East meets West End

She is poised to become a West End sensation thanks to her leading role in a lavish new £4 million musical. But Gayatri Iyer clinched the part of the heroine in The Far Pavilions, which opens next month, with a show-stopping rendition of The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Music.

Indeed Miss Iyer, 24, who is already a successful Bollywood singer in her native India, had not even planned to audition for the role of Princess Anjuli, an Indian woman who falls in love with a heroic British officer against the backdrop of the death throes of the Raj.

She only attended an open casting session in Bombay to give a friend moral support. But somebody there recognised her and convinced her to perform the classic Julie Andrews number.

Producer Michael Ward explained: "We went to Bombay to find our princess, and found her in Gayatri. They knew that she was a singer and coaxed her into performing something from The Sound of Music.

"When the director Gale Edwards and I saw the tape we both said, 'that's our princess'." Miss Iyer said: "I was thrilled when I won among hundreds of women who auditioned for the role."

The Far Pavilions is an adaptation of the 1978 novel which has sold 15 million copies, and is the West End's first bigbudget musical of 2005. The show has been in development for almost a decade and faithfully recreates M.M.

Kaye's epic tale of forbidden love. Hadley Fraser co-stars with Miss Iyer as her lover Ashton Pelham-Martyn.

The musical also features Bollywood star Sophiya Haque, who appeared in Bombay Dreams in the West End.

The show spans the 25 years between the Indian Mutiny and the Afghan War of 1879. Author Molly Kaye was closely involved with the painstaking adaptation of the novel for the stage, and said in 2003: "Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine The Far Pavilions would be turned into a West End musical."

Sadly Kaye passed away, last January, aged 95. So, come first night, one of the finest seats the Shaftesbury Theatre has to offer will be left empty in her memory.