Salaam, West End

“Musical theater can’t just go on and on being revivals and compilation shows,” Andrew Lloyd Webber muses. “I’ve long thought there must be something else--something that would unlock a new, younger audience for musicals.”

Whether you like his work or not, Lloyd Webber has been the most commercially significant name in musical theater for the last three decades. And wouldn’t you know that he might just be the one to have found that elusive something new?

His new show, “Bombay Dreams,” opened here in mid-June at the cavernous 1,900-seat Apollo Victoria Theatre, replacing “Starlight Express,” another Lloyd Webber show. The “Starlight Express” cast finally roller-skated its way out of the Apollo in January, after an astonishing run of almost 18 years.

“Bombay Dreams” is a very different kind of Lloyd Webber show, mainly because Lloyd Webber wrote not a single note of its music. Its composer, AR Rahman, is a legend in India, where he has been responsible for the soundtracks of some 50 films, including last year’s foreign-language Oscar nominee “Lagaan.” Sales of his soundtrack albums exceed 100 million worldwide.

But “Bombay Dreams” is also crucially different in other respects. Of its cast of 42, almost all are Anglo-Indian, “all except for a couple of Malaysians,” as Lloyd Webber puts it. Rahman’s score ensures a strong Indian music influence. The story is set in Bombay, home to the most prolific film industry in the world--and that includes Hollywood.

A visit to the Apollo Victoria in early July served to underscore the differences. On this Tuesday night, the theater was completely full: an achievement during this difficult period for London’s West End. But most startling was the constituency of the audience. Slightly more than half were Anglo-Indian, and many among them were young, sharply dressed and enthusiastic, applauding and cheering wildly, with a few female screams reserved for the show’s appealing young male lead, Raza Jaffrey. This Asian audience is one the West End has failed to attract in sizable numbers until now. (The British usually use the word “Asian” to mean immigrants of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent who settled in the U.K. in the 1960s and 1970s, and their families.)

“Intriguing, isn’t it?” says Lloyd Webber, two days after that performance. “When the show opened, the audience must have been 95% Asian. There was a hurdle, and we didn’t know how it would work out: would the show happen with a white audience too? But it has, and among the white audience, there’s a lot of traditional theatergoers, as well as younger people.”

“Bombay Dreams” is a boy-meets-girl story with Bollywood as a backdrop. Akaash (Jaffrey) is a young boy from a Bombay slum who can carry a tune. He realizes his ambition of becoming a Bollywood star, but he also falls for a girl who seems beyond his reach: Priya (Preeya Kalidas), the educated daughter of a wealthy film producer. In the course of pursuing his true love, Akaash thwarts the Mafia villains trying to demolish his slum and learns a lesson about not forgetting one’s humble roots.

The book, written by Anglo-Asian novelist and comedy writer Meera Syal, pokes gentle fun at Bollywood films and their odd conventions: hammy acting, song-and-dance interludes unrelated to plot, modesty about all things sexual. “Bombay Dreams” features extravagant production numbers with gushing fountains and wet saris, silk-clad dancers undulating in unison, even a Busby Berkeley-style routine in a parade of beauty pageant contestants. The staging is amazingly colorful, all oranges, purples and hot pinks.

With a couple of harsh exceptions, reviews have been positive, or at least tolerant. “A few critics have said we’re helping reinvent musicals,” Lloyd Webber says happily. “And ‘Bombay Dreams’ has received better reviews than either ‘Cats’ or ‘Phantom of the Opera’ ever did.”

Indian reviewers have generally been less negative than some of their British counterparts, according to Amit Roy, an Indian journalist based in London. “The notices from the Indian critics were mixed, but leaning toward the favorable. None of them was scathing.”

Some Indian critics, in fact, were wildly enthusiastic. Sanjay Suri of the national Indian newsmagazine Outlook India, wrote of “the dazzle that is at the heart of the musical” and affirmed that “Bombay Dreams” works primarily as a spectacle

It’s timely that “Bombay Dreams” should be the first major Asian musical to reach the West End, because in Britain this is an “Indian summer,” with this ancient, colorful Eastern culture making itself felt everywhere from films to fashion. The major London department store Selfridges dedicated itself to a celebration of Bollywood and Indian design, fashion and food for three weeks in June. The Victoria & Albert Museum in London has a major exhibition of the enormous Bollywood film billboards that dominate Bombay’s streets. One of this year’s few runaway British film hits is “Bend It Like Beckham,” about a teenage Anglo-Asian girl in London who wants to be a soccer star.

