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Watch the scene where Ila\u2019s husband Rajeev (Shiv Nadkarni) comes home from work and barely looks at her, seeming to wish he could shoo her away like a pest. She\u2019s been trying to rekindle his affections by putting extra care and special spices into his lunches, with the knowing aid of Mrs. Deshpande (Anisha Nagarajan) upstairs, but nothing\u2019s working \u2014 and not just because her efforts are going to that lucky widower, Fernandes (Manu Narayan) instead. As she clutches him and whirls away, her eyes look like two caged wild animals. Each new glance is as thoughtfully calibrated as each note on a score.<\/p>\n
But \u201cThe Lunchbox\u201d isn\u2019t just \u201cThe Kuhoo Verma Show.\u201d Director Rachel Chavkin devises stage versions for much of the film\u2019s magic. A dabbawala, or lunch deliveryman, might saunter down the city street singing an incantatory air, accompanied by a violinist, right as Ila and Fernandes are getting to know each other through their letters. This humble worker, the staging implies, might actually be something larger \u2014 a protective, guiding deity or a trickster figure, or even a little bit of both.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Benjamin Mathew, from left, Savidu Geevaratne and Vishal Vaidya in \u201cThe Lunchbox.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kevin Berne\/Berkeley Repertory Theatre<\/p>\n
Scenic designer Mimi Lien makes the characters\u2019 Mumbai apartments resemble the cylindrical stacked tins, called tiffins, that serve as lunchboxes \u2014 crowded together but atomized at the same time.<\/p>\n
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Choreographer Reshma Gajjar dapples the whole show with touches of wit. The dabbawalas jauntily slink their shoulders as they shuffle along, cocky in their famed competence. As Ila and Mrs. Deshpande blast a meal with extra chiles to avenge a note from Fernandes in which he dares to nitpick about his free home-cooked meal, female dancers surround him squatting in warrior poses and making off-with-his-head gestures.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Whereas jukebox musicals have a connective-tissue problem, reverse-engineering a story from one preexisting song to another, musicals that adapt movies have a parallel but opposite issue. The narrative\u2019s already there. It didn\u2019t need songs before. Adding them after-the-fact risks simply padding the action, distending one line into a minutes-long dilation, turning poetry into exposition, implication into cliche.<\/p>\n
But then there\u2019s that moment toward the finale when Verma\u2019s Ila takes off her jewelry. She\u2019s preparing to pawn it, but it\u2019s as momentous as unlatching shackles. The chorus crescendoes into a great throng of yearning, and the band, under the music direction of Sheela Ramesh, courses and swirls. It\u2019s like a racing pulse, an oncoming train. Sometimes in life, forces larger than you \u2014 fates, gods, dabbawalas \u2014 lead you to the just the right place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kuhoo Verma, left, and Manu Narayan in Berkeley Repertory Theatre\u2019s \u201cThe Lunchbox.\u201d Kevin Berne\/Berkeley Repertory Theatre Musicals can…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":336613,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[329,7,332,143,145,144,1058],"class_list":["post-336612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-arts-and-entertainment","tag-california","tag-east-bay","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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