EYE ON INDIA

A booming economy, a fancy new venue, and all the reasons the world's most populous nation could become the next major theater market

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The state-of-the-art Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai. Photo: Courtesy of NMACC

Broadway has long had its eye on India, and it’s easy to see why.

A giant population? Check. Fast-growing economic power? Check. And, crucially, a proven cultural fondness for musical storytelling? An emphatic check with a Bollywood flourish.

After a decade of sporadic forays into the region—most notably by Disney Theatrical, which brought Beauty and the Beast to Mumbai and Delhi in 2015—there’s reason to believe that the international commercial theater industry has now begun to forge real, sustainable links with India’s cultural sector.

Back in the spring of 2023, the opening of Mumbai’s Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre had Broadway types buzzing about the luxe new venue ripe for large-scale musical fare. (I mentioned the industry’s excitement about it in the very first story I wrote for this newsletter.) Now, less that two years later, NMACC has become a regular stop for international tours of Broadway titles including The Sound of Music, Matilda, The Phantom of the Opera, Life of Pi and Mamma Mia! The institution has also become a high-profile host of locally made musical theater—and also a producer, inaugurating the campus’ largest venue with its own original show, The Great Indian Musical: Civilization to Nation.

At the same time, projects in the pipeline around the world—from the Bollywood-based Come Fall in Love to the recently announced Slumdog Millionaire—stand poised to bring Indian stories to global stages.

In this SPOTLIGHT STORY, I’ll highlight

• the reasons to bet on the market’s potential for musical theater makers and producers,

• the notable hurdles to its growth,

• the theatrical ins and outs of the region from run lengths to pricing to funding,

• the two big venues to know in Mumbai,

• the homegrown titles to pay attention to—and the cross-cultural collaborations in the works,

• the Oscar winner aiming to make Chennai into the Broadway of India,

• the new Indian musical soon to play a New York City run, and

• why Disney moved the intermission for the Mumbai debut of Beauty and the Beast.

LOTSA LANGUAGES, LIMITED RUNS

India is the most populous country in the world, with 1.46 billion people across the 36 states and territories that make up the nation. It’s home to 121 languages (22 of which are official recognized in the Indian constitution) and nearly 20,000 dialects. “Every 150 kilometers, the dialect will change,” says Vikrant Pawar, a Mumbai-based director-producer who spent 12 years as the head of live entertainment at Disney India.

To say that India has a rich tradition of performance is selling it short: It’s a country of multiple thriving traditions that are often specific to a particular region or language. There’s plenty of theater in that mix, from folk forms to Hindi stagings of Chekhov and Shakespeare that are performed open-air in rural areas. In the eastern state of Assam, the enduringly popular tradition of mobile theater known as Bhramyaman can be lucrative enough that some actors will choose it over a Bollywood gig.

Much of the nation’s theater operates on a not-for-profit model, with large-scale performing arts venues like NMACC funded largely by philanthropy from corporations or the ultra-wealthy, and smaller companies supported by pools of donors.

In both urban and non-urban areas, theater productions—and theater companies, largely semi-professional—come and go quickly. “A show of ours might run for five years, but we’ll do four performances in Bangalore, next month three in Delhi, next month four in Mumbai,” says Abhishek Majumdar, a playwright and director who is the former artistic director of the Bangalore-based Indian Ensemble. “A play will do maybe 30 to 40 performances in a year, and usually we would have more than one play running, so it’s 70 to 80 days of performance a year for a company like ours.”

Which is to say: “The idea of a run doesn’t really exist here,” according to Bruce Guthrie, the head of theater and film at Mumbai’s National Centre for the Performing Arts.

That’s one obstacle to Broadway-style, commercial theater finding a foothold in the region. Another is a scarcity of venues that can accommodate productions of scale and technical complexity, and no real established touring network between major cities.

There’s also fierce competition for consumers’ free time with the explosive local growth of OTT media services (i.e. digital streaming content, predominantly consumed by Indians on mobile devices)—not to mention price sensitivity in a population far more accustomed to paying ₹130-₹260 (~$1.50-$3) for a movie than shelling out for ticket prices that would make a run of a large-scale theater production sustainable.

Pawar recalls that back when Disney’s Beauty and the Beast played Mumbai and Delhi in 2015, tickets averaged about $30. “People were not used to spending that kind of money for theater back then,” he says.

BIG PROSPECTS, BIG POTENTIAL