Director Rachel Chavkin, left, speaks with librettist and lyricist Ritesh Batra during “The Lunchbox” rehearsal.
Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle
Choreographer Reshma Gajjar, from left, director Rachel Chavkin, associate director Neeta Thadani, librettist and lyricist Ritesh Batra and composer and lyricist Patrick Lazour watch actor Kuhoo Verma rehearse the world premiere of the musical “The Lunchbox” at Berkeley Repertory Theatre rehearsal studios in Berkeley on April 29, 2026. The musical adapts a film about a misplaced lunch delivery which brings together an older widower and a young wife.
Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle
Actor Manu Narayan, top, and the chorus rehearse “The Lunchbox” at Berkeley Rep.
Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle
Choreographer Reshma Gajjar watches the ensemble during “The Lunchbox” rehearsal.
Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle
Tony Award winner Rachel Chavkin addresses the cast at during “The Lunchbox” rehearsal.
Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle
Twins, lyricists and composers Patrick Lazour, left, and Daniel Lazour observe “The Lunchbox” rehearsal.
Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle
Chorus members take cues from choreographer Reshma Gajjar, right, during “The Lunchbox” rehearsal.
Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle
Lyricist and composer Daniel Lazour observes “The Lunchbox” rehearsal.
Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle
Every workday in Mumbai, 200,000 hot lunches get delivered from home and commercial kitchens via a single network of workers called dabbawalas. Low-tech and efficient, the 136-year-old system is famous for never making mistakes.
“The Lunchbox”: Book by Ritesh Batra. Music by the Lazours. Lyrics by Batra and the Lazours. Directed by Rachel Chavkin. Performances begin Sunday, May 17. Through June 28. $25-$135. Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. 510-647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org
Ritesh Batra’s 2013 film “The Lunchbox” envisioned one such slip: A young housewife hopes to rekindle her husband’s interest with a special meal, complete with a fragrant spice recommended by an auntie upstairs and arranged in a set of cylindrical stackable tins called a tiffin. Somehow, it gets mis-tagged, mis-sorted or just sent on the wrong train and bicycle journey to a widower on the verge of retirement.
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But as the film’s musical adaptation gears up for its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Batra and the rest of the show’s creative team reframed the dabbawalas’ supposed error.
Choreographer Reshma Gajjar, center front, works with the ensemble during “The Lunchbox” rehearsal.
Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle
“It wasn’t a mistake,” choreographer Reshma Gajjar told the Chronicle during a group interview over — what else? — lunch. “It was divine intervention.”
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But it’s not just a miracle, Batra added. It’s that the characters are primed to have a miracle happen to them.
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“They are ready for either consigning themselves to the usual flames of their life, or ready for something different,” he said. “The story puts them in the position of choosing between those two things.”
The show, which begins previews Sunday, May 17, brings together Tony Award-winning director Rachel Chavkin (“Hadestown”), the Lazours — songwriting brothers Patrick and Daniel Lazour — along with Batra and Gajjar (who’s performed in “La La Land” and with Madonna). All felt drawn to what Gajjar described as the film’s “unexpected” love story.
Lyricist and librettist Ritesh Batra, second left, and composer and lyricist Patrick Lazour, right, discuss “The Lunchbox” rehearsal.
Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle
“There’s a real, relentless humanism to the movie,” Patrick Lazour said.
It takes an almost affectionate look at the indignities of life — the crowded trains, the annoying coworker who won’t go away, the neighboring auntie who can smell all your cooking and overhear everything you say but is always ready to help.
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As Ila (Nimrat Kaur) and Saajan (Irrfan Khan) bond over notes passed back and forth with the lunchbox, the film is whimsical without being sentimental. It doesn’t shy away from either character’s gutting loneliness or insist those feelings be magically resolved. But it allows magical things to happen, tossing them off matter-of-factly.
“There is heart. There is sentiment,” Chavkin said. “But it is trusted, because the plot structure is so impeccable, to stay almost at bay.”
The creatives’ task is to give the audience “just enough,” she added, describing the tone as “delicate.”
Director Rachel Chavkin speaks to the cast during “The Lunchbox” rehearsal.
Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle
In translating that tone to musical theater, the Lazours had nearly a blank slate. Max Richter’s scoring in the quiet, airy film is so minimal that early on in the process, Daniel Lazour jokingly wondered, “Does this person like music?”
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Batra pointed out there’s an obvious way they could have written songs.
“Because it’s driven by so much internal thought, we could have just gone in and musicalized all the voiceover,” he said.
To be fair, there is some of that in the stage version, “but it came alive for us as a musical when we started finding songs in between the seams of the story,” Batra explained, noting, for example, a moment of active waiting at a café.
Daniel Lazour even found himself using the words “ditty” or “flourish” to describe what they were writing because “song” didn’t always feel right.
Actor Kuhoo Verma performs a solo during “The Lunchbox” rehearsal.
Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle
Another apparent challenge is that in the film, the leads never meet face to face or appear in the same frame.
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“I spent a lot of time thinking about, ‘Well, how do I connect them spiritually?’” Batra recalled.
Since film is a visual medium, he went on, “I would have her putting a thread around the stuffed brinjal” — eggplant — ”and then cut to him opening it.” In another cut, the characters make parallel motions flicking away a fly.
“But the stage is built for stuff like that,” Batra continued. “Two actors can be on the same stage at the same time, and we can believe that they both are not aware of each other.”
“There is a beautiful, deeply yummy theatrical tension,” she said.
She also pointed out that in the stage version, the main scene partner of Ila (Kuhoo Verma) serves what the team calls a “Ghost of Christmas Future” role in her life, while Saajan (Manu Narayan) has a “Ghost of Christmas Past” figure. That parallel underlines the story’s existentialism: If family togetherness and youth entrap, so do solitude and age.
Actor Manu Narayan, center, rehearses with the chorus during “The Lunchbox” rehearsal.
Don Feria/For the S.F. Chronicle
That might sound depressing. But the magic of “The Lunchbox” is how it’s not depressing at all.
During rehearsal — which featured a tiffin-laden cart, a bicycle and a train car swirling about Berkeley Rep’s studio — Chavkin’s direction conjured twinkly, wistful warmth. When she spoke to Caryna Shah, one of two youth actors who plays Ila’s daughter, it was with the life-giving seriousness that respects a child as a full collaborator.
Working with actor Anisha Nagarajan about the moment her character realizes she’s getting left behind, Chavkin emphasized not spite or self-pity, but something gentler. Chavkin held a fist close to her chest. She beamed without smiling big, somehow — like she was carrying an incandescent treasure.