I’ve just realised it’s a decade this month since I began my Sunday ‘On the Upbeat’ column in the Navhind Times. In that time, I haven’t missed a column (apart from the COVID-19 pandemic and other reasons for there not being a Panorama supplement in the Sunday paper). So that is upwards of at least 500 columns. I hadn’t expected to get this far. I hope I can maintain the streak.
Despite the clashing event (Fr. Rob Galea live in Goa for the first time, at Pilar), the Ravindra Bhavan Margão had an impressive turnout for the C.A.U.S.E. (Co-operation of the Arts for the Upliftment of Society and the Environment) Foundation’s most recent offering, “Something Rotten!”, a 2015 musical comedy with music and lyrics by brothers Karey and Wayne Kirkpatric. The near-full auditorium was indicative yet again of just how starved Goan audiences are for a decent production.
India (or should one start saying Bharat now?) will probably successfully send a rocket into another galaxy before the Kala Academy auditorium is up and running again, so North Goa’s ‘culturati’ had better get used to commuting to Ravindra Bhavan Margão for the foreseeable future.
I’ve so far been to three of C.A.U.S.E, Foundation’s visits to Goa: Fiddler on the Roof (2014); “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” (2021); and this one. The first two were much more well-known, of an older vintage, going back several decades. “Something Rotten!” at eight years is much newer, and I had to look it up. The name reeked of Shakespeare (sorry, Will, there’s a lot in a name!) and the more I read up about it, the more I knew I had to go see it.
A Shakespeare-based musical with the Bard himself having a singing, acting and dancing role is actually a stroke of genius. It’s hard to believe it hadn’t been done before. After all, Shakespeare almost certainly did all three as he trod the boards and directed his troupe members to, in his plays. It’s the perfect excuse to pepper the script with Shakespearean neologisms and phrases.
It’s not difficult to see how the plotline evolved; it’s a short leap of imagination from the real-life brothers Kirkpatrick to the Bottom siblings in the stage musical, with all the double-entendre and puns the surname could generate. And it’s not that far-fetched as English surnames go. In the world of classical music alone, you have the music scholar, organist, choirmaster and conductor Edward Higginbottom; and the orchestral and choral conductor, organist, harpsichordist and scholar (especially of the music of Bach), John Butt.
The director Leila Alvares and cast and crew of C.A.U.S.E, Foundation are to be commended for treating Goa to yet another fine performance. As she reminded us in her speech at the end, the troupe come from different walks of life; none of them are professional, paid actors, singers or dancers. And yet the finished product had the gloss of professionalism. It speaks of the motivation, drive and countless hours of gruelling individual and group rehearsal.
Learning reams of lines isn’t easy, as I learned first-hand when a group of us celebrated Shakespeare’s 200th death anniversary in 2016 by reciting excerpts from his plays in public. The famous Mark Antony ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech from ‘Julius Caesar (act 3, Scene 2) was allotted to me, which I relished, as I have recited it from my schooldays. Another excerpt from the same play’ (Calpurnia’s dream, Act 2, Scene 2) was tougher to memorise and deliver.
But in a musical, apart from knowing one lines, one also has to sing them, obviously in time and in tune. And in a comedy, timing and delivery are everything. A punchline too soon or too late and the moment is lost. I think all the cast were spot-on in this respect.
Whoever picked the principal cast (John Mark Sudevan and Rahael Roy Thomas as the siblings Nigel and Nick Bottom respectively; Aakarsh Paul, Shakespeare; Deepa Jacob, Bea Bottom; and Alapana Bagirath, Portia), chose extremely well. Going through my 2021 review of their ‘Joseph’ production, I wasn’t surprised to find I had mentioned two from this lot (Thomas and Bagirath) positively back then too. All of them have fine voices with power to match. I’m sure the others in the cast do too, but these had more of the limelight.
The best song in a musical is judged by its catchiness, its ability to become an earworm playing in your heard long after you’ve left the theatre. For me, it was ‘A Musical’.
But there were other contenders: ‘God, I hate Shakespeare’ and ‘Hard to be the Bard’, for example.
The lyrics of ‘The Black Death’ reflect the scientific thinking of the time in which they were written: “What’s that coming up the Silk Road out of China? The Black Death.” However more recent research challenges the Chinese origin of the bubonic plague pandemic. It might seem like splitting hairs, but we have seen the racial scapegoating during the COVID-19 pandemic, so it’s worth pointing out.
Likewise, the reference to Nazis as “such good men one and all” even though satirical, made me squirm just a little. It’s bad enough that contemporary fascists worldwide are not only idolised but repeatedly voted back into power. Maybe the reference was meant to remind us of the ever-present danger of that.
There were sound glitches in the second half, which thankfully didn’t affect the performances of Paul’s Shakespeare or Arvind Kasthuri’s Brother Jeremiah. Both seamlessly picked up cordless mikes without skipping a heartbeat. But I did feel that overall, the sound fidelity, especially of the musicians was not as good as it was for ‘Joseph.’
For those of us seated nearest the door, the chattering among latecomers (and it has to be said, ushers as well) oblivious to the disturbance they were causing, was an irritant.
We Goans keep resting on our laurels as having “music in our blood”, but I can’t remember the last time a homegrown Broadway or West End musical of this calibre was ever staged here. Even in my younger days, visiting troupes from then Bombay (remember Alyque Padamsee’s ‘Evita’? Or ‘Cats’ or Godspell’?) were eagerly awaited. Now Bengaluru seems to have wrested that crown from Mumbai.
Goa’s near-obsession with sacred music to the neglect of other genres such as musicals is depriving our youth of opportunities and aspirations and a wholesome cultural exposure. Today we can blame the lack of venues, but this malaise predates the out-of-commission Kala Academy auditorium.
This is why the song ‘Welcome to the Renaissance’
was ironic. Our false prophets and their nephews (like Thomas Nostradamus in the play) keep chanting ‘renaissance’ like a mantra when in fact Goa has actually regressed musically, as I’ve written often before.
Watching “Something Rotten!” in the state of Goa was a welcome distraction from all that is actually “rotten” in the state of Goa, and indeed the state of India, for at least the last decade or more. To quote Shakespeare from ‘As You Like It’: “We have seen better days.” May they return soon, and may all be well that ends well.
(An edited version of this article was published on 17 September 2023 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)