One couldn't quite commend the first scene for being the magic carpet ride back to AD1620. People discussing their political loyalties off the job isn't exactly a lost practice! But the rest of the play justified throughout, every reference to time and period in the posters and IPs

So there it was - Aurangzeb The Untold Story(TM!) - finally, for us to see, after long being for us to only imagine. Though a trifle longer than most expected, the play did deliver in most areas. Maybe not very justifiably so, the acting is the first thing that one judges a play by; and that was very good indeed. Mihir Mysore and Mrinal Sinha, Nasreen, and Rajeshwari, in her short but substantial role, were the most talked about (Rajeshwari, in particular, for her voice and her rendition/recital of Aurangzeb's full name). Ashutosh Parande and Mrinal Sinha did an admirable job as directors.

The audience thought, that the script, at large, was all right, but rather repetitive at times - " Who is going to build my black marble mausoleum?", The Song Of The True Mussulman, etc. That forgiven, the play was rather universally appreciated for its background score, costumes, and backdrop. (Which only occasionally confused Agra for Delhi!)

As for the 'audience' that I have so frequently referred to, it probably didn't include as many non-IITians as Stagecoach would've hoped to reach out to. Nevertheless, the play turned out to be one that every IITian can be proud of. It serves as an example of those elusive post-JEE instances when IITians work hard like they once could, and come out of it feeling great, like they once did.

Now, to gather how the final performance, and the expectations of its cast and crew got along at their first and only encounter at The Music Academy on the 4th Of April 2001, we caught up with Mihir Mysore, the actor in the title role.
 

Considering this was the first big production of IITM's Stagecoach in many years and there are no 20/4 s around, Aurangzeb would have been the big jump from the CLT to The Music Academy for almost all of you. Apart from the fact that the period of rehearsal was scaled up to about two months, how was this play treated differently? Did you have to get majorly into theatre fundaes, and discipline yourselves any more than usual? Meditate?!
Well, I'd say the major difference was with regard to spons and production ...we wouldn't have been as hell bent on getting spons as we were, had the play been staged in the campus itself . As far as the acting goes, there was no major difference except that we all were a lot more serious than we would otherwise have been. Yeah, I guess discipline too was more than usual. (Although I don't suppose Parande would agree with this even for a moment!)

I'm told the mikes you used were rather tricky. Tell us about it. You were very visibly troubled by them!
Naw...the mikes were not tricky, there was some funda that no mike should cross a UHF mike (or was it VHF? I forget), but anyways, all the mikes we used were the ones which could cross hither and thither, so there was no problem. We checked 'em out the earlier day and they were OK. Erm....about my having to adjust it during the play ... well, to put it simply, I goofed up <sheepish grin> ... whatever is left of my ego doesn't allow me to discuss it any more .

You probably got a better look at the audience than us students 10 storeys above. Not that you could immediately gauge, but how good was the response from outside IIT? Were the seats for the press empty? Were there older people, you know, the pseud kind that claps with the left hand over the right?!
The response from outside IIT was pretty bad, I don't think you need me to tell you that. I guess a lot of factors were responsible for that. I'm not sure about the press boxes since I didn't know where they were located. I don't think that the "pseud class" you talk about was there.

Did the cast have any apprehensions as to how a particular scene would turn out? Maybe the possiblity of the actors laughing at their own lines?
I can only talk about the scenes in which I acted, and no, positively no apprehensions about that whatever ... we removed some of the lines which we felt we would laugh at. As for me knocking out Mammo's beard ... well, we had practised the scene twice with the beard ... (you can readily understand that the nature of the scene prevented our practising it more times) ... and those times it came out OK. In hindsight, maybe we ought to have taken the precaution of Mammo applying more glue to that unseemly growth just before he came on ... what with Mammo playing the flute live and all, it was slightly difficult to manage, so it wasn't done... oh well.