I remember seeing Aradhana in Lucknow with my classmates, after a taxing board exam, and falling totally in love with both the Rajesh Khannas in the film. Suspending all disbelief, we sat mesmerised as snow-capped mountains echoed with 'Kora kaagaz tha yeh man mera'--the song that Khanna sang to woo a coy Sharmila Tagore. It was pure romance! Harishankar Parsai’s story, Ek Film Katha, lampooning escapist Hindi films, had not yet been penned, and we watched Aradhana with undiluted joy. As did countless movie buffs across the country.
Decades later, I find myself in Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai, watching a stage adaption of Parsai’s satire. Time plays a role in my mixed feelings towards Golden Jubilee, conceived, written and directed by Saurabh Nayyar.
The play has all the elements of formula Hindi films, mainly of the 1960s, with some elements of the black and white era as well, when three-hour-long melodramas gave the ticket-buying audience its money’s worth. But today’s audience would not be able to sit through some of the long-winded, maudlin sagas of the 1950s. Spoofing the latter in great detail, therefore, makes Golden Jubilee sluggish in parts. Old, rheumatic, poverty-stricken fathers, ailing mothers and shuffling, servile Ramu chachas were stock characters of earlier films, adding to their emotional quotient, but became tiring stereotypes thereafter. The challenge for a contemporary stage director, therefore, is to caricature them in a shorter, crisper manner.
Apart from this, Golden Jubilee is a light-footed entertainer, bringing in the applause with song, dance and exaggerated mannerisms.
The lead actor, Girish Sharma, playing Rakesh Kumar, a yesteryear superstar, is a delightful combination of Dharmendra, Rajendra Kumar and Rajesh Khanna, with touches of Tragedy King Dilip Kumar and Jumping Jack Jeetendra.
From his bell-bottom trousers and flamboyant shirts to his acrobatic dance steps, Sharma does a perfect comic imitation of the stars who ruled the screens in the 1960s. The giggly heroine, Ranjana (Niketa Saraf who plays the role needs to have a more flattering wardrobe and hairstyle to portray yesteryear heroines) nimbly matches the hero’s steps and skips away after moments of affected flirtation—so like Asha Parekh bidding adieu to Rajesh Khanna with a coquettish 'Achcha to hum chalte hain' or Rajshree playing hide-and-seek with Biswajeet in verdant gardens and forests, singing 'Na yeh zameen thi, na yeh aasman tha...tera mera pyaar yun hi jawaan tha'.
Prosaic Parsai, unmoved by the melody or mood of such cinematic rendezvous, commented dryly that it seemed as if certain hours in gardens were out of bounds for the layman, to allow lovers to frolic here, undisturbed. The narrator of Golden Jubilee quotes him while Sharma and Saraf sing and dance to comic effect. The play makes fun of even those lovely romantic drives, in open convertibles, when heroes and heroines cruised along winding, deserted roads, humming dulcet numbers. Set director, Vivek Jadhav, does a back projection of a toy-like car going uphill and downhill, while Rakesh and Ranjana bring the house down, bumping along, in the foreground, in Jadhav’s contraption of a car.
Apart from having a song for every occasion, the formula films of the golden jubilee era invariably had a sacrificing heroine, a gaggle of the heroine’s friends, a rebellious hero, sidekicks of the hero, a larger-than–life villain, a cabaret dancer, one rich father in a silk dressing gown, and one set of doddering parents.
Golden Jubilee makes a mockery of all these stock features, much to the amusement of fellow viewers, mainly youngsters. What I found particularly enjoyable, apart from Ranjana and Rakesh Kumar’s spoofy song-and-dance numbers, was cabaret dancer Suzy shaking a leg, in a shimmering red, lacy outfit in a nightclub, to Ritajaya Banerji’s throaty Kitni haseen raat hai. Cutely portrayed by Namrata Varshney, Suzy is a welcome diversion from suffering parents and over-the-top villains. The smoky nightclub scene, reminiscent of the iconic one in the 1958- Howrah Bridge, and of many crime thrillers thereafter, is highly entertaining.
It gets even more entertaining when the menacing villain, played by Avneesh Mishra, suddenly drops dead. Now follows the mandatory courtroom scene. Hilariously spoofed, this scene has all the absurdities of formula films, with the giggly heroine donning a lawyer’s robes and cross examining Ramu chacha, cabaret dancer et al to save the love of her life while the public prosecutor, played with exaggerated gravity by director Nayyar, mouths highfalutin Urdu phrases, typical of Hindi films playing to the galleries.
The incredible finale is decided by Rakesh Kumar who wants to break the jinx of his previous flops, seventeen in all. The pliant scriptwriter Javed, fleshed out by actor Farrukh Seyer, complies, making it an apt end to a play burlesquing the absurd but entertaining Hindi films of a bygone era, and caricaturing the tropes that made them golden-jubilee hits.
The show will next be staged at Mumbai's Sophia auditorium on 10 June.
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