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“Earlier, going to the theatre would be an event. “The audience has also changed tremendously over the years,” says Patankar. Many stalwarts of Marathi theatre, such as Acharya Atre, Prabhakar Panshikar and Vasant Kanetkar have performed here. “The college-going crowd really enjoys such plays and makes up most of the audience,” says Hari Patankar, who has been working at the theatre’s box office for more than 25 years.
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Now the front rows may be full, but the back rows remain empty,” Naik says.Ĭomedy plays by popular television and film actors like Prashant Damle and Bharat Jadhav, still run to full houses. Once the mills shut, they stopped coming. They would come in droves after their shifts and fill up the back rows, especially our balcony seats. “We would have three time slots, in the morning, afternoon and evening. Most mills in the city were concentrated in Parel and Dadar. “Textile mill workers used to be our best audience,” says Bhalchandra Naik, who has worked at the theatre for the past 35 years. Comedy plays by popular television and film actors like Prashant Damle and Bharat Jadhav still run house full whenever a show is scheduled.
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The shift in the Maharashtrian population, from Dadar to the suburbs may have contributed as well. Now, auditoriums have cropped up everywhere, so people don’t feel the need to come all the way,” Bhalekar says. People from as far away as Borivli would come to watch plays here. “Earlier, this was one of the few auditoriums that staged Marathi plays in the city. Nowadays, shows are scheduled mostly for Sunday evening. It isn’t the oldest one though - Damodar Hall in Parel was already in existence. Eventually it was turned into one of Dadar’s first closed auditoriums,” he says. “Around 1960, it was turned into an open-air theatre, one of many in the area, where travelling theatre companies performed often. “Before the auditorium was built on this plot, it was a ground mainly used for wrestling matches,” says Bhalekar.
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Shivaji Mandir was built in the heart of Dadar in the 1960s. The theatre remains a landmark for the older generation of Mahashtrians in the city, who lined up in droves to watch plays by the likes of Prahlad Keshav Atre (Acharya Atre), Prabhakar Panshikar and Vasant Kanetkar.
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But people watch all that on TV now so we have stopped those shows,” says Shashikant Bhalekar, president of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Smarak Mandal, which runs the theatre that opened on May 3, 1965. “We used to have orchestras perform on New Year’s Eve earlier. The board outside its blink-and-you-miss-it entrance had listed two shows on that day: A morning show of the suspense-ridden Ek Shunya Teen and an evening show of the comedy play All The Best. Gone are the days when it used to host special night shows and even orchestras to ring in the new year. This New Year’s eve, Shivaji Mandir, Mumbai’s landmark Marathi theatre near Dadar’s Kabutar Khaana, shut well before midnight.