There are certain evenings in the theatre when you can feel a show’s future being written in real time — when the audience rises not out of obligation but out of a kind of collective astonishment, as if everyone in the room has just watched something take its first confident steps toward a much larger life. The Lunchbox, now in its world-premiere run at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, is exactly that kind of evening. Adapted by filmmaker Ritesh Batra from his own internationally beloved 2013 film, and directed by Tony winner Rachel Chavkin of Hadestown fame, this is a new musical that arrives looking, sounding, and feeling like a Broadway hit in waiting.
The premise is deceptively small. In Mumbai, a city where a centuries-old army of dabbawallahs delivers more than 200,000 home-cooked lunches a day with an error rate famously studied by Harvard Business School, one tiffin box goes astray. A young wife’s lovingly packed meal, meant for an indifferent husband, lands instead on the desk of a widowed accountant counting down to retirement. From that single accident grows a correspondence — notes tucked between layers of curry and rice — and from the correspondence, something tender enough to save two lonely lives.
Not spoil my notes below, to me The Lunchbox works gloriously and it was fascinating to me to learn about the origins of its story, the genuinely distinctive shape of its score, the architectural marvel of its staging, and why critics across the Bay Area are already pointing it eastward toward New York.
The Story: Two Lives, One Tiffin
The book, by Batra himself, follows Ila (Kuhoo Verma), a young mother trapped in a marriage that has curdled into neglect. Each morning she packs an elaborate tiffin, hoping good food might rekindle her husband Rajeev’s affection. When he complains about a cauliflower dish she never cooked, she realizes her labor of love has been delivered to the wrong man — and that the wrong man licked the tins clean.
That man is Saajan Fernandes (Manu Narayan), a dour, salt-and-pepper-bearded accountant, a recent widower with no patience for office small talk and only weeks left before retirement. Touched that someone appreciated her cooking, Ila tucks in a note. Saajan, gruff to the bone, replies that the next day’s meal was “too salty.” And so begins a daily exchange of food and confession — an epistolary romance between two strangers who slowly write themselves toward courage.
Around them orbits a beautifully drawn ensemble. Auntie (Anisha Nagarajan), the unseen neighbor one floor up who lobs cooking advice and chili peppers down by rope-and-bucket while tending a comatose husband. She was exactly how my Bay Area Indian friends describe Aunties of any kind 😉 Shaikh (Aathaven Tharmarajah), the relentlessly eager young trainee hired to replace Saajan, an orphan who taught himself accounting and refuses to be rebuffed. Each character, as Bay City News observed, carries a story that dovetails into the others, forming a quiet meditation on loneliness. My favorite line of the night is delivered by Sasha’s: “I think we forget things if we have no one to tell them to.”
The miracle of The Lunchbox is that this modest, melancholy material never feels heavy — it lifts.
An American-Lebanese Score Meets Modern India
The score is the work of brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour, the Lebanese-American writing team behind the acclaimed We Live in Cairo, whose music drew on the protest anthems of Tahrir Square. For The Lunchbox — a project that spent years in development at Lincoln Center Theater before this Berkeley premiere — they have woven classical Indian melody, tabla drumming, and Western musical-theatre songcraft into something genuinely fresh.
The show opens with “No Wrong Mistake,” the dabbawallahs’ harmonized boast that they never misdeliver — a propulsive number that sets the heartbeat of the evening. Ila’s first solo turns a simple meal into a wish: “It’s an idea, it’s a hope, it’s a hunch.” When Saajan praises the food to his café cooks, the trio explodes into “Bird of Gold,” the night’s comic showstopper, marveling, “Did we catch the bird of gold with our cauliflower?”
The motifs return like the dabbawallahs themselves. Shaikh’s irrepressible “Train Me” and his anthem “Better Here” — sung atop a packed commuter train as the carriage erupts into hand-and-foot rhythms — give the show its comic propulsion. The duets between Ila and Saajan, sung from separate perches, intertwine into what SF Classical Voice called “a complex musical tapestry” of longing.
The motifs return like the dabbawallahs themselves. Shaikh’s irrepressible “Train Me” and his anthem “Better Here” — sung atop a packed commuter train as the carriage erupts into hand-and-foot rhythms — give the show its comic propulsion. The duets between Ila and Saajan, sung from separate perches, intertwine into what SF Classical Voice called “a complex musical tapestry” of longing.
