Rakeysh Mehra's 'Mirza Sahibaan' will see actors converse in song form

For Rakeysh Om Prakash Mehra’s ambitious love epic Mirza Sahibaan, music composers Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy have been thrown a challenge that no muician in India has ever confronted.

Shankar Mahadevan and his partners have been asked by Mehra to create a full-on musical where the lovers would converse entirely in song-form whose lyrics are written by Gulzar. Says a source, “The format is something never seen in our cinema before. The lovers will converse in musical form. Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy are busy recording nearly 180 minutes of songs.”

The closest we’ve come to this format was in Chetan Anand’s Heer Ranjha where the lovers conversed in verses, written by Kaifi Azmi.

No doubt this will be a huge leap ahead for the language of Hindi cinema and also a slap in the face of those who feel the song-and-dance formula has run its course. Mehra says, “We are exploring the musical genre in a most comprehensive format. In that sense, Mirza Sahibaan would be genre-breaker. At the same time, we’ve to keep in mind the changing times. I am not sure whether we are taking the Broadway route, the folk-theatre route or the Bollywood route. A new form of expression will emerge as we work.”

Anil Kapoor’s son Harshvardhan plays the lead in the film.