As I type these very words, Bombay Dreams on Broadway is finishing up the final performance of its eight-month run. Its closing unleashes a horde of desi actors with Broadway experience. May they find their way to productions far beyond these comfortable shores.

Richard Corliss of Time analyzes Bombay Dreams’ short run:

[Meera] Syal, a writer and performer on the Anglo-Indian sitcom Goodness Gracious Me, could assume that the London audience would be knowing too — they’d be familiar enough with the genre to get the jokes poked at it. Bollywood films get a fairly wide release in the U.K., often making the weekend box-office top ten. Because the South Asian community is proportionately larger in Britain than in the U.S., the Bollywood culture more deeply permeates the official culture. Indian films can gross millions in the States and not be seen by anyone outside the subcontinental diaspora…

Essentially, he had to write a primer on Bollywood: explain the genre, then rack some jokes about it. Most of Syal’s best lines vanished. The show became soft and lumpy. The New York Bombay Dreams was a desperate, failed reworking of the London version… The Indo-American audience wasn’t large enough to keep it afloat, and it didn’t attract the idle non-Desi curious.

The outreach to critics was a disaster for this straightforward, unironic ’50s-style show. The London show had a better book and more physically striking actors, though the New York version had stronger singers and a slicker production.

And what is the sound of one critic’s heart breaking? Corliss has found his guru, and it’s the show’s composer A.R. Rahman:

Rahman is not just India’s most prominent movie songwriter… but, by some computations, the best-selling recording artist in history. His scores have sold more albums than Elvis or the Beatles or all the Jacksons: perhaps 150 million, maybe more.

That’s by unit sales, not by revenues. But if you apply a buying power conversion, it may still be a fair comparison. Corliss waxes lyrical about lyrics:

His songs were recognizably Indian but paraded a world of musical influences, from raga to reggae, from Broadway to Ennio Morricone, with each tune heightening the film’s drama… He plays with reggae and jungle rhythms, runs cool variations on Morricone’s scores for Italian westerns, fiddles with Broadway-style orchestrations… It’s hard quickly characterizing a Rahman song, because it can change direction, tempo and speed several times in its three- to seven-min. span. The composer has a voracious musical appetite… Last year he worked on the Chinese martial-arts drama Warriors of Heaven and Earth.

Read the story to hear about how ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ is based on a Sufi melody, how Dileep Kumar became A.R. Rahman, and just how deeply Corliss has fallen for Bollywood:

The song’s vocalists, Anupma and Mathangi, get Fs from the Bollywood swamis; I think they’re swell… One spits out the chorus… the other wailing the verse… like a stoned goddess who’s seized control of an airport P.A. system… And on the screen, the criminally beautiful [Diya] Mirza… listens to the Freedom chorus and slowly lifts a gun to her head.

Here are photos from the Bombay Dreams premiere.