Wuthering Heights

So the Lyric Hammersmith does Free First Night tickets for residents, and I was lucky enough to pick up a pair of free tickets to tonight's show of Wuthering Heights - Bollywood version. And when I say "lucky enough," I mean that I was lucky that I didn't decide to spend money to see this show.

I'll start with this. It is nice to see a theater production full of Asian people, as I feel like they don't get enough opportunity to make it in the Western arts world. However, it is sad when this is how the opportunity gets used..

I'm not really sure where to begin. Given that I'm not Indian, I feel bad judging the Bollywood-ness of it, which was supposed to make it interesting. I did see the show with an Indian girl though, and I was able to confirm with her some of my thoughts about the show. For instance, a Bollywood musical usually isn't composed entirely of cheesy bad-Broadway-esque ballads, right? Throwing in some sitar does not a Bollywood song make. I thought there'd be some flashy Bollywood dancing and fun songs (I guess I caught the Slumdog fever), but I was sorely disappointed. I got all excited for it when everyone started singing this (relatively) high energy song about a camel race. But then they just sang it in rows. Staring out at the audience. It was kind of like dancing, but like the kind where you stand in rows and stare forward. And the Indian accents? Let's just say this didn't transfer from India.

Okay, Bollywood shortcomings aside, we can still try to explore other redeeming features of the show. Okay. Tried. And failed. The acting was pretty much a struggle all around, but I don't fault the actors, in that the characters were just so poorly developed and inconsistent. The main female character seemed to change sides more than Lindsey Lohan, and the show just kind of glossed over anything from the book that made the Heathcliff character remotely interesting. It was good the show used a storyteller format, as that kind of justified the choppiness and complete lack of flow of the story. Given how choppy it was, it still managed to drag in all the little random thrown-together scenes. Even the painfully cheesy dialogue, which at one point had me spontaneously enter a fit of uncontrollable laughter, couldn't make the scenes go any faster.

The production quality of the show felt a little high school musicalish to me (and I'm not talking the Kenny Ortega version starring Zac Efron ... I'm talking the actual kind that gets put on by high schools), though I did think the sandstorm effects were pretty cool.

I also found it a little funny that they just called it Wuthering Heights. I mean, couldn't they have given it a different name and said it was based on Wuthering Heights? At least have some element of creativity. Okay, so to sum up: I am disappointed because a) I usually write much more entertaining bad reviews and b) them Asians got themselves on stage but let me down. Tough.