direction is extensive and augments the sensationalism of the story; however, nothing overpowers the central plot dynamics of the play. The most memorable moment is when all the Kathak dancers gather around a despondent Anarkali upon being ostracised for loving the Prince, they gather and with a loud thumping of their ghungroo-laden feet they help her rise, vent, and question the Mogul that dared to question her love.

Mughal-E-Azam is so deeply involved in the Indian household that the story and its most endearing episodes are mere jokes and have to bear the brunt of parody by the popular. Most of us have grown up in the generation that sang its songs without having lived through the cultural genesis of its acclaim. It thus becomes a revival of sorts, a revival of the ghazal and the kathak form, seen in the subversive act of a courtesan employing the two to question the patriarch that denied her the right to love. Neha Sargam is a unanimous favorite for the audience; her voice persists across the duration and sentiment of the play and makes Anarkali veritably lovable in 2018 theatrics.

Grab tickets to a show in Delhi here.

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