“Still Beautiful”

Reviewer: Andre Joseph Theng
Performance: 14 November 2015

Not quite the same as the earlier productions but Beauty World is still as enduring and endearing as ever.

It is 2015 (although it is still 1965 in Beauty World) and Dick’s Lee vision for the latest production of Beauty World is one of a ‘has-been’ place, dated and irrelevant. Still, some things never change – the characters, and the music (with the exception of two songs omitted from the 2008 production). First staged in 1988, the musical has indeed aged well and remains no less relevant today. It follows the story of Ivy Chan (played by Cheryl Tan), an orphan who comes from Batu Pahat, Johor in search of her father. Her only clue to her parentage is a jade pendant left behind with her when she was abandoned, which was engraved “Beauty World”. She leaves her boyfriend Franky Wong (Joshua Lim) behind and travels to Singapore where she joins the cabaret in search of answers. In the process, she finds herself plunged into a new world, and falls in love with Ah Hock (Timothy Wan), an employee at Beauty World.

Despite publicity material promising a ‘darker’ Beauty World, this iteration does not detract much from earlier productions. Cheryl Tan, a Malaysian herself, especially shines as Ivy and brings new life to the innocence of her characters. Ditto Frances Lee as Rosemary, and one can add Timothy Wan’s Ah Hock to the list of sterling performances. However, Jeanette Aw’s Lulu is less convincing, as her attempts to portray a sultry “number 1 cabaret girl” came at the expense of being able to hear her relatively weak singing.

While the 2008 production featured a grand finale of flames being combined to form a bigger one, the understated nature of this production means that it ends rather abruptly. The Wong Chee Wai set features some nice details, especially an inverted Beauty World sign facing outside, as if the audience is looking at a cross-section of the cabaret. Overall, there is little to complain about what really is a competent if not ground-breaking production of a familiar script.

To me, there is no other Singapore musical anywhere as successful, memorable and distinctive as Beauty World. Simple as the story is, it brings out universal values of small-town girl moving to a big city, a search for identity and of finding love. Having found her answers, Ivy eventually returns to Batu Pahat. For her, Beauty World is a place of transience, a departure from her “normal” life, a temporary state of being. Yet her character, and Beauty World, is permanently etched onto the history of Singapore theatre, a musical we can be proud of.

Those who have watched it previously may not find any reason to catch this production other than relieving good memories of watching the earlier productions. But I hope that this production reaches out to new audiences who have yet to discover the world of Beauty World, and so if you have never previously watched it on stage, this is a must-see piece of Singapore culture.

I do have a minor complaint though, and that is of the expensive programmes and CDs. While of course no one is forced to buy either, other theatre groups such as W!ld Rice and Pangdemonium have established a commendable precedent of offering programmes for a nominal fee (a donation). These are high-quality and glossy programmes with good content and make for a nice souvenir of production. While Broadway musicals showing at Marina Bay Sands charge upwards of $20 for a programme, I find that reasonably-priced programmes (up to $5) go some way to encouraging audiences to local theatre productions, who should not feel that they are being fleeced on a night out to the theatre.

“By Bibiks, For Bibiks”

Reviewer: Andre Joseph Theng
Performance: 7 November 2015

I enter the theatre to an audience dressed to their nines in nonya kebayas, and I know that I am in the right place. It is after all, a production for the inaugural Peranakan Arts Festival. Bibiks Behind Bars, an original musical by Richard Tan, is being restaged after its first run in 2002.

The music revolves around a group of bibiks (“aunties” played by Shirley Tay, Melvyn Chew, Catherine Sng and Jackie Pereira) who meet regularly in Joo Chiat for mah-jong games. Their appetite for gambling increases and eventually they find themselves at a casino, and end up running a “gambling den” at home. Interspersed between scenes of the bibiks are side-plots of passing down Perenakan heritage to future generations, and a romance with a police officer (Richard Chia) who arrests the bibiks.

I generally enjoy musicals and appreciate distinctively local musicals that we can be proud of. However, I have yet to find one other than Beauty World, and most of the other efforts are relatively amateurish. The story-line of Bibiks Behind Bars is rather shallow and follows a premise that is hardly true (“gambling is illegal”), at least not the kind of mah-jong games that they were playing at home. The singing is generally weak with the exception of Matheus Ting. The music is not particularly memorable either. Even the presence of Koh Chieng Mun, who played Judy Lui, a goddess of fortune and a life coach, does little to raise the standard of the show, and it end up looking like a Peranakan rehash of Under One Roof with the living room set. It is regrettable that the story-arc of preserving Peranakan heritage was not developed further, and was instead relegated to an on-stage lamentation of the loss of heritage.

Then again, perhaps it is unfair of me to speak so harshly about the performance, considering that it doesn’t try to be a serious musical production. It is something like reviewing your family’s Christmas programme featuring your young nephews and nieces. After all, most of the cast are Peranakan, and ditto the audience on the day of this performance. It has the feel of a family gathering. The audience seems to be having a ball of a time, and roar with laughter at each of the inter-language wordplays, of which there are many throughout the performance.

Nonetheless, Peranakan heritage is worth preserving and it is good that there is Peranakan culture represented on stage by someone other than Emily (of Emerald Hill). I can say that Bibiks does achieve that in talking about everything Peranakan – its food, expressions and an entire way of life.

