Staging a musi-call

A scene from Conference Call with the disgruntled employees and their momentarily perplexed boss

The idea of a musical is that of a grand spectacle. Or at least it was. The lockdown has changed things, having emptied the stage. Everyone-s back to the drawing board sitting at home. We are re-evaluating different concepts within the same constraints, including musicals - what does one look like when it isn-t a live sensory blast with lights, drama and action?

It looks like something stuck to a screen so far, that-s what. A group of city-based independent musicians and creative professionals gave us a taste of that recently with Conference Call: The Musicall. It-s an online musical available on YouTube. The setting is such that three disgruntled employees are getting on video conference with their overenthusiastic, slightly campy boss. They sing out their differences, giving us an insight into their individual personalities. The 12-minute story has romance and humour, and a twist at the end when the client comes in. And it-s all played out entirely in the form of alternating Zoom screens, which, we are all familiar with by now.

Kamakshi Khanna and Tejas Menon

The plot lampoons our times, in that sense. The concept came about after Dinkar Dwivedi and Tejas Menon thought of it, and then fleshed it out with their friends Adil Kurwa and Kamakshi Khanna before getting a few more friends - notably Jishnu Guha, Maalavika Manoj and Aarifah Rebello - on board for added roles. They are all concept creators or musicians in one way or another. Kurwa tells us that it was Menon and Dwivedi who did most of the heavy-lifting to keep the show together. The duo gave the others a blueprint to work on, with each actor-singer free to make his or her character their own. The songs came first. The script came second. Then, came the thrashing out of ideas, followed by each performer recording their own scenes at home, with Dwivedi and Menon finally editing all the parts together into a cohesive, musical whole.

The key word there is editing, because it was done keeping a flat screen in mind. Dwivedi admits that he hasn-t even thought of replicating this concept offstage yet. Kurwa adds, "We don-t even know when we will be able to do that." So, it-s this onscreen avatar of a musical that we will be consuming till the future unfolds itself. One of the differences it brings about in the creative process is losing spontaneity - that which exists when a director brainstorms ideas with his cast and they all immediately bounce it off each other in a physical rehearsal space. "The tough part is recreating the opportunity for something like that to happen," Dwivedi says. But at the same time, he adds that leaving the actors largely to their own devices also opens up their performances. He says, "When each person-s recorded bit came back to Tejas and I, it wasn-t exactly what we initially had in mind. So, we had to create a version 2.0 that was different from what we had pictured. The clearest example is that of Jishnu, who plays the client. The way we had pictured it, it was a villainous character. But the way he chose to deliver it ended up being more comical."

Dinkar Dwivedi and Adil Kurwa

The end result is that we now have an idea of how to re-envision a musical in this period of 2020. Conference Call has a bit of The Inception in it because it has a call within a call, with the first and last scenes tying up as images of heads popping out of multiple screens trying to catch what each person is saying in a virtual set-up. Dwivedi tells us that they kept production levels intentionally grainy to give it a more natural vibe; Zoom calls don-t have stereo sound, after all. There was no point in going for a grand spectacle is what he means to say, since musicals as we knew them, are indefinitely on hold.

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