"Bharati: The Wonder that is India", a Sahara India Parivar initiated musical extravaganza to present Indian cultural richness at the world stage, has captivated the Israeli audience with capacity crowd turning up for all the eight performances at the Heichal Hatarbut auditorium here.
"An aesthetic delight that takes you on a memorable journey of the colours, scents and savours of India that we love so much in this country.
The storyline accompanying the musical sequence makes it like a live Bollywood blockbuster", Ophir, a student of Indian Studies at Tel Aviv university told PTI after having
watched the show four times in the last eight days.
The final performance at the hall was not the first time for many among the audience who cheered and whistled at the introduction of the main protagonist, Bharati, being played by
actress Bhavana Pani, and at other moments of triumph in the love story presented through 14 Bollywood hits, interwoven with Hebrew story narration and glimpses into diverse Indian
cultural facets.
Hit numbers peppered with a typical Bollywood theme, the two hour musical extravaganza showed how an NRI engineer
Siddharth (Sara Muthu Saravanan) comes to Varanasi on Ganga cleaning project, meets Bharati, falls in love and after Mumbaiah twists and turns in the storyline, gets married to
her despite her father wanting to give her hands to somebody else.
Kamlesh Pandey has written the script for the show and choreographer Jojo Khan directed it.
The show makes a return to Israel after four years and attracted a lot of media attention before and after it started, with the major television channels here carrying out promos at prime time during the run up to the inauguration.
"It is a matter of great pride to represent India. It also brings a lot of responsibility as I see myself in the role of a cultural ambassador representing my country at the world stage", Pani told PTI.
"The overwhelming response of the audience despite the show being a repeat in many ways, and the kind of curiosity it has generated among the people here makes me feel pride as an Indian", she said.
The whole hall stood up and repeated the dance movements on Chori Chori hum gori se pyar karenge as the presenter (sutradhar), local TV artist, Lior Halfon, urged them to imitate the movements.
'Dil to pagal Hai', undoubtedly the most popular Hindi song in Israel saw half of the audience joining in chorus and whistling and dancing to the tune.
The songs for the show have been picked from Bollywood hits across the years and also include Pagri sambhaal, Jaadu hai nasha hai, Silsile yeh chaahat ke, Nimbuda nimbuda, Bole
churiyan, Dulhe ka sehra, Rang de, Mere dil ka and Kehna hai.
Several hundred copies of the Sahara India Parivar released Compact Disc, comprising of all the songs at the show, have been bought by Israelis who came to see the performances, a shopkeeper at the Heichal Hatarbut auditorium
selling the discs said.
Halfon, during his narration also introduces the audience to Indian cultural values, huge diversity and various forms of musical instruments with a short solo performance over santoor and sarod at various stages greeted by huge applause from the audience.
The large cast of almost 100 artistes would be also performing in the northern coastal city of Haifa before moving on to other European and US cities.
There will be a narrator relating the story in the local language everywhere the group travels, Advocate Anat Bernstein Executive Producer of the show who coordinated the event in
Israel said.