The coronavirus lockdown has surely brought out the entertaining side of celebrities in Tamil Nadu, who have been sharing videos of them working out, cooking etc with their fans. Comedian Alexander Babu or ‘Alex’, who is quite regular in posting videos on his YouTube channel, has posted a short video of him singing a popular Tamil song, but in English.
The six-minute video, released on Sunday, shows Alex with his harmonium, translating lines from the song ‘Mandram Vandha’ from Mouna Raagam. At the outset of the video, Alex speaks about his first full-length stand up comedy show Alex in Wonderland, which was a musical comedy show. Around 52 songs from Tamil movies across eras were referred to in that show, which was received by the audience well.
“When we were writing English subtitles for that show, we got an idea. How would it be if we tried and wrote English lyrics for the Tamil film songs referred to in the show. That exercise of translating and writing lyrics was interesting and enjoyable,” he says. Then he goes on to sing the SP Balasubrahmanyam classic ‘Mandram Vandha’ line by line in English, accompanied with chords on his harmonium. Once he finishes singing the translation line by line, he sings the whole piece at a shot, accompanied with percussion.
Alex’s first stand-up special ‘Alex in Wonderland’ toured worldwide and premiered on Amazon Prime in August 2019. The show was about music, Tamil film music in particular, and had snapshots of imagined scenes around a few music directors from MS Viswanathan, Ilaiyaraaja to AR Rahman and actors like Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth as well. The show also received accolades for having been clean without any sexual innuendos and for being appropriate for an entire family to sit and watch it together.
In an interview to TNM earlier, Alex had said that the show evolved over a time period of two years from the time he started putting together sets in open mics across the city to compiling it all as a single two hour-long show.