Lloyd Webber first became aware of Indian music five years ago, when he found himself watching an Indian movie on British television one Saturday morning. He was intrigued by one particular song, and noted some superficial similarities between Indian and Celtic music, with which he was deeply involved at the time. He was then working on his last musical, “The Beautiful Game,” set against the political strife of Northern Ireland.

Lloyd Webber forgot to note the song title but subsequently met film director Shekhar Kapur, best known for “Elizabeth,” starring Cate Blanchett, and the Indian film “Bandit Queen.” When Lloyd Webber expressed an interest in Indian film music, Kapur volunteered to give him videos of Bollywood films with outstanding soundtracks.

“It seemed to me that about one song in five or six had a gorgeous melody as well as complex rhythms,” Lloyd Webber recalls. “It soon became clear that the common denominator to all these songs that I really loved was the composer. And it was AR Rahman.”

Lloyd Webber asked Kapur to set up a meeting between himself and Rahman. He flew to Bombay, where Kapur organized a huge press conference to proclaim Lloyd Webber’s interest in Rahman’s music. “I went to meet him as a fan,” Lloyd Webber says now. “It seemed to me he might unlock that new audience in a way I couldn’t--because people see that I’ve written the music for a show and form preconceived ideas.”

He asked Rahman if he would consider writing a musical; Rahman agreed and flew to London. Only on this second visit, as they strolled through the streets of London’s theater district together, did Lloyd Webber appreciate the magnitude of Rahman’s stardom among Britain’s Asian population: “We walked 100 yards from my office to the Palace Theatre, and I swear he had to sign 10 autographs on the way. By the time we reached the stage door, it seemed most of the Asian head waiters in Soho were there to greet us.”

Lloyd Webber is very clear about Rahman’s contribution to “Bombay Dreams,” and his own. “He would be the first to tell you that he has only written for cinema. So, as a producer, what could I bring to the party? I suppose 35 years of experience in theater. The melodies, harmony, orchestration are all his, and his only. But it would be disingenuous to say I didn’t have a hand in the way the show is constructed. I was able to show him, for instance, how you place a song in the context of a book.”

Rahman wrote the songs with lyricist Don Black (who collaborated with Lloyd Webber on “Sunset Boulevard” and “Aspects of Love”), and a couple of songs written for the two leads would not sound out of place in any Lloyd Webber musical. But for the most part, Rahman’s score bubbles rhythmically in a way quite new to Western musicals.

“In the last 20 or 30 years since Tim Rice and I came along, there have been no new writers for musicals who have stuck,” Lloyd Webber says. “Now I hope that by introducing AR to the theater, I might have found such a writer.”

“Bombay Dreams” opened without much hype or expectation. As Lloyd Webber points out, “It had no advance at all. Zero. Because no one knew what it was.” Yet only three weeks into its run, he became convinced that the show had a genuine appeal for audiences of non-Indian descent, and he could therefore begin thinking about North America. Lloyd Webber has announced the show is sold through September and is taking bookings through March, and he says advance bookings, initially $200,000, have shot up to about $3 million.

“There have been several offers in the last 10 days,” he says. “So now my casting people are meeting about this. But I have to make a judgment about the best way of doing it. There are three main Asian centers in North America with a reasonable number of Indian singers and dancers. In order, they’re Toronto, Los Angeles and New York. So we might find it easiest to cast in Toronto. I’m determined to do it with an Indian cast rather than, say, having Puerto Ricans doubling for Indians.”

It’s curious that at the very time when Lloyd Webber’s long-established musicals (“Cats,” “Phantom of the Opera” and “Starlight Express”) are reaching the end of their long lives, having represented the conservative norm for musicals, he is suddenly emerging as something of an innovator.

“I’m thrilled to have found a completely new audience,” he says. “The experience has made me rethink what I might write next myself. And at this stage I really have no idea.”

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David Gritten is a regular contributor to Calendar.