The Advocate

Red Blooded Male Theater Review:
Cookin' and Bombay Dreams

Tony Monchinski
New York City is the cultural capital of the world. There are literally thousands of renowned sights and sounds to enjoy within walking distance of the Graduate Center. Two blocks down Fifth Avenue, in the shadow of the Empire State Building, you’re in the heart of the City’s Koreatown, where you’ll find kimchi, gayageum music, and happy endings (which, for those who don’t know, are more likely to be found on the menu of a massage parlor than a take-out joint). For Cookin’ however, you’ll have to travel downtown to the West Village’s Minetta Lane Theatre.

First developed in Seoul in 1997, this Korean import made its way from the land of morning calm to the belly of the beast in 2004. Originally slated to open in America in 2001, the September 11 terrorist attacks effectively put the kibosh on its North American premiere, but Korea’s longest-running show has proven irrepressible – at least for now.

Conceiver/Director/Producer Seung Whan Song has concocted a mixture equal parts Stomp, Blue Man Group and (fill in the blank with any cooking show of your choice, dear reader).

The cast – billed as “Sexy Food Dude,” “Hot Sauce,” and “Master Chef” (not to be confused with Halo II’s “Master Chief”) – cook and dance their way through a story involving the catering of an imminent wedding, an officious manager, and a budding romance. The rhythms of traditional Korean nong-ak music are achieved with common kitchen utensils, from cutting boards to chopsticks, and a piped-in musical score. As in Stomp or Blue Man, the story isn’t the important element of Cookin’: nearly all of the performance is non-verbal.

Unfortunately, after about twenty minutes I found myself stealing glances at my watch, trying to figure out how much of the show was left, worried that the actors might catch me in the act. I was especially nervous that the cute “Hot Sauce” – actress Che Ja Seo – might see me doing so. Decked out in a belly shirt to add some sort of sex appeal factor to the otherwise all male proceedings, Che had me enraptured with her near-orgasmic cucumber-swinging solo, which would not be out of place in the pink light district of Korea’s American G.I.-teeming It’aewon. Was this part thrown in to appease American audiences weaned on Janet Jackson’s breast and Desperate Housewives? Or, was it a transplant from Korean shores? Having lived in Korea, and remembering it as a somewhat conservative culture, I suspect the former. But I might be wrong.

Four boxes of cabbage are chopped up and discarded every week on the Cookin’ stage floor, but I’m glad to say that in the production of Bombay Dreams I attended, no hijras were harmed. This is quite an accomplishment considering we live in the land of Mathew Shepherd and virulent opposition to gay marriage. A hijra, as I learned along with a tourist family in the row behind me from parts unknown but, sadly, very much part of the contiguous United States, is a eunuch trained as an entertainer in India. It was funny to listen in on the family’s conversation during the intermission.

Mother: I don’t get it? Do they know he’s a girl?
Father: He ain’t a girl. He’s a man minus his you-know-what.
Son: No, pa, I think he’s one of those trans-sex-ya-a- call-its that we seen on 11th Avenue the other day.
Daughter: I bet they teach evolution up in the schools here too!

Bombay Dreams, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s UK transplant, is currently playing at the Broadway Theatre, one-time home to Les Miserables. Like Cookin’, Dreams is derivative – the junk pile slum that descends from the ceiling bears a resemblance to the junk pile barricade of Les Mis. But the majority of Dreams’ derivation draws from Bollywood, the film capital of the world, where three new films are produced and distributed every day.
Jobs aren’t the only things being outsourced to India. It looks like our ideology has caught on too. Dreams is an American rags to riches story set in India. Akaash, the talented Manu Narayan, is a child of the Bombay slums who dreams of making it big so he can purchase Paradise, the slum he inhabits with his grandmother and friends, including Sweetie the hijra (crowd pleaser Sriram Ganesan). Through a series of events, Akaash finds fame and fortune as a leading man in Bollywood cinema. But once he’s made it, our protagonist promptly forgets about his family and friends and focuses on the ample assets of the Bollywood sexpot, Rani (Anjali Bhimani).

Dreams delivers. Its song and dance numbers are entertaining and over-the-top. For instance, the British version’s 13-hose fountain number now features 32 hoses. Bollywood films may lack sex scenes or even kissing, but there’s nothing like a wet-sari number for the uninitiated. The hijra song and dance numbers left the aforementioned tourist family behind me scratching their heads, but they seemed to have no problems grasping the concept of the show’s villain, a millionaire land developer who seeks to raze Paradise and build a multiplex. America is, after all, inhospitable to Darwin, but quite at home with eminent domain.

Perhaps not as potently at Byron’s opium, Dreams inspired dreams of its own, at least in this writer. Couldn’t someone lure Aishwrya Rai, the reigning queen of the real Bollywood and arguably the most beautiful woman alive, to New York for a special performance of this show? Then couldn’t Billy Crystal be imposed upon to spring and buy a block of tickets for the whole Advocate staff to attend said performance? Perchance, to dream. In the meantime, I remain, in more ways than one, a blue man.

Tony Monchinski is a student in the PhD program in political science.