Tag Archives: drama

Urban Turban

It’s stand up comedy. So, obviously, it is racist, sexist and every other –ist in the world. If you are ready to deal with it, it is a laughter riot.

The show begins with Monty Python’s always look on the bright side of life (which seemed quite like the actors were still doing their make up and they had to kill time). Immediately after, they sing a pettairap version of we will rock you. At the end of that is an introduction to the play. Evam‘s Urban Turban is the (funny) story of four people narrated in their own words by themselves, of course.

Image courtesy: Bookmyshow.com (for want of a better free image)

First up is @Aravind_SA: Assistant Director, two-time visa reject, loud mouth from down south. He has three stories. His story as an assistant director talking in Tamil to pigeons, his love for Leeds United and his humiliation at the hands of the UK Home Office and of course a childhood love story. He has an adorable Chennai accent and an uncanny ability to enact his sorry state of affairs in the most funny of ways. He’s got some killer lines and better expressions! Here, the joke is on him.

Next comes this boy from Coimbatore! It’s a shame I don’t remember his name. Or perhaps he didn’t say it clear enough. In his story, the joke is on us. He is the regionalist (if there is such a word) comedian. His jokes are on Coimbatore and on Bangalore. The dance at the pub was my favourite out of the whole gig. He has some great stories about squatting in a western toilet and dancing at a Chennai pub.

Madhuri’s stories were the most drab of them all. She begins with her self-proclaimed embarrassing story of being dumped by the boyfriend she met on bharatmatrimony. She begins very slow, stand still most of the show and the best joke in her whole gig is that her ex-boyfriend’s name was Sam, short for Nikhil. As a phoren-return to Chennai, I was expecting racist, sexist rib ticking comedy. Good or bad that didn’t happen, she had finished before we knew.

The last gig was expectedly the best of them all. Yudi aka fit-in-the-longest-name-you-know had the funniest story. From a Nepali boy in Chennai, this is a completely racist, sexist, regionalist, crack-a-joke-at-anything-that-moves gig! Every line was hilarious, he interacted the most with the audience and even called a spectator a “lucky b@stard”. The best of his work was the way he brought all other standups together in his gig. He gave a meaning to why these people were in the same show. Stunner boy who’s T-Shirt said ‘I Love CHEnnai’.

If you notice, they were all Chennai people making a joke about the city exuding Chennai-ness.

That said, it was a hilarious show. Tamil film directors, over-acting heroes, visa-seekers, Leeds United fans, schoolboy lovers, Coimbatore cool kids in ice-cream parlous, hostels and roommates, American desis and their moms, l3sbian Indian girls in the US, Gurkhas, Tam Bhrams, auto-drivers and many other vibrant characters brought together in a beautiful bouquet of experiences.

If you dare to laugh at yourself, this one is for you!

Disclaimer: I was invited to review the play and that means I got free “VIP” passes to watch this one (many thanks to @manuscrypts).

39 Steps – a laughter riot that tripped!

The 39 Steps – A comical adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock brought straight from the Broadway by Evam and precisely Bhargav Ramakrishnan. I haven’t watched the play at Broadway or anywhere else and therefore I do not have a scale to measure this against. It’s a great thing I think. So, I am going to rate this in absolute and not relativity. :)

Image courtesy: Evam

I am going to skip the story and the introduction for now. You can read Evam’s version here. And of course, you can Google to read around. Evam’s 39 Steps is simply a comical rendition of a murder mystery spanning itself through London and parts of Scotland. It is four-people playing about 140 characters and I must say, they’ve played it with panache.

After having Annabelle Schmit (or Smith with an accent, was it?) dead in his house, Richard Hannay (rather charmingly played by Navin Balakrishnan) escapes to Scotland in search of a Professor that she had spoken about. He embarks on a train journey which is very tactfully and efficiently executed by the team. Sunil and TMK play tens of roles in this one sequence and each one of them register very well. The train journey, the seats, the conversations, the cops, the scene where they all move back and forth to signify the train coming to a stop, the moving board that says ‘Edinburgh’, the men who are selling newspapers and everything about that train journey was enjoyable to say the least, awesome to exaggerate! The sound, the light, the action and the audience laughter were all well synchronised.

There are many such instances of awesomeness in the play. The scene where Hannay is arrested and taken in a car by the Scotland Yard, the next scene where Hannay and lady (I forget her name and can’t be bothered google-ing) run away handcuffed, the Professor’s house that is big in my head because they opened so many doors before they met the Professor and the list goes on.

But there is a big problem in a major part of the play being an accent comedy. The woman who calls herself Annabelle Schmit begins the ‘accent comedy’ with her French or German or European or whatever accent it is (with the intermittent usage of ‘ze’ for ‘the’). It could be noticed without much effort that when she is delivering her lines faster than usual she forgets the ‘ze’ and so it seems rather forced on her.

A few minutes into the play, Hannay lands in Scotland, THE land of accent comedy. This is where the play seems so misplaced. I can’t recollect anything beyond ‘whose hoose (Scottish for house) is it?’ and the total miscarriage of the pronunciation of ‘r’. As a total fan of the Scottish accent, I was very disappointed. Everybody in the play is speaking a very distinct Indian accent and so the accent comedy falls flat on its face. A little more effort into understanding and internalising the accents could have done a world of good!

TMK for some weird reason ended up playing many women roles. The screeching, desperate women roles are essayed very stereotypically in the play. I should convince myself by saying, “it was much expected”.

This is not the best Evam play I’ve watched, perhaps because it hasn’t been perfected yet! If they are really looking to take it abroad, farther than Asia, they have a lot of work ahead of them. They need their share of “bad” reviews to take from!