Amar Photo Studio - A Magnificent cinema that is played on-stage.

You have always herd and experienced that cinema as a medium is stronger than drama. But this notion of yours will be proved absolutely wrong when you will watch Amar Photo Studio and it indeed is that brilliant!

It actually starts with a scene which gives a feel of an extension of Z Marathi daily soap 'Dil Dosti Duniyadari' (for the obvious reason of the same artists) but as soon as the protagonists with a heavy baggage of their emotions enter the wonder land of 'Amar Photo Studio' you literally don't remain in this world. Literally!

The cast - Suvrat Joshi, Amey Wagh, Pooja Thombare, Siddhesh Purkar and Sakhi Gokhale mesmerize you with their acting prowess and comic timming. Except Sakhi, rest of them play more than one character of different length and all of them skilfully and effortlessly mould in each of their character. Amongst them all, Siddhesh is the master of disguise, and as he is still not a well known face you might not recognize him in all his roles.

Scenes of Chandrika (Pooja) and Appu (Suvrat) are the highlights of 1^st half. Amey is damn good as a veteran fillm personality he portrays. Rendition of ‘Char bottle vodka’ with a twist is catchy too. Sakhi’s sheer energy is contagious. But Suvrat’s double role as Appu and his father in a single scene is hands down the best of all.

Kudos to Manaswini Lata Ravindra – the writer of the play – just for thinking of writing a play on the very concept of Amar Photo Studio (I won’t disclose it’s one line theme here as you have to watch it yourself). Lights by Shreyas Talpade – Bang on. Dicto for the music and background score by Gandhar (and Akshay Vaidya). Applause for set design and set changes.

And finally star of the show is the director – Nipun Dharmadhikari (yes he is the one who is listed in the top 30 theater personalities in the world for the year 2016 in Forbes list). He is the to be credited for presenting a 'play' with a 'cinematic brilliance'. He has definitely blurred the line between a drama and a cinema. 

His idea of using black white and retro colours right from set to costumes to lights is praise worthy. Presentation of fight sequence between Suvrat and Siddhesh and Suvrat’s double role are just fantastic.

 Nipun and all the artists have preserved the subtle comedy (no puns (कोटी) or heavy body gestures (अंगविक्षेप)) in the writing of Manaswini ;making this play a delight to watch.

The marketing and social media strategy adopted by them (Gandhar) to promote this play will give you an idea of how ‘hat ke’ this play is. Right from their teaser; challenging well known Marathi artists to upload their age old photographs to their ritual of clicking the photos of audiences after each play and uploading it on their FB page Amar Photo Studio requesting audiences to comment on the photo with their seat no is simply out of the box.

Teaser Challange

 So basically I have all the praises for this play. May be I will have to watch it again to appreciate all its nuances.

So? go and get lost in the fantasy world of ‘Amar Photo Studio’!! and please please please don’t miss this fabulous play produced by Sunil Barve! 

From Left: Pooja Thombre, Nipun Dharmadhikari, Amey Wagh, Sunil Barve, Suvrat Joshi, Sakhi Gokhale, Siddhesh Purkar