It’s lovely to look at, courtesy of David Bengali’s virtuosic video wall and Arjun Bhasin’s gorgeous costumes. Vishal Bhardwaj’s melodies are consistently sprightly, and the show boasts some appealing performances, especially in Salena Qureshi’s Aditi and Deven Kolluri as her banker husband-to-be, Hemant, from Hoboken, N.J. Still, there’s something pat about the whole enterprise, redolent of the canned characters and contrived plot twists of a vintage family TV comedy, that stops “Monsoon Wedding” short of specialness.
Nair, who conceived and directs the production, has worked for years on transforming her movie into a singable live event. She still has some work to do in explicating motivation and knitting the serious and silly threads together. For one thing, we don’t learn until very late in the proceedings why the worldly, Princeton-educated Hemant would travel thousands of miles to participate in a hidebound matrimonial tradition. Nor are the comic possibilities sufficiently mined in the couple’s meet-awkward get-together. How they progress from strangers to lovers is unconvincing.
A far too clownishly drawn wedding planner, played by Namit Das, part of a working-class romantic couple with the marvelous Anisha Nagarajan, feels as if a cartoon has been shoehorned into a sitcom. And a subplot about incest that unfolds in Act 2 is cursorily revealed and resolved in a few short scenes that raise more questions than they answer.
One can see where the moments of musical inspiration do occur, particularly in the vivacious opening number, “Rain Is Coming/Tip Tip Tip.” An impending monsoon, sung about by the cast of 21, foreshadows other storms to come. The number, with lyrics by Masi Asare and Susan Birkenhead, set to Bhardwaj’s music, is exciting not just because it embraces joyfulness on set designer Jason Ardizzone-West’s thrust stage, but also because the space bubbles with Indian and Indian American talent en masse.
Gagan Dev Riar, for example, finds a touching essence to Lalit, Aditi’s father. He sings perhaps the show’s most affecting and effective ballad, “Come Home, Ria,” to his niece, played by the radiant Sharvari Deshpande. Palomi Ghosh, Meetu Chilana and Sargam Ipshita Bali are vital presences. With accompaniment by an eight-member band, conducted by Emily Whitaker (and including Soumitra Thakur on sitar), the evocative dances help with the illusion of a journey to another culture. The credit goes to choreographer Shampa Gopikrishna and movement director Carrie-Anne Ingrouille.
All the nurturing Nair has done to this musical version of “Monsoon Wedding,” first produced in 2017 by California’s Berkeley Rep, certainly shows. Attention now has to focus on infusing the central characters with more depth — making them more original creations. If she and book writers Arpita Mukherjee and Sabrina Dhawan could refine some of the plotting and tone down some of the silliness, the road to Delhi would be one I’d be happy to set off on again.
Monsoon Wedding, book by Arpita Mukherjee and Sabrina Dhawan, music by Vishal Bhardwaj, lyrics by Masi Asare and Susan Birkenhead. Directed by Mira Nair. Lighting, Bradley King; sound, David Schnirman; orchestrations, Jamshied Sharifi and Rona Siddiqui. With Alok Tewari, Miriam A. Laube, Jonathan Raviv, Rhea Yadav. About 2½ hours. Through June 25 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, 45 Water St., Brooklyn. stannswarehouse.org.