When Bombay Dreams reached Broadway in 2004, it needed something the industry could not simply pull off a shelf: a large ensemble of South Asian musical-theatre performers who could sing A.R. Rahman’s score, dance Bollywood-inflected choreography, and act. In the early 2000s that talent pool was small and largely undiscovered by mainstream casting. If you are mounting a culturally specific musical today and facing the same problem, this article shows how a show like Bombay Dreams solved it and gives you a concrete plan for casting when the pipeline looks thin.
Why the pipeline was thin, and often still is
The shortage was not a shortage of talent. It was a shortage of access. Musical-theatre training, audition rooms, and casting networks had rarely been