It was a dark and stormy night in New York with a tornado brewing but thousands of cars from the tri-state area wound their way to Nassau Coliseum in Long Island as film-mad Indian-Americans had only one thing on their mind: Amitabh Bachchan, the Bachchan family and the rest of the biggies from Bollywood who were all part of the Unforgettable World Tour, the live show which had traveled to several US cities, Toronto, and Trinidad. And it also happened to be August 15 so Indians did their civic duty and watched their Bollywood stars live.
And what a show it was – gorgeously produced by Wizcraft, with dramatic choreography and sets by that wizard Shiamak Davar, the four hour show was bright, over the top and fun, keeping the audience hungering for more right past 1.30 a.m. at night.
Bharat Jotwani, the New York impresario who brought the show to the city with Victor Khubani, said the show cost $1.3 million, had over 5 tons of props and costumes and it cost $500,000 just to airlift it all to the various locations.
There were enough stars to light up the darkest night – Amitabh, Abhishek and Aishwarya Rai, and Jaya Bachchan, Madhuri Dixit, Preity Zinta, Ritesh Deshmukh, Vishal and Shekhar, with a crew of 130, including 62 dancers and a live orchestra. In Toronto Akshay Kumar performed with the show and London fans got to see Shilpa Shetty.
In New York, the sold out hall reverberated with the buzz of diehard Bollywood fans that had turned up en masse to see the Bachchan family together on tour for the first time. The highlight of the show was Amitabh Bachchan reciting dialogues from some of his landmark films such as ‘Deewar’, where Vijay confronts God as his mother lies dying. He ended that with tears in his eyes, leaving the audience very moved.
Madhuri Dixit still dominates people’s hearts and she and Aishwarya did a spirited dance number from ‘Devdas’. Preity Zinta and Ritesh Deshmukh also had some lively numbers through the evening, and Vishal- Shekhar kept people dancing in the aisles.
Abhishek Bachchan, on his first tour, had the girls started oohing and aahing. He asked the audience, all 13,000, to take a picture of him, clicking their cameras at the same time, and the effect was quite a sound and light show! “Brilliant – you don’t know how beautiful that looks!” he said. Abhishek did some of his father’s famous songs including ‘Khaike Paan Banarswala’ and the audience went wild.
The crowds were as thrilled to see Abhishek and Ash together as if they had done the matchmaking themselves, and they erupted into cheers when Aishwarya said, “New York has special significance in my life – this is where Abhishek proposed to me! It will always remain very, very special to me.”
The crowd also got a glimpse of Sweta Nanda who was introduced to the crowd by brother Abhishek who said she had flown in especially for Raksha Bandhan. Jaya came on stage to make a plea for fighting global warming and then actually took part in a song from ‘Abhiman’ with Amitabh, standing on a stool to get her hug from hubby.
This marathon orgy of dance and musical numbers would leave even the most ardent fan drained, satiated and content. It was like an addiction – the Bollywood Bhakts had their fix and left for home, satisfied and in a surreal glow… they had seen the stars and were over the moon.
© Lavina Melwani
