The Mahima Sogani Show at NCPA: A Bollywood Romance Where the Audience Writes the Ending
Most theatre asks its audience for silence. The Mahima Sogani Show asks for opinions.
Billed as an interactive musical storytelling show, it plays the Godrej Dance Theatre at the NCPA on Sunday, 1 November, as an NCPA Off Stage presentation in collaboration with DIY Solutions. The premise is deceptively simple: a contemporary young woman tries to find love and navigate relationships. The execution is where it becomes interesting.
A Bollywood film, assembled live
The organisers describe it as "almost like watching a Bollywood movie unfold live on stage". Mahima Sogani plays multiple characters herself, and original songs are woven through the narrative.
Then comes the device that defines the evening. At several points, the audience makes decisions that influence where the story goes next.
It is a small structural choice with large consequences. Every performance becomes a slightly different negotiation between performer and room.
The idea underneath
Beneath the comedy and the music, the show is built around a single proposition: how much of what goes wrong in relationships comes down to communication.
There is a neat symmetry here. A show about the failure to communicate is staged in a form that depends entirely on communication, between a performer who must listen and an audience that must speak.
Why participatory theatre is having a moment
Live culture in India is undergoing a quiet reorientation. Audiences raised on interactive media, on polls, comments and choose-your-own-path storytelling, increasingly expect to be participants rather than spectators.
The theatre has always known this instinctively. Folk forms across the subcontinent, from Tamasha to street performance, have long treated the audience as collaborator. What is new is the urban, English-and-Hindi, twenty-something packaging.
The show's own positioning acknowledges this. Its setting is contemporary and speaks especially to people in their 20s and 30s, but its themes, love, relationships and the difficulty of saying what one means, are not bound by age.
The details
Date: Sunday, 1 November 2026
Time: 7pm
Venue: Godrej Dance Theatre, NCPA, Mumbai
Duration: about 1 hour
Language: English and Hindi
Age limit: 16+
Tickets: Rs 500 on BookMyShow, listed as filling fast
Note: late entry will not be permitted
An hour, a single performer and a story that depends on who happens to be sitting in the room that night. It is, in the most literal sense, a show that cannot be repeated.
For more of the city's independent stage culture, read our piece on Ekjute's Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan.
Frequently asked questions
When and where is The Mahima Sogani Show?
On Sunday 1 November 2026 at 7pm, at the Godrej Dance Theatre, NCPA, Mumbai.
How long is The Mahima Sogani Show?
The show runs for about one hour.
What is the age limit?
The show is for audiences aged 16 and above.
How much are tickets?
Tickets are listed at Rs 500 on BookMyShow.
What language is the show in?
The show is performed in English and Hindi.
Kenneth Hopkins is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AltBollywood. Indofuturist, posthumanist and unapologetically Indocentric, he describes himself as an epimemeticist, a swaraji, a freakonomist, a lexicographer and a cartochronicler, mapping the ideas, words and quiet shifts that shape Indian entertainment. Follow him on Instagram at @kennethhopkins.
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