Rekha Shankar's upcoming indie flick wants to make you laugh and cry
Why it matters: You've seen Shankar on "Hacks." Or heard of her "Smartypants" streamer, the belly buster where comedians present PowerPoints on farcical topics like how vegetables aren't real.
The big picture:"Vidhya's Guide to the Afterlife" is the first feature-length film for Shankar, the Philadelphia-raised comedian whom New York mag called one of the country's biggest up-and-coming comics to watch.
She's crowd-sourcing it, and so far has raised more than $114,000 from about 1,400 supporters through Kickstarter — more than doubling her initial goal.
The extra kitty will allow Shankar, director Sandeep Parikh and the crew to shoot scenes beyond her Los Angeles apartment. If they raise enough, she aspires to set and shoot parts of the movie in Philly.
The intrigue: Her hometown's already showing up.
Queen and Rook in Society Hill named a new samosa chaat vegan pizza after Shankar, plus had an employee fly to LA to hand-deliver a pie to her before a fundraising kickoff event.
Zoom in: Shankar, who will star in the film, says she began working on the "Vidhya" script after the death of her grandfather, a "brilliant" guy who'd watch "Jeopardy!" with her and help with her chemistry homework.
In the film, Vidhya is "such a bad Hindu" that she's left virtually alone to grapple with the loss of her family following an absurd Hindu rapture — a Christian concept that doesn't exist in Hinduism, Shankar says.
She teams up with a huckster-y local priest to try to bring everyone back through a 13-day Hindu death ceremony.
What they're saying: Shankar tells Axios she struggled to wrap her "Americanized brain" around the Hindu rituals at her own grandfather's ceremony. A Hindu priest told her that if she cried, she would tie her "grandfather's soul to the mortal realm" — the solemn ceremony is supposed to ensure the departed's peaceful transition.
"It's so difficult when your family of origin does all these things one way, but then your Western therapist is like, 'No, no, it's totally OK to cry,'" she says.
The film also pays homage to her grandfather's playfulness. He was a "prankster" who once blew a French horn to wake up Shankar's cousin at 6am.
If he were alive, Shankar says, her grandfather might not appreciate the movie's humor — but he'd still support it.
"What's great about him is he would have hit replay on it every single time it ended to be like, 'I'll just get you a bunch of views,'" Shankar says.
What we're watching: Whether the indie flick, which could drop as soon as 2027, gets picked up by a big platform like Netflix.
Parikh, the director, joked in the fundraiser announcement that the filmmakers must recruit "Monkey Man" director Dev Patel to make the movie a box-office smash.
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But it's got to be a great compliment that everybody wants to be associated with you for this. It's an insane lineup. McBride: Thank you very much. There's a combination of getting the business done and making sure all of the things are put into place. And then there's the other part of it, like, 'Hey, this is your own cruise with your name on it, with your musicians on there and people who you've been associated with.' So, it's like a small snapshot. It's like an express snapshot of my career, and that's a little bit of a scary thing to see, but ultimately, I think it's going to be fun. Baltin: You say it's scary, but at the same time it's got to be huge that all these people want to be associated with you and that they want to do the cruise with you. I mean, that's putting trust in. Also, you've been involved with Newport Jazz Fest for almost a decade. Weren't you involved in kind of curating and helping pick that as well? It feels like there would be some similarity. McBride: The difference is people will come to play at the Newport Jazz Festival no matter who the artistic director is because of the history of the festival. But the Christian McBride's World at Sea cruise is a brand-new thing. Granted, most of the musicians who come to both Newport and who are coming to perform on the cruise, I have personal relationships with, so it does help. But until the McBride's World at Sea Cruise has a 71-year run like Newport, I won't take myself too seriously. Baltin: What are your hopes for the cruise? McBride: Since it's the first time, I really have no expectations. I'm just curious to see how it all unfolds. Everybody I'm inviting are good friends, we've all worked together. And most of all, they're all professionals. They've done many cruises before. They've done the Jazz Cruise, they did the old Blue Note Cruise, and so they're professional veterans