Culture: A Cultural Grand Salaam

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From the dance floor, Indian music percolates to the recording studio. Hip-hopper Jay-Z and British-based Indian producer Panjabi MC served up Beware of the Boys, which featured Jay-Z rapping over a remixed version of a song that Panjabi had made a hit in Britain and India. Even Britney Spears is getting her Ganges on; she used British-South Asian producer Rishi Rich on her last album. And you know a culture is hip when it generates a superhero; that's Bombaby, a cult comic-book out of California.

Then there's Bollywood--Hollywood in Bombay and, by extension, all the country's dozen separate film industries--producing the Indian musicals that nearly everyone in America has heard of and practically no one in America has seen. Bollywood films provide the primary entertainment for half the globe; the top films earn millions more in U.S. theaters catering to Desi audiences. But Bollywood has not dented the mass, or even the class, movie public. The Oscar-nominated Lagaan took in 10 times as much in the Desi houses as it did when Sony Pictures Classics gave it a general release. Bollywood films are also hard to find in video stores, although they're easily available online and in Indian-American neighborhoods.

Why are the films having more trouble finding an audience than the music and books? America's current cultural insularity aside, the musicals are a hard sell. At three hours-plus, with family-loyalty plots out of the hoariest Hollywood weepies, and all that singing, a Bollywood epic is too old-fashioned for the art-house crowd and too sedate, too girlie, for young males.

All of which makes Bombay Dreams a big risk for Broadway: a $14 million musical with no stars, a score by a composer famous in most of the world (see box, below) but not in the U.S., and a story set in the Bollywood milieu unknown to Broadway's conservative audience. Producer Andrew Lloyd Webber hired writer Thomas Meehan (The Producers, Hairspray) to cut a lot of in-jokes, pump up the mother love--domesticate the Bollywood beast. Will the transplant work? The show has a $6 million advance; and at a preview last week, the audience, perhaps 25% South Asian, seemed to love the infectious songs and rain-drenched dancing. So salaam, Bombay.

But Bombay Dreams needs to fill only 14,000 seats a week. How do you get millions to see an Indian movie? For a true crossover, you need a movie that just happens to be Indian, that pours a familiar tale into an Indian milieu. That's Marigold, the story of an American starlet, stranded in India, who works in a Bombay movie to get airfare home and falls for her Indian leading man. Bollywood is not the genre here; it's just the backdrop for a fish-out-of-water plot. Says Steve Gilula of Fox Searchlight, which distributed the breakout hit Bend It Like Beckham: "American popular culture is good at absorbing influences from around the world. But we embrace the elements, not the complete form. We have borrowed from parts of the culture and integrated it into ours."