Grateful Men

Even before it all began, the first show I mean, we had a blast. It was a very different play that I was a part of. Lot of people in the cast, and lot of people to watch too! That made it a lot of fun. And The Hindu was kind to us as well.

When Vijay first told me about the play, I honestly was not too thrilled with the story of Monkey, Tiger, Snake etc. But when we read the script for the first time, there was magic. It was simple yet nice. Funny and witty. All of us actually enjoyed reading it.

Then the rehearsals with the SPOT 2007 folks and all the other ex-SPOTTERs and future SPOTTERs made it fun. I did not realize how the 3 months had gone away. There were times when the more diligent of us were mugging the lines, the lazy bunch that was in there (yours truly was part of it) winging it, eating 2 samosas (all right! all right! I had 3 :) ) that I have wondered how the hell will this turn out to be a play that people pay and watch. We were doing it for Dream a Dream...was it going to be Nightmare at Ranga Shankara, I feared.

Guiding us through this mayhem was Vijay (the Bheeshma Pita Maha, if you will) and Vijji (often wondered what is the deal with extra j). Vijay had to manage the real monkeys er...us, and Vijji the younger ones. Man did they pull it off! I am sure the kids who go to Vijji's Magic Puddles would be so lucky that they have her to learn from.

Anyways, show time came and went. The cast had a blast, the crew had fun and whatever happened we all laughed a lot backstage. One of my key learnings in this play was whatever you do have fun doing it in the play. The size of the part does not matter. There were so many folks fighting to play the rock, the friends, the people in Kashi. One of the best shows I had was when I was doing a 30 s role as the doctor who tries to save the princess...a blast. The other key learning was to do a play that entertains people, you need to be happy doing it. The happiness that you had on stage translated to one off stage. When the tempers were up backstage, the onstage team suffered and I guess the audience did not get a great show.

Of course, for me this play was a challenge as I had to do a critical part on a couple of days fighting through Laryngitis (for the record, I still am fighting!). So I must thank the kind doc who did not ask me to keep quiet but gave me drugs to tide things over, to my two special friends who went home and made turmeric milk with pepper and saffron (which was promptly attacked in the green room!). No thanks goes to the "Tigers" who beat the living daylights out of me :). And I will be a ungrateful dog, if I don' t say that the play was what it was because of the amazing kids. Kudos guys and gals.

And who knows, there may be more shows of the UGM and we can have more fun...I would be grateful.