A Day at the Call Centre

Anuvab Pal, whose plays The President is Coming and Chaos Theory have done very well, has already written a new one, which opens in June, and this time he directs too, with Raell Padamsee producing.
1-800-India is set in a call centre, and is ���a satire on modern India��� with some cracklingly funny lines, and situations that every urban Indian will relate to.It just happens to be extremely topical as well ��� when recession is making Americans suicidal and an Indian entrepreneur has the idea of helping, by getting the suicide helpline outsourced to India. As a result, Mumbai call centre workers with enough problems of their own take on the job of talking to depressed Americans out to kill themselves.
Kunaal Roy Kapur, who directed The President is Coming (the play and the movie), stars along with Foizeh Djalili, Ashwin Mushran and Ratnabali Bhattacharjee. After a long time, a comedy to look forward to.
The new auditorium at Sathaye College is seeing a fair amount of theatre activity. Keeping in mind the days of summer vacation, a season of children���s plays has been programmed, which includes a few of the best in the genre in recent times ��� like Mohit Takalkar���s Bed Ke Neeche Rehnewali, Akarsh Khurana���s A Special Bond Part 2 and Nipun Dharmadhikari���s Sutti Butti (Marathi).
Mean-while, at the ongoing children���s theatre festival at Prithvi, Om Katare���s new children���s play Dadaji Kahein opens next week, in which a grandfather tells a bunch of kids some unusual stories, like in the old days
before TV addiction, when storytelling was an art.
Lillete Dubey���s Dance Like A Man will have its 300th show early next month, retaining its reputation as one of India���s most successful original English plays, and also the longest running. The play, written by Mahesh Dattani (turned into a film by Pamela Rooks) about the travails of a family of classical dancers, stars Dubey herself with Vijay Crishna, Joy Sengupta and Suchitra Pillai. Dubey is also quietly working on a new play Living in the Flicker, also written by Dattani, due to open in July.
Kolkata-based Vikram Iyengar and Debashree Bhattacharya���s Labbaik may not come back to Mumbai soon, but one hopes it has given local performers some ideas. The production, meant to demystify and explain Kathak to kids, involved children in the audience beautifully, never once talked down to them, and held their attention for its one hour plus duration. Many kids in the audience, who would kick and scream at the thought of watching a classical dance performance, must have ended up badgering their parents to let them learn it.