Much about Shakespeare’s beloved comedy Much Ado About Nothing fits a Bollywood checklist.

An exotic location. Check. Melodramatic declarations of love and ensuing shenanigans. Check. A dance number. Check.

There have, in fact, been several Bollywood takes on the play, a staple in many Indian school curriculums.

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The Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon did a version in 2012, starring British funny woman Meera Syal (The Kumars at No. 42). Bollywood movies have borrowed plot points such as the bromance between the male leads and the simmering tension between sparring couple Beatrice and Benedick.

So what’s new about Tarragon Theatre’s adaptation, which has its world premiere on Wednesday, besides a cast made up mostly of talented South Asian actors on a Toronto mainstage?

For starters, the play doesn’t borrow just from Bollywood.

Sure, a rehearsal last week started out straight from the Bollywood cliché playbook, with two actors figuring out their cues for a scene involving an unravelling sari. However, the cast quickly reassembled to take things from the top.

The action opened with a Bharatanatyam class (a classical Indian dance akin to ballet). In the scene, Sita/Hero (Sarena Parmar) performs kuttadavu (toe movements) under the watchful eyes of a guru (Nova Bhattacharya, Bharatanatyam dancer and choreographer for the show). Tara/Beatrice (Anusree Roy) bumbles along much to the amusement of her classmates and annoyance of Auntie (Odissi dancer and actor Ellora Patnaik).

While the girls banter in Shakespearean English, with the odd Hindi word thrown in, Auntie speaks only in Hindi.

“I’m calling it my Bollywood, bhangra and Bharatanatyam play — set in Brampton,” says Richard Rose, artistic director of Tarragon Theatre and director of the play.

A year after he directed Much Ado About Nothing at Barrie’s Theatre by the Bay in 2006, Rose happened to watch a Bollywood film. (“I can’t remember the name. It was something my kids picked up,” he says.) He was immediately struck by the similarities.

“In Shakespeare’s comedies there’s a lot of suffering in love. Falling in love can be a terrible trauma. And watching this Bollywood movie, there was suffering love in those big epic stories they tell. The whole theme of Much Ado About Nothing is in the title. You fall in love. But in the end, you have to trust the person you are going to be with,” he says. “I thought there might be an idea there.”

Flash forward to 2011. Actor/playwright Ravi Jain’s playA Brimful of Asha ran at Tarragon Theatre. The play was about Jain’s relationship with his mother and his parents’ attempt to set him up in an arranged marriage. Rose told Jain that his mother’s arranged marriage story was fascinating; that a woman married a man within two weeks of meeting him and then arrived in Canada in the middle of winter to start a new life.

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The conversation got Rose thinking about setting the Shakespeare classic within the South Asian diaspora in Brampton. He brought on Jain as a consulting director.

“I encouraged Richard to translate the text,” says Jain. “If it’s going to be about Indian culture, then it’s got to be for an Indian audience. So there’s an Auntie character who only speaks in Hindi throughout the show. The show will have surtitles in Hindi and when Auntie speaks there will be English surtitles. . . .

“Otherwise there is a tendency to appropriate the culture and then forget about the audience. (With this production) I can bring my mom to opening night. She may not understand Shakespeare, but she will understand the Hindi script. And when Ellora speaks, she can connect.”

Not fluent in Hindi himself, Jain brought in Sharada Eswar as a cultural consultant. A teacher and performer herself, Eswar had worked on several projects inspired by her Indian upbringing, including an East Scarborough retelling of A Winter’s Tale. She was initially wary of a Bollywood reinterpretation.

“I also did not want to be associated with anything that panders to stereotypes we have of Punjabis . . . as gas station owners or taxi drivers,” she says. But Rose was open to suggestions and changes, and Eswar found herself translating the plot to a backdrop that she feels is a true representation of Brampton Punjabis.

“In terms of their involvement in politics, you have a character, Ranjit, who is the mayor of Brampton. The family is affluent but holds on to traditional values.”

Eswar ensured the translation reflected the everyday Hindi spoken in Toronto suburbs.

“It’s next to impossible to write iambic pentameter in Hindi . . . but there is poetry in the language and it’s not necessarily blank verse.”

The team hopes their efforts will have audiences hitting the 401 to watch the play. But Eswar hopes the play also appeals to the “so-called mainstream audience.”

“To be able to hear the language, it would be a great joy to shatter all those stereotypes that exist,” she says. “I hope people realize there’s more to South Asian theatre and literature than Bollywood.”