I raised one reservation at the post-show discussion and found a few neighbors nodding along to. There is an early stretch — I think the comic sparring number between Ila and Auntie in particular — where the Lazours lean hard into rapid, intricate internal rhyme and characters riffing off one another’s lines. To my ear it tipped briefly into Sondheim pastiche, specifically the patter-and-parry mode of Into the Woods. It’s clever, but the cleverness draws attention to itself, and for a moment I worried I was in for sixty minutes of that mannered style. Happily, a genuinely melodic number arrived right behind it to break the spell — no disrespect to Mr. Sondheim, but this material is at its strongest when it stops winking and simply sings.
A City That Breathes
If there is a second protagonist in The Lunchbox, it is Mimi Lien’s set. The Tony-winning designer has built a towering, four-story Mumbai of stacked apartments, balconies, walkways, and kitchen windows — a vertical city that bustles even in its stillness. Auntie’s rope-and-bucket pulley descends from one floor to the next; an entire building rotates to reveal the rooms and lives within.
A very inspired stroke is musical as much as scenic: the orchestra is nestled into the apartment units of the neighboring building, so the city itself appears to generate the score. A solo percussionist, Rohan Krishnamurthy, plays traditional Indian rhythms from a street corner all evening, while violinists roam the crowd scenes — the “wandering violinist” several critics singled out.
Choreographer Reshma Gajjar, a Bay Area native making a remarkable debut, animates this world with dance that conjures the pulse of Mumbai — commuters jostling on a charming streetcar, ensembles bursting into color during dream sequences. Chavkin’s direction prizes flow, scenes melting into one another across a single mesmerizing 105-minute act with no intermission, with Arjun Bhasin’s costumes and Bradley King’s lighting completing a Mumbai that feels “teeming, vibrant, intensely colorful.”
One structural note worth flagging, which surfaced in the post-show conversation: the piece opens with a narrator framing the world, a device that recalls the Hermes role in Chavkin’s own Hadestown. He sets everything up handsomely — and then quietly vanishes, never returning to close the frame he opened. More than one of us felt the absence and instinctively waited for him to come back. In a show still visibly evolving toward New York, restoring or resolving that narrator feels like one of the clearest opportunities to tighten the architecture.
One structural note worth flagging, which also surfaced in the post-show conversation: the piece opens with the dabbawallahs as narrator framing the world, a device that recalls the Hermes role in Chavkin’s own Hadestown. They set everything up handsomely — and then quietly vanishe, never returning to close the frame they opened. More than one of us felt the absence and instinctively waited for them to come back. In a show still visibly evolving toward New York, restoring or resolving that narrator function feels like one of the clearest opportunities to tighten the architecture.
Broadway, Take Note
The Bay Area press has been close to unanimous — and unusually emphatic about where this show is headed. SF Classical Voice declared it deserved to “go straight to Broadway,” adding, with a wink, that “Broadway doesn’t know what’s coming.” Theatre Eddys awarded a full five-E “Must-See” rating and pronounced it “a future Broadway hit,” praising a cast of Broadway and touring veterans of Indian heritage.
Bay City News, writing for Local News Matters, called it “a must-see,” and made the sharpest observation of the bunch: this is “that rare beast: an art film that seems to have been heightened, intensified, not merely gussied up, by its new iteration as a musical.” Critics consistently singled out Kuhoo Verma’s “phenomenally affecting” Ila and Manu Narayan’s nuanced, melancholy Saajan, alongside scene-stealing turns from Nagarajan’s Auntie and Tharmarajah’s Shaikh.
The clearest verdict, though, came from the box office. Berkeley Rep extended the run twice, pushing the closing through mid-July to meet demand. What distinguishes this production from earlier developmental readings is precisely its fullness — Lien’s monumental set, Gajjar’s choreography, and a live Indian-classical instrumentation that could only be realized at this scale. It is a show that has finally found the body to match its heart.
Go see it while you can!
The Lunchbox takes the smallest of premises — a lunch delivered to the wrong desk — and builds from it a richly populated, deeply humane musical about the courage it takes to open your heart to a stranger. Ritesh Batra’s tender book, the Lazour brothers’ inventive fusion score – What in the movie was expressed in silence, is here expressed by a beautiful musical score – Rachel Chavkin’s seamless direction, and Mimi Lien’s breathtaking vertical Mumbai combine into an evening that earns its standing ovation honestly.
It is funny without being slight, melancholy without being heavy, and stuffed — like I have heard a good tiffin has to be — with layer upon layer of flavor. Bay Area audiences have a narrow window to catch it before, as every critic in town seems to agree, it boards a one-way train to Broadway. Don’t wait for the empty tins to come back. Go now.
