Avanti set to rock the stage in Karachi

Jumbo Editorial Team

Avanti, a Grand Comedy Musical Theater Play, made its debut in Karachi at the Arts Council of Pakistan. It’s scheduled to last a month.

The story of the play revolves around Avanti, a place where wandering souls find contentment. Adapted from the a Brazilian and Bollywood screenplay Avanti is a wonderful mix of music, dance, drama, tragedy and comedy. 

It’s one of the rare plays where all genres have been intertwined into one theater play. Avanti reminds many of Madhuri Dixit's comeback movie, Aaja Nachle? The one with Konkona Sen Sharma and Kunal Kapoor? Aaja Nachle bombed at the box office. Big time. 

Yet a group of theatre lovers took the story, tweaked it and put it on stage in the form of Avanti, The Grand Musical. After being successfully staged in Islamabad and Lahore, Javed Saeedi, the director, with Entertainment Xtra has brought Avanti to the city of lights. 

With glittering sets, costumes and even more colorful characters Avanti is a rollercoaster ride of entertainment. It’s believed to be the most interactive theater play that audience has come across Pakistan for a long time.

It’s a comic presentation of the theme and is teeming with the most modern of dances with the dancers performing roll-overs and cartwheels and prancing across the stage, sometimes in a hysterical way, so much like the group dances one sees in Bollywood movies these days, totally unrelated to the theme and a departure from the artistic movements one would normally associate with dance. 

These dances are there it seems just to maintain a lively tempo. Avanti had a profusion of such dances, dances which are a test of one’s acrobatic capabilities. 

It is supposed to be a musical comedy comprising Bollywood tracks. It is based on a Brazilian movie and one from Bollywood. The Bollywood character is so very evident from the acrobatic dance numbers and the way the dancers prance across the stage like foals. 

It is the story of a lady who is fighting to save the place she’s been brought up in, its musical and showbiz character, its once liberal nature. It is the story of the resistance she faces and sometimes the heartily comic cooperation she is confronted with by overly artistically inclined elements.

What makes the performance unusually interesting is the amalgam of all three languages, English, Urdu, and Punjabi, and the way it is teeming with humorous punchlines.

The performances unfolded the teeming musical talent around. With the rise in theatrical activities, musicals have made their place amongst the rest. There might have been some misgivings about this genre working in Pakistan, but the response Chicago, Bombay Dreams, Karachi - The Musical got, changed mindsets. 

With Avanti, the cast and crew expect to draw in a wider audience as the script is bilingual; incorporating Bollywood music just broadens the horizon further. For those who haven't watched Aaja Nachle, Avanti is about a girl (Khwahish) who loves to dance but is looked down upon by society. She leaves her town for good but has to return when her dance teacher requests her to come back and pursue her dreams. 

It is then she returns and tries to persuade the townsfolk to accept this medium of art. The cast includes Zarmeena Yusuf as the lead as well as Rana Majid, Ammar Ahmed, Mariam Ansari, Saqib Sumeer, Usman Mazhar. The choreographers are Veera and Talal Rehman. For promotion of the play, the cast and crew held flash mobs around the city. 

With a grand opening, 15 dance performances and a tried and tested script, it's almost a given that Avanti is most likely to rock the stage in Karachi.