Sita Ram
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It’s a different matter with Lookingglass’s new musical, Sita Ram, whose run is sold out (though standby tickets are available). This show makes Indian dance accessible by putting it in a Western context. But today the stakes are much higher than getting an underexposed genre some respect. With religious wars raging across the planet, many people have come to see religion in any form as only a source of murderous conflict. Sita Ram’s greatest accomplishment is the rehabilitation of a religious point of view: it’s a musical-theater comedy whose message, means, and feeling are devotional.
Not that there’s any proselytizing. No one’s going to be converted to Hinduism because the source of Sita Ram’s story is a 2,000-year-old religious text, the Ramayana. Basically it’s a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl tale: Princess Sita and Prince Rama meet and fall instantly in love, but then the demon Ravana steals Sita away, and both prince and princess must undergo many trials before they’re reunited. Thing is, they’re no ordinary mortals: Sita is an incarnation of Hindu goddess Lakshmi and Rama of Vishnu, and they’ve come to save the earth from the “dark times” occasioned by the rule of Ravana, who’s interested only in material things and power.
