Council Rock South Alum Returns To Bucks With Musical Short Film

NORTHAMPTON, PA — Priya Ghosh, a Council Rock South alum from Richboro who made her theatrical debut in a Bucks County Playhouse production of “The King And I,” will return to her hometown Aug. 1 to show a film she produced.

“It’s going to be so full circle for me, from acting when I was six to showing my film about musical theater in the same place,” she said.

Ghosh’s film, “Last Night In Vegas,” was created in collaboration with director and fellow graduate of Savannah College of Art and Design, J. Nicholas Meese. The pair met early on in film school and bonded over their shared interest in musical theater, and their shared experience as the first-generation kids of immigrants.

“Last Night In Vegas,” a story they developed together as a senior thesis project, follows a young Bengali American woman named Aria as she recounts a pretty wild Vegas evening. It’s the night of her bachelorette party, the night before her arranged marriage, and also the night she ends up marrying a random man in a Vegas chapel instead. (The lyric “I’m getting married to an almost perfect stranger” takes on several meanings during the eight-minute song).

Throughout the film’s single-shot run, with sets rising and falling behind her and background characters whirling in and out of the frame, Aria sings about the difficulty of negotiating her heritage and family expectations in an American cultural context.

Shooting one continuous shot for eight minutes is no small feat; but Meese said they saw it as a fun challenge and an homage to their favorite kind of performance.

“We obviously love when things seem effortless, but what’s so great about musical theater is all the effort that’s getting put into it,” he said. “All the work that goes into that is on the screen.”

To create a musical piece, the duo also needed an original song. As a “moonshot,” they reached out to composer Nikko Benson with the concept. He said he’d work with them, and they began a back-and-forth collaboration to build out their concept in the lyrics. The result was the original song “Before You Know It.”

“We knew how we wanted to tell the story,” Ghosh said. “We knew what the beats of the way we’d explore it were in our one-shot, in this sort of recollection, mind-theater [style]. We took that to Nikko, and he did his genius thing and made it work.”

All told, the process of putting together the film from the first idea through its promotion now took nearly three years. The COVID-19 pandemic hitting in the midst of post-production further complicated things — although these two were up to the challenge.

“We like to have our hands on every aspect of production whenever possible,” Meese said. “At the end of the day, it was so great to get to tactically work on every part of this film.”

For both of them, what matters most now is sharing the story with wider audiences. (Anne Hathaway was actually spotted wearing ‘Last Night In Vegas’ merch on her face shield). Meese said they’ve already gotten feedback from viewers who connected with the “little minutiae and specific struggles” of the first generation experience articulated in the song.

Ghosh is proud of having told this particular story in this particular form.

“In the musical theater community, there’s ‘Aladdin’ and there’s ‘Bombay Dreams,’” she said. “And neither of them are accurate representations of the Indian community. There’s only one Broadway star right now who has a lead who’s Indian, and she was the first one since ‘Bombay Dreams’ in 2002.”

One of her biggest hopes for the film is that the song will have a life beyond the screen — and that people might even bring it to auditions.

“I wanted to have a song that’s just specifically for Indian girls,” she said. “Who can be like, this musical theater bop is for me to sing.”

Learn more about “Last Night In Vegas” via their website, or watch it Aug. 1 at 12 p.m. at the New Hope Film Festival.

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Got tips, story ideas, or questions in Lower Bucks County? Email kate.fishman@patch.com.