Come Fall in Love: The DDLJ Musical – Opera House, Manchester

Jena Pandya (left), Ashley Day (centre) and the company of Come Fall In Love: The DDLJ Musical at the Opera House, Manchester. Picture: Johan Persson

Come Fall in Love continues at the Opera House, Manchester until 21 June 2025. 

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

The 1995 Bollywood film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge – known as DDLJ for short – was such a big hit in India that it is still playing in cinemas, 30 years after its release.

An epic, globe-trotting musical rom-com, written and directed by Aditya Chopra, it centres on mismatched London-based young people Simran and Raj, who meet and fall in love while backpacking in Europe and then need to overcome their family’s reservations – and Simran’s arranged marriage in India – to finally be together.

The big challenge for this new stage adaptation is to please diehard fans while being universally appealing enough to win over new audiences.

Directed by Chopra himself, its creative team brings Bollywood together with the cream of Broadway, with a book from Mean Girls and Legally Blonde lyricist Nell Benjamin, new songs from Benjamin and Indian hit-making duo Vishal Dadlani and Sheykhar Ravjiani and choreography from the multi-award-winning Rob Ashford with Bollywood choreographer Shruti Merchant.

If the reaction from some of the press night audience is anything to go by, it should satisfy the devotees, with recognisable moments, visual references and musical cues from the original film greeted with whoops of delight and applause from the crowd.

The big change is that the romance is now multiracial. In the film, Simran’s love interest Raj was played by Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan. In this version, Raj becomes Rog, a rich, feckless English boy (Ashley Day). The studious Simran (Jena Pandya) and fun-loving Rog are now both Oxford University students who meet before their European vacation at one of Rog’s lavish parties. The changes allow for some fun – but not always subtle – culture clash comedy when their respective families finally meet, but the early sections paint the beats of their relationship in the broadest of strokes, as the pair gets stuck together during their whistlestop tour of European cities.

One of the best songs comes early, with the uplifting ‘So Far’ sung by Simran’s strict but loving newsagent father Baldev (played affectingly by Irvine Iqbal) as he yearns for the beauty of his homeland in India. The song has some of the stirring, mass appeal magic of The Greatest Showman, while the burst of colour and movement provided by the Indian dancers and the first of Moulin Rouge! designer Derek McLane and video designer Akhila Krishnan’s spectacular, eye-poppingly vivid scenic backdrops gets proceedings off to a rousing start. But not many of the following songs come close to matching its impact, at least until the action shifts to Simran’s Punjab wedding in Act II.

The two leads have a lot of charm. Day is particularly convincing as the brash, confident young man with the megawatt, Joel Dommett-like smile, who is normally liked by everyone he meets but is flummoxed when Simran’s father proves immune to his charms. He also throws himself enthusiastically into the musical numbers, with his Act II song with the female members of Simran’s family ‘Desi Kudi’ being a particular highlight, enlivened further by Linda Cho’s sumptuous costumes and silks.

But the couple’s relationship with their parents is more compelling than the central romance, as evidenced when Pandya duets touchingly with Harveen Mann-Neary as Simran’s devoted mother Lajjo on the moving ‘I Give You the World’, made even more evocative by having verses sung in Hindi.

Kinshuk Sen also stands out as Simran’s immature, preening fiancé Kuljit, his Bhangra-inflected reprise of the show’s title song providing another high point. He also combines to amusing effect with Kara Lane as Rog’s vampish, aristocratic mother Minky, and their brassy Las Vegas-style number ‘Hot and Independent and Hot’ is a racy delight.

There is plenty here for fans and newcomers alike to enjoy, even if the story doesn’t quite manage to be more than the sum of its parts. But it is still a big, brash, enjoyable night at the theatre that captures some of the joy of the communal viewing experience that made the original film such an enduring hit.

Chris Bartlett