Gustadji’s success

Gustadjino ghotalo may have got him into one soup after another but for the 600 Gujarati speakers of Toronto it was excruciating merriment that netted Canadian $ 26,000 for the coffers of the Ontario Zoroastrian Community Foundation (OZCF).

The producer-director team of Meher and Jal Panthaky wrote the lyrics to match the theme of the plot with the music from popular movie songs. They did the groundwork, putting in countless hours constructing props and designing sets, writing scripts in English for those who cannot read Gujarati and organizing a laundry list of events that inevitably arise when producing a show of this caliber, notes an e-mail report by Roshan Davar and Cyrus Gazdar from Toronto.

To whip up audience expectations, two young, talented, vibrant masters of ceremonies — Khush Panthaky, a favorite personality on OMNI News-South Asian Edition, and Sarishta Katrak, a gold medallist for public speaking in English and French — humored the audience and whet their appetite with their own jokes to kick off the evening, adds the write-up.

The curtain call: the cast of Gustad-jino ghotalo Photo: Daraious Billimoria

Kerman Katrak in the title role was assisted by other "star cast” — Zarir Cooper and Burjis Mehta together with Katy Mulla and Shirin Chaturvedi all caught in a web of their own making. Sam Gazdar, Meher and Jal Panthaky, Noshir Mulla and Jasmine Wadia performed exquisite cameo roles, in the spirit of the Parsi nataks that for generations were the staple of community enjoyment on special occasions.