By Ernest Kearney — Ruchi Kishore, creator and star of Dirty Chai – a hip-hop bollywood musical which recently played during the Hollywood Fringe Festival, has staged a rather flat, staggeringly uninspired girl meets girl romance that is strictly by the numbers. In this case the numbers being “one-two-one-one-two-one-one-one- three-one.”
Chai (Kishore) is being pressured by her parents (Debra Sullivan and Asit Vyas) to enter into an arranged marriage with a nice Indian boy Sameer (Roshan Mathews.)
Escaping from them, Chai finds herself in the park where she comes across the striking Ronnie (Raquel Alexandra Woodruff) praying over a cardboard box with a dead pigeon in it. Chai immediately falls in love with Ronnie completely unaware of the fact that she is Sameer’s sister!
You can call it fate, you can call it serendipity, you can call it karma; I’m calling it incredibly derivative and formulaic writing.
With the exception of Falcon Sang as the hip-hopping Barista Joe there were no survivors.
I did leave the theater, however, humming the tunes. Unfortunately, the tunes were all from West Side Story.
No Medal awarded.
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