who are also my friends. So, the only expectations that I have is that there'll be a lot of great music and a lot of great fun. Baltin: How do you approach playing on a cruise where people are seeing you every night? I feel like it's similar to a residency. McBride: That's not much different than playing, like you said, even if it's not a residency, just playing a week at the Village Vanguard. But certainly on a cruise if you play with the same group every night and basically the same pool of people are coming to see you play, you're forced to change up the show every night. And I think that's a really cool thing. I like the fact that I cannot repeat myself because I don't want people to say, "Oh, I heard y 'all play that set last night." And some bands will do that. They have a set list and that's what they do. But I like the fact that being on this cruise, you got to change it up. I'm a veteran of cruises. I did my first jazz cruise. Maybe it was 2014, 2015. I can't remember. The gentleman who is the executive director of all of these cruises, his name is Michael Lazaroff. He's been running the jazz cruises for many years. Yeah, I've done the Jazz Cruise and the Blue Note Sea Cruise on and off for over a decade. So yes, I know how the cruise world runs. But also in the '90s, George Weene tried a Newport Jazz Festival Cruise. It didn't last, I think he only did it for one or two years maybe, but I did that too. That was in the 90s. So yeah, the cruise circuit is a very prolific place for musicians. Well, you know, Baltin: How did the idea come about to do it with your name? And what did you first say when they came to you and said, hey, we want to literally put your name on a cruise for a week. Did you look at them and say what the hell's wrong with you or were you insanely flattered? McBride: Exactly. It was a lot of the first, a little of the second. In fact, I'm still saying that. I think what happened was after having done the Jazz Cruise for so many years, I had, after maybe five years, become the official host of the Jazz Cruise. And there were three main cruises that would go back-to-back to back. It was the Jazz Cruise, the Blue Note at Sea Cruise and the Smooth Jazz Contemporary Jazz Cruise. The Jazz Cruise was pretty much known as a straight up and down, right down the middle acoustic straight ahead cruise. The Blue Note Cruise was a combination of the Jazz Cruise and the Contemporary Jazz Cruise because the music and the artists that would play that Blue Note Cruise were much younger. Robert Glasper would play that cruise. Kamasi Washington would play on that cruise. Layla Hathaway would do that cruise as well as somebody like Joe Lovano, or myself, or Brad Mehldau, Joshua Redmond, or somebody like that. Then the Contemporary Jazz Cruise, which was all straight, smooth jazz. The Blue Note Cruise went away, and Michael said to me, 'We really would like to have a cruise that musically fits the template of what the Blue Note Cruise was. You get your straight-ahead jazz You get your electric jazz, you get your contemporary jazz. You get everything all In but it's still unmistakably a jazz cruise. We think having a McBride cruise would be the way to do it. I said, 'You are out of your mind.' And they said, 'Look, man, we feel that what you've done in your career is exactly what we want.' Baltin: Between Jazz Night in America and the cruise do you feel like in a way, you've become an ambassador for jazz? McBride: I feel like I'm in a good place right now. I really enjoy investing and staying interested in what's going on in the contemporary world and investing in the future. But I carry Ray Brown with me everywhere I go. I carry Ron Carter with me everywhere I go. I carry Bootsy with me everywhere I go. I carry Jaco Pastorius with me everywhere I go. I am a product of all these great legends who allow me to play with them and make mistakes with them when I was 18, 19, 20 years old. So, I'm never going to look at that and say, well, just on general principle, we have to shed that skin and go toward the future. No, you never shed that skin. It stays with you. It's part of your DNA. It's part of your story. It's in your blood. It's in your bone marrow. Everybody thinks trying to consciously be like Miles Davis is the way to go. Everybody can't be Miles Davis. In fact, I think one of the greatest examples of bridging the gap is Herbie Hancock, because while Herbie Hancock was setting a new standard in the 70s with jazz funk, with dance music in the 80s with Rockit, he still started playing straight -ahead jazz. In fact, most of the performances he did were straight-ahead jazz. That's a template that I think is very important for people to look at.
