A mad-dash , a sprinkling of luck and the last available ticket …………….

……………. and voila I got to watch Prashanth Nair’s cleverly penned “ROMEO AND JULIET” at the Rangashankara.

The plot which includes 4 puppets who are bound by strings and have played Shakespearean plays all their lives, decide to break free from their stings and perform Romeo and Juliet (their way) one last time before they can enjoy their newly found Freedom as what they like to call it.  What unfolded over the following 90 minutes is a intelligent volley of words that alternate between the ones Shakespeare penned all those years earlier and the words we get to hear at a coffee table in any office cafeteria or a college parking lot (“FIGURE KOUN HAI BE?” would be a good example of what I mean) 

The delightful connection built with the audience with references to Arnab Goswami’s painful tirade to the brainless hogwash namely “Chennai Express” kept the audience in splits. The narration by Chris and generously peppered with the excellent guitar playing if I may say so, is extremely effective in setting the tone for the entire play. Avinash Pathak is brilliant and I can safely say that laughs would be a lot lesser if not for him. His expressions and timing marks a talent to watch out for in the future. The multi-faceted Shashank Purushotham who plays Lord Capulet and Juliet’s nurse and Montague and the Friar and an angel and ARNAB GOSWAMI with surprising ease was a pleasure to watch.

The dance sequence which is a take on the famous balcony scene deserves a special mention here. The lighting is superb and the choreography beautifully executed. This sequence in particular took my breath away. Rijul Ray gives voice to Shakespearean words the way it should sound to our ears. His command over lines was something that didn’t go unnoticed.  Kalyani in her brief role was beautiful. Her highlight moment was ofcourse the balcony scene.

So in review , I spent a delightful evening laughing(for the greater part. A few moments of the play seemed a bit prolonged. Personally as a viewer, I would have just loved to see Juliet answer Panauti’s question 

The best introduction to a movie ever!

My version of the the Zulu part was “Maaaa sesenyaaaa mamasissii babaaaa” until Googleruined it  corrected it for me years later. My heart still goes ‘aww’ everytime I see Simba sneeze when Rafiki pours sand on his forehead . Even though this movie is about Simba, Mufaasa will always remain “The Lion King” for me, he was way cooler than Simba ever was and I guess once you’ve heard him , you can never look at the stars as just regular balls of gas burning billions of miles away. I guess my childhood was as awesome as it was due to movies like these.

Oh and what a cool character Rafiki was – he was as crazy as he was cool. I remember watching a clip of the show on Broadway performing “the circle of life” on the Oprah show a long time ago and burst into tears right there in the living room.