Bend It Like Beckham’s hit status can now be attached to the theatre world as well as the big screen.
The musical stage adaptation of the 2002 film by Gurinder Chadha, presently being performed in London’s Phoenix Theatre, has been scoring five star reviews in London.
Chadha, who has turned out to be equally adept directing for the stage, explains the production was a way of revisiting the movie without making a sequel.
“Constantly, I’ve been asked to make a sequel to Beckham,” she says. “However, I thought a West End show was the proper way to go. Once we made the show, I wanted to make sure that I embraced the West End genre, rather than just put the film on stage.”
Bend It Like Beckham – The Musical shares largely the same plot as the film: Jess (Natalie Dew) a young Indian girl persuaded to be in a local girls football team by tomboy mate Jules (Lauren Samuels). Jess hides the fact from her parents, but when members of the community find out, it threatens to derail the Indian wedding of her sister Pinky (Preeya Kalidas).
The production has been five years in the making. The first thing Chadha did was to learn about musicals. She went to as many West End shows as she could and took notes on what she felt worked. From the notes taken, Chadha and her co-writer, husband Paul Mayeda Berges, then unpicked the original film and put it back together as a musical. “I think that it was quite liberating to know that you were doing a completely different thing and also embrace West End musical tradition,” she says. “That also was quite hard because it was learning a whole new way and discipline of telling the story.”
The couple employed two legends of London’s West End to take care of the musical side – Howard Goodall came on board as the composer and Charles Hart as lyricist. “We could give hints of what we wanted to do and Charles took those thoughts and turned them into amazing lyrics,” she says. “My notes to Howard were never musical – they were always emotional – I’m not feeling how I should be feeling. We started to understand each other by talking about music emotionally and that is very Punjabi.”
Where Chadha was able to bring some of her own musical knowledge was in the moments in the show Indian music is fused with western sounds. “I spent the first few months sending tons of YouTube clips that I wanted to put in Howard’s mind,” she says. “He would never pastiche anything. He would digest it all and then re-present it, and wrote a piece of music, which is why I think it’s so fantastic.”
Casting the actors was also a challenge. Some of the film actors she worked with before could not sing to the standard required for musicals.
“But then we started casting and met actors who could sing and act and it started to open up,” she says. “Before I always saw Parminder Nagra as Jess, but now I just see Natalie.”
One of the noticeable changes to the musical are that the parents are made more endearing. “The difference of taking something you created and going back to do it a decade later, you are able to look at what really worked and also what you really liked about the final piece of work and focus on that more,” she says.
“They also seem much more loveable characters because when you sing you have to sing with your heart and so you immediately go straight into the emotions of the character very quickly. Also, when I made the film, I was not a mother and now I am, and we do change with that.”
