It took a lot of South Asian weddings to create a lavish musical that brings dancers, actors, and even a bhangra band to the great outdoors

Raakhi Sinha, who wrote Bollywood Wedding with some help from Gurpreet Sian and Camyar Chai, knows her subject matter. “When I was at university, I was a reception dancer, so I have been to hundreds of weddings,” she says. “Good ones, bad ones. I've seen artists treated as crap, artists treated as royalty. I ate shahi paneer and rice every weekend for three summers. My social life was all about going to weddings. And weddings are comedy gold.”

Sinha and Chai are chatting with the Straight in the Italian Gardens at the PNE, where the lavish dance musical Bollywood Wedding will unfold nightly at 8 p.m. from Thursday to Sunday (July 23 to 26), with 2 p.m. matinees on the weekend. Admission to this roving outdoor event is free, with donations gratefully accepted. (Reservations are going quickly, but there will be limited rush seats at the door.)

Sinha and Chai promise spectacle. The audience will be limited to 200, but there will be 13 actors, 25 dancers, three roving musicians, and the hot five-piece bhangra band En Karma. Collectively, these artists will tell the story of the groom, Hanuman Singh, and the bride, Sunaya Patel, whose families have brought them together for a potentially ill-conceived arranged marriage.

Chai, founding artistic producer of Neworld Theatre, is directing this project. He remembers his state of mind before he first saw a show mounted by South Asian Arts, the troupe that Sinha runs with Sian. “I was really depressed,” he says. “I wanted to make a change in my life and I was taking a hiatus from theatre because I wasn't finding anything inspiring.” Then Barbara Clausen—of New Works, which is coproducing Bollywood Wedding with South Asian Arts—took him along to an SAA production at the Roundhouse. “I went to see Bollywood Seen, which was a deconstruction of a Bollywood movie,” he recalls, “and I just fell in love with the company. First of all, there's always this conversation in Vancouver: ”˜Well, we'd see more Chinese and South Asian actors on-stage—there's such a big population—but there just aren't the artists around.' And then I walked into this room and there were 40 of them and they were amazing. Their energy was wonderful. It was just so honest and raw and they were loving being on-stage. I hadn't felt that kind of excitement in a long time.”

Without being disrespectful, Bollywood Wedding has fun with South Asian culture and characters, including a poetically mystical grandmother known simply as Bibiji. “While the desert sands dream of rain,” she intones, “time goes for a walk in Malaysia.”

“Each person in the script is somebody I know,” Sinha insists. “I could pull out their pictures. They're real and, honestly, they're not that exaggerated.”

One of the characters who gums up the course of romance in the story is Hanuman's friend Bobby, a relentless womanizer. Asked about the prevalence of Bobbies in the Indo-Canadian community, Sinha groans, then replies with a laugh: “Oh man, half my bhangra team are Bobbies. And half of that team are boys, so all of the guys I know are Bobbies!”

The company's enthusiasm will burst forth in dance sequences as well as in energetic characterizations. Sinha explains, “You'll see Bollywood, which is basically Indian contemporary dance and incorporates every dance style under the sun, and we'll also do some folk dances. We'll do dandia raas, which is from Gujarat, a western state in India. It evolved from a martial art. We've also got giddha, which is a Punjabi women's folk dance. Giddha includes a mocking, poetic exchange in which the women from the groom's side and from the bride's side basically diss one another.”

Asked what it's like directing a show in the Italian Gardens, Chai says that it's important to keep up the pace when you're moving around an audience of 200. So he won't change locations too often, and audience members should be able to sit down for about half of the show's projected 90-minute running time.

Sinha, who is choreographing the show, says that when the dancers first saw the site, they were thrilled. They suggested making one entrance by running over the crest of a hill, and they were intrigued by the possibilities of the fountain that feeds a long, narrow watercourse in the garden. Sinha remembers: “They were like, ”˜Why don't we come splashing down the fountain? That'd be pretty.' And I'm like, ”˜Yeah, with the sunlight and the sparkles. That would be great.' ”

Bollywood Wedding will end with a big, participatory bhangra party. There will be a food shack and mehndi, the henna-based hand decorations that are traditionally associated with Indian weddings.

“I just want people to have a good time,” Sinha says. And Chai, who is Iranian-Canadian, points out that in Farsi, shaadi, the Indian word for wedding, translates as “joy”.