City of Dreams is about a small-town girl who wins a reality show and comes to Mumbai to act in a movie; (Below) Mohammad Morani wrote the play especially to launch his wife Nasreen

Who should get the credit for the runaway success of Temptations Reloaded 2008, Shah Rukh Khan’s glitzy mega-show in Amsterdam? Certainly, the star himself had the audience roaring their approval with his electric onstage performance. But take a peep backstage and you’ll find meticulous organisation went into every moment of the lavish production.

The brains behind the scene are the Morani brothers, famous for their rich productions and star-studded performances. Ali, Karim and Mohammad run Cineyug, the production company that’s made a huge transition from being just a nuts-and-bolts show organiser in the ’80s to a niche entertainment company producing films, large-scale world tours and reality shows for TV.

But now they’ve reached out even further. Mohammad, the youngest bro-ther, felt it was about time theatre in India got a Bollywood-style treatment to draw in the masses. So he has come up with India’s first homegrown musical City of Dreams, scripted and directed by him and co-produced with Ashvin Gidwani. The play opened in Mumbai last month and all the five-shows were sell-outs.

But why a Bollywood musical? The idea occurred to him during a trip to London. Says Mohammad: “The Broadway-style musical is new to India and we wanted to open in Mumbai because the city has a strong theatre culture and also it’s the Bollywood film powerhouse.” The result: A Rs 2-crore extravaganza inspired by Bollywood with 13 set changes and 450 costume changes in a 150-minute show.

There’s also a personal reason why he took the colossal gamble and staged the play. “I wanted to launch my wife Nasreen, who has trained under theatre actress and director Nadira Babbar for two years,” he says.

The story is about a small-town girl Adaa (Nasreen) who wins a reality show and comes to Mumbai to act in films. After many ups and downs, she gets to play the lead opposite top Bollywood matinee idol King Kapoor. It’s got all the ingredients of a Bollywood drama — from a King Khan-like superstar played by Gaurav Chopra to a Rakhi Sawant-like item girl played by Kashmera Shah.

Nasreen says: “It wasn’t difficult to do this play because I know the kind of hard work that goes into his shows when everything from costumes to sets to music has to be larger than life.”

City of Dreams isn’t Mohammad’s first musical. Last year he tasted success with Miss Bollywood, a musical with Shilpa Shetty which toured the UK, the US and Germany. This was after the Big Brother controversy. The play revolved around Maya, played by Shilpa, and her dream of opening a dance academy in London.

So what’s his winning formula? “Today, Bollywood has become global. So, we try to create a buzz around Bollywood stars and package our shows with lavish song and dance numbers, which are our strong points,” he says. The cost of a world tour ranges from Rs 40 crore to Rs 70 crore depending on the popularity of the stars. Buoyed by its success, Mohammad wants to take City of Dreams around India and to the Gulf, UK and the US soon. He agrees that staging a show of such huge magnitude in India was a challenge. The play had 40 actors and innumerable costume changes. And it wasn’t easy to find large venues that could host a mega-production.

A poster of the musical

Mohammad always had large cinemascope ambitions. His tryst with Bollywood started in 1984 during the making of Sunny Deol-starrer Arjun. A chance to coordinate the action sequences with foreign stuntmen set him on course. He then used to handle his father’s business, Morani Fireworks, which created pyrotechnics for films and live shows in India.

In 1989, Mohammad set up a separate entertainment division Cineyug Entertainment to manage sound systems and live concert lighting for stage shows and award functions. “I was inspired by the grandeur of the sound and lighting at one of the stage shows in London’s Wembley Stadium. I wanted the same thing in Bollywood,” he says.

So in 1989 he travelled to the US and Canada with a show called Chamakte Sitare that starred Aamir Khan and Juhi Chawla. It did 30 shows and was a hit with the Indian diaspora. Over the next few years, Cineyug produced blockbusters like Yodha, Damini, Raja Hindustani and Dum. The Moranis have also produced reality shows recently including Ustadon Ka Ustad on Sony and Yeh Hai Jalwa on 9X.

Today, Cineyug has grown into a production company with five divisions — dedicated to entertainment, live shows in India, making films, TV shows, corporate events and world tours with Bollywood stars. Mohammad scripts and directs all the shows with creative inputs from his brothers. It has been a busy summer for Mohammad this year too. In between getting City of Dreams onstage in Mumbai, he also scripted and organised the Temptations Reloaded show.

But will he concentrate more on directing films and shows now? “Every project I set out to do is creatively satisfying. And even if I concentrate on direction, I’ll still be involved in every aspect of my company from scripting to producing,” he says. He will start on his first film in a few months. And as for theatre, he has more musicals up his sleeve and is hoping to score plenty of mega-hits.