JOIN USPuppet shows aren’t very common in the City but a puppet show called ‘Bollywood Bandwagon’ recently held at Rangashankara managed to attract a lot of people. The show was popular especially among the young people. It did well to merge filmy concepts with creativity.
It was a hilarious take on the many facets of Bollywood and captured the struggles of the people in the film industry, the insecurities among the actors and the challenges faced by the new entrants. The show was performed in Hinglish and included actors such as Pawan Waghmare, Choiti Ghosh, Avinash Kumar, Anurupa Roy, Mohammad Shameem and Anand Kumar.
Sprinkled with satire, irony and tragedy, the story traced the dreams of those in the film industry and how those dreams remain unfulfilled. It also explored themes like revenge, family and sacrifice. The story began with shooting of Kya Jeena Bin Tere and worked towards exploring the theme of ‘stream of consciousness.’
It featured two brothers falling in love with the same girl and encompassed stereotypical characters like the ‘baadshah’ of Bollywood, Raj Razdan, the new heart-throb Vicky Kapoor and the lucky charm of the industry Kamini Katyal.
A satirical take on Bollywood cliches, it included bubbly heroines, villains and love stories and showed the intimate spaces in the industry. What brought out the comedy and entertained the audience was not the story itself but the process of making it. The projection from script to screen and reel to the real was interesting. As the show was a live act, the viewers could watch the final act on the projector or the entire process that went into the making of each scene.
The special effects that were created such as using torch lights portraying a car’s flash lights sent everybody into peels of laughter. The show literally explored the happenings behind the camera. The play did well to entertain the audience. Rohini, a puppet lover, added that she enjoyed the show since it challenged the traditional boundaries of puppetry. “The cast was wonderful and the play had been devised after a lot of research. The presentation technique was unusual.”