Stephen Schwartz turned Matthew into Godspell. Andrew Lloyd Webber set the narrative from the back chapters of Genesis to song and verse and called it Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. More than a few world-famous musicals have modernized ancient devotional literature through an encounter with contemporary pop. Ramaavan — A Musical, a stage adaption of the Hindu Ramayana by Jersey City theater and dance company Surati for Performing Arts, bears a similar bouquet. Director and choreographer Rimli Roy straddles two storytelling traditions: one that’s over two thousand years old, and another that was born on Broadway in the freewheeling 1960s.
Her show, which ran at NJCU’s Margaret Williams Theater in 2023 and played in India this summer before arriving at the Cullum Theater in New York City (314 W54th St.) this weekend, is a postmodern English-language Ramayana with a multi-ethnic cast, a bright, upbeat, omnivorous mix of subcontinental sounds and mainstream music, and a message that emphasizes loyalty, fairness, and the need for rulers to be rational and temperate. It feels awfully salient to our moment.
Nevertheless, theirs is no radical reinterpretation. Everything in Ramaavan is firmly rooted in the Ramayana, and the Ramayana is a hoot. There are many reasons why this tale of a showdown between a noble exile and a vengeful king has persisted through the ages, and Roy isn’t obscuring any of them. Surati gives us the swordfights and the palace intrigue, the abductions and the evil spirits, the battalion of monkeys (unlike the Wizard of Oz, the animals fight for the good guys), the royal costumes and the daring rescues.
In Ramaavan, the supernatural elements of the storytelling are frequently enhanced by voiceovers and video screen projections. But the technical interventions always feel supplementary to the human connections generated by the cast of sixteen acrobatic actors, all of whom seem to be having a great time inhabiting the timeless. When they sing — and since the music in Ramaavan barely ever stops, they almost always do — they put their voices to sunny major-key material by Rajesh Roy (the director’s brother) that’s instantly appealing, legible and genial, muscular and broad-shouldered. Every line in every song advances the drama.
And that’s important, because there’s a lot of drama to get to. Scriptwriter Arati Roy (the director’s mother; this is absolutely a family affair) has excised major portions of the Ramayana by necessity: the poem has over twenty thousand verses. Ramaavan packs loads of incident into two and a half hours of entertainment, and gives us plenty of time to get to know the cast of legendary characters, including plenty of time with the monkey-trickster Hanuman, played with a wink and a wriggling sense of mischief by Jeremiah Williams. Lengthy this show is, but what is an epic without a little excess?
At the center of the drama is Ram, a wise prince who is constantly forced to cope with the lousy choices of the people around him. Kicked out of his own kingdom through no fault of his own, he makes a life for himself in the country — but even there, trouble finds him. In Hindu tradition, Ram is a human manifestation of the benign god Vishnu and and a perfect being; Roy’s secular version is vulnerable but still morally flawless. This presents a challenge for lead actor Jonathan Gregory Power, who must elicit sympathy and identification from modern audiences who’ve gotten used to rooting for antiheroes. He acquits himself nicely by presenting Ram as a regular fellow with unusual patience and solid judgment: a deeply good, squarely regular guy who keeps his head no matter how turbulent things get.
His adversary is Ravan, the brooding and dangerous king of Sri Lanka, played with gravity and leonine charm by August Williams. But his true foil is his younger brother Lakshman, a righteous hothead whose impulsive actions drive much of the drama. It is Lakshman who resorts to violence when Sita, Ram’s wife, is threatened in the forest, and Lakshman who must absorb Ram’s sternest rebuke about the necessity of diplomacy and considered action. Anybody who has ever had to deal with a too-perfect sibling will nod in recognition at Tanner Hodson’s exasperated but fiercely protective interpretation of Lakshman. Even when he’s drawing back his bow, kindness undergirds his actions.
The same is true for Madison Halla, whose radiant Sita wears her sweetness on the surface and, even when beset by evil spirits, never loses her composure. Her weakness is an another expression of her goodness: her fascination with all things beautiful. In one of the show’s best sequences, she’s lured from her place of safety by a demon disguised as a golden deer. Fiona Smith dances the part of the treacherous animal with a combination of innocent flirtation and menace, and Halla’s innocent mimicry of the deer’s movements crackle with seductive energy.
These breaches in the infallibility of the protagonists are crucial to understanding the Ramayana’s power. Ram and Sita are paragons, but they aren’t automatons. As many of the godly and quasi-divine characters in the Sanskrit epics are, they’re passionate — and Roy’s production, full of bold colors, declaratory sentences, and energetic gestures — foregrounds this. The difference between the main characters and their adversaries is their self-control. Roy and Williams don’t make Ravan a villain outright: he’s doing morally questionable things because he isn’t thinking clearly. He’s governed by his rage and resentment, but he’s got a good idea of what nobility might look like. Even abducted Sita recognizes that he’s got the potential to be a decent king if he could discipline himself and get his fury under control. Ram demonstrates that he can be just as fierce as Ravan, but he’s always got his brain working. He’s the Indian ideal of the union between the head and the heart, and one that modern Americans might consider emulating.
Thus it’s no coincidence that the more Indian Ramaavan feels, the better it works. The weakness of the songs is their reliance on easy end-rhyme, and in the slower, American-style ballads influenced by radio R&B and Broadway plays, this is exacerbated. Wife will be paired with life, touch with too much, and the singers are going to take awhile getting around to destinations that are visible from miles away. But when the Roys turn to Indian and Indian-inspired music, all of that is swept away in a great rush of percussion and sinuous melody. Composer Sumit Roy (the director’s father; again, this is a very talented family) delights in the connections between the music of his homeland and what we currently call global pop, and Rajesh Roy’s piano jumps with Ravan-like agility between gospel bass, soul chords, and raga-inspired leads. He’s joined by percussionist Elhadji Alioune Faye, who gets surprising expressive mileage out of a single hand drum. The show is repeatedly stolen by a quartet of Indian classical dancers: Harsha Harikumar, Hitanshi Patel, Sanika Pophale, and Mihika Keran. Adorned with jingle bells and wide smiles, their steps and graceful hand gestures are simultaneously exotic and familiar, and a rhythmic, flashing reminder of how much modern choreography owes to Indian traditions.
Likewise, the Ramayana, old as it is, is likely to feel recognizable to modern audiences. Parallels to Star Wars are unmistakable: the purloined but plucky princess, the two feuding but complementary brothers, the evil empire, the semi-human and outright alien allies and adversaries, the sweeping, romantic scope, and the Jedi-like insistence that the unmastered emotions are the playthings of dark forces. These weren’t tucked into the script by the Roys. They’re there in the original work. Those who see Ramaavan will walk away with a good understanding of one of the world’s greatest and most influential stories, and one that still isn’t as well-known in America as it should be. As educations go, Ramaavan makes this one a heck of a lot of fun — and if you can’t get to the Cullum Theater this weekend, the Surati cast will be airing songs from the show at a special presentation in Jersey City on November 15.