Laila's Wedding is the simple title of a new serial drama aired this Ramadan. The work is unique in many ways, but most importantly in that it is a musical series, heralding a new genre in Egyptian drama. Starring Laila Elwi, the beautiful and popular film and television star, it revolves around a middle-aged wedding planner who has refrained from marriage following the death of her mother of breast cancer, an illness she inherits. As a teenage girl, she had to raise her young and only sister, which kept her away from love stories and marriage proposals. The serial drama follows Elwi's strong performance in the historical series Napoleon and Al-Mahrousa, aired last year, in which she played the influential wife of a Mamluk bey, somewhat older than this Laila. Laila's quiet life is interrupted by her chance meeting with a war photographer who arrives from London in search for his own mother, whom he has not seen since childhood. They grow close as friends, and then they fall in love. As Laila resists her growing attachment to him, she is at the same time freeing herself of her marital fears and the gloomy future awaiting her as a spinster. As the name of numerous female leads in late 1950s musical films starring the legendary singer Laila Mourad, Laila brings back a particular mixture of drama and music never before tried on television in Egypt. But unlike the early musicals, Laila's Wedding fits the songs snugly into dramatic developments. Mai (Nadia Khairi), Laila's younger sister, is a teacher at the Faculty of Fine Arts whose final grade students have a band. Led by singer Mariam Saleh, who plays once of the students at the faculty, the band performs truly fresh fare, with spontaneous lyrics and a youthful spirit, giving the viewers an intimate taste of young Egyptians and their language. Saleh, who enjoys a raw vocal gift, sings of solitude, unfulfilled dreams, freedom, uncertainty and fading love. Sudden shifts in her pitch reflect dramatic developments. Ghareeba (How Strange) is one of her most beautiful songs. With instrumental backing, it tells of the anxiety in the eyes of a young woman in love. Ana Mesh Baghanni (I am not singing) and Helw Al-Helw (How Pretty is the Pretty One) are lighter in tone but equally moving. For her part the Tunisian singer Ghalia bin Ali plays herself giving a concert in Cairo at a beautiful historical palace where Laila holds weddings. Her wild voice, with the faintest musical accompaniment, is perfect and enriches the emotional atmosphere, as she speaks of the vague and wild feelings one experiences in love. She performs once more, while still in Cairo, in the 29th episode, while Laila is facing the conflict between her illness and her love for Adham, dancing and performing a classical Arabic song about a woman called Laila. Directed by Khaled Al-Hagar, the spontaneous performance by actors was par excellence, especially that of the veteran actor Abdel-Rahman Abu Zahra playing Laila's father; it is so spontaneous it breaks down the proverbial third wall, and you feel as if you are in the casual company of your friends and relatives. Improvisation, I believe, plays a large part in the screenplay, allowing waves of funny coincidences to replace the routinely written scripts. Played by the new, half-British actor Feras Said, Adham, the photographer, is another attraction in himself: his confident, affecting and sensitive performance beautifully complements his perfect English accent. Wearing shorts and a ponytail, he provides a convincing portrait of the British man with an Egyptian background, and what he tells Laila about war photography seems to reflect her own fears and the necessity of facing them. One big difference between East and West, he suggests, is that Westerners do not worry too much about tomorrow; they can enjoy the moment. The foreign hero who enters the life of the heroine to unlock her heart is a somewhat clichéd theme in Egyptian drama, however, and seems to become more so when Laila accompanies, Adham, a new neighbour, on his mission to find out about his mother, seeking out her family who in a remote village in Sharqiya. There they meet one of his aunts and stay the night in a rural house attached to the large plot of land he inherited by his mother, who had long since left for Alexandria. They pretend they are married so as not to disturb the rural folks' assumptions about a man and a woman travelling together, and this brings them closer together, giving Adham the chance to introduce Laila to new ideas and emotions. The day they finally locate Adham's mother, sadly, they find her dying of a rare disease… Despite the power of the musical aspect of Laila's Wedding, the series is stuffed with unnecessary detail, bringing up routine women's issues such as late marriage, Urfi marriage and so on. It would have been better for this musical series to be shortened to 15 episodes; viewers could have been spared the sad long solo scenes of Laila after her close friend dies suddenly in a car accident, or when she finds out about her own fatal illness. The songs could have been better spaced out, too, rather than having up to three songs in one episode and over three episodes without any songs. “Only love and faith will cure the disease,” Laila says in a speech to a small audience at a society for breast cancer patients, a few days after she discovers she is ill. Yet the happy ending that is integral to all Egyptian TV drama is there: Laila organises her own wedding to Adham, another occasion for Ghalia to sing. The surprise rather is Carmen Said, another new singer, who presents the wedding song, Hodn Dafy (“Warm Embrace”). Even more surprising is the fact that the end of the 30th episode promises viewers a second season. How, I wonder, will Amr Al-Dali further stretch an already short dramatic string? Whatever else he includes in this new season of the series, only music will save the day in the end.
