It is a brave move to bring a total of 45 dancers, technicians and musicians from India to the Palladium for a two-month run. But, while this show offers an undeniably lavish spectacle, you wish that the company had remembered to pack a decent script. There is a story by Rajeev Goswami, who is also the director and choreographer, but it is so absurd that it undermines the show’s sensory appeal.
The plot, such as it is, involves a woman called Shaily who lives in Munich and is constantly urged by her late mother, a dance star who never appears without dry ice, to “follow your heart, where dreams turn into reality”. When this sage counsel was repeated for the fifth or sixth time, even a baby in the audience was driven to utter a loud despairing cry we could all share.
Shaily goes off to Mumbai where she falls in with a choreographer, Raghav, who is trying to fuse eastern and western styles. But when the pair of them, accompanied by a comic sidekick, embark on a tour of India, they discover the joys of authentic folk dance, which they hope to export to the wider world.
It is only in the second half, when we can forget about the silly story, that the show takes off. It becomes a celebration of different folk traditions including the Garba dance of Gujarat and the Punjabi bhangra, and of the festivals of Holi and Diwali. As the stage becomes a riot of colour and swirling movement, I found myself wishing, as with last year’s tango show Dance ’Til Dawn, that the creators had offered us pure spectacle and ditched the narrative framework.
When the show returns to the story, it sows only confusion. Having rediscovered the richness of Indian tradition, Shaily returns to Munich, where she and Raghav entice a gay entrepreneur into giving them an old theatre by tantalising him with a version of It’s Raining Men, performed by a chorus of blokes in skimpy shorts.
In the end, the show tries to have it both ways. It hymns Indian tradition while teasing us with western-influenced numbers, including a display of black-clad decadence clearly derived from Cabaret. But, although the show is a bit of a terpsichorean hotchpotch, it is performed with great style by Ana Ilmi and Mohit Mathur as the two leads, the music by Salim and Sulaiman Merchant has its charm and the costumes provide a glittering Technicolor kaleidoscope. It’s just a pity that the book is not so much Beyond Bollywood as beyond belief.
• At London Palladium until 27 June. Box office: 0844 412 2704. Buy tickets from theguardianboxoffice.com or call 0330 333 6906.