As a side note, reviews of the 2002 production pointed out how the subtitles did not always match the dialogue, and the producers responded that this was due to some characters improvising their lines. On the SISTIC ticketing page for this production, it is stated that the production was in English, Baba Malay and Mandarin, with English subtitles and there are also references to subtitles in the programme booklet. Unfortunately, there are no subtitles at the show. I have to guess what is going on for much of the show, as it not only contains large portions of Baba Malay, but also Chinese dialects. It is a good idea to make such an important point clearer in publicity material, even if the producers expect majority of the audience to be Peranakan.

“Lost in Translation”

Reviewer: Andre Joseph Theng
Performance: 10 October 2015

Chinglish is an excellent production let down by a mediocre script.

We have all been in that situation before, a case of two people of different cultures and who speak different languages meeting and the struggle to understand each other. Perhaps in the midst of the frustration and the miscommunication, hilarity ensues as each party puts the pieces together and improvises a meeting.

Such is the premise of Pangdemonium’s final production for the season. Chinglish is a play by American playwright David Henry Hwang and revolves around Daniel Cavanaugh (played by Daniel Jenkins), an American businessman who goes to China to market his sign-making company to Chinese government officials Minister Cai Guoliang (played by Adrian Pang) and Vice Minister Xi Yan (played by Oon Shu An). In the process of their conversations, a translator (played by Audrey Luo), frequently mangles her translations and attempts by Cavanaugh to communicate directly to the Chinese officials prove challenging. It was not just language that was an issue, but also that of understanding each other’s culture and business practices.

To be honest, I am running out of ways to describe Pangdemonium’s productions, many of which seem to follow a tried-and-tested formula. Yes, there are the occasional ones which stand out, but the majority of their productions seem to suffer from the fact that the script chosen was not a very good one in the first place. This is unfortunate considering the high standards of the productions – from the excellent acting (Adrian Pang speaks convincing Mandarin), to Eucien Chia’s very impressive set. Just as other Pangdemonium productions have received flak for inconsistent (American English) accent work, Oon sometimes struggles maintaining a consistent Mainland Chinese Mandarin accent.

Hwang’s script seems to essentialise the differences between America and China (see the “Asian” memes on the internet). The humour is entirely derived from the delivery of mistranslated lines and misunderstood remarks, and the characters lack depth. Especially bizarre is the character of played by Oon, who begins hostile to Cavanaugh, but then quickly enters into a romantic relationship with him. Thankfully, the show picks up in the second half, as motivations are explained and the point of the show made clearer. Yes I did read the script prior to the performance and even so, I feel that Pangdemonium has done the best they could with the material, providing comic timing and on-point delivery.

Regardless of the artistic merits of the production, Pangdemonium’s formula has been a downright commercial success, with tickets for the entire run sold out by the beginning of the run. Perhaps it is the marketing team who should receive the greatest credit for this production although they seem to have slightly oversold the show.

“Magical or Bizarre? You Decide.”

Reviewer: Andre Joseph Theng
Performance: 29 August 2015

Margaret Leng Tan’s Cabinet of Curiosities cleverly combines different art forms, but is an acquired taste that not everyone will enjoy.

As the audience files out for the intermission, I overhear some trying to describe what they had just seen to their friends.

That was magical, said one.

I am not sure if I entirely agree.

Cabinet of Curiosities is a commission for the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) and features renowned pianist Margaret Leng Tan performing on a collection of toy instruments, including the toy pianos she is known for. Included in the programme is the world premiere of a piece by Phyllis Chen entitled Curios, played by “instruments” such as crank toys, bowls, a music box and featuring video clips.

Performed at the School of the Arts Studio Theatre, the production toes the line between a classical music performance and a theatrical performance. Tan is of course, first and foremost a classical pianist and she performs some pieces with the music sheets before her. At the same time, she also takes on the role of an actor. For example, in the piece entitled “Wrong, wrong, wrong”, based on an ancient Chinese poem, Tan transforms into a Chinese Opera performer, performing single-handedly an ‘orchestra’ of 16 instruments as well as singing and making sound effects with her voice.

The sharp, tinkly, bell-like sounds of the toy piano do create an aura of mystique, well in line with the “Cabinet of Curiosities” theme. The theme refers to collections of weird objects, antiques or pieces of natural history, as kept by the rich in days of old. The Phyllis Chen piece is accompanied with a video of old carousel rides and carnivals, and her music provides a nice soundtrack of sorts although the video was mostly a distraction from the music.

With the rather abstract and unusual nature of the performance, Cabinet of Curiosities pushes boundaries of traditional and modern art resulting in something rather creative and intriguing. In one piece, James Joslins’ ‘Hatta’, she moves between two toy pianos facing each with an amplified chess set between them. The movements of the chess pieces against the board created sound effects that contrasted with the pianos. In another, Alvin Lucier’s ‘Nothing is Real’, she performs with a tea pot. She opens and closes the lid, a small speaker from within grows and dims in volume with the Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ wafting out of the teapot.

I have to say while I appreciate its creativity, I am not a fan of such avant-garde work. Such work is often an acquired taste. In any case, the very well-behaved audience seemed to appreciate the performance, watching and listening intently to every detail and every sound produced by the variety of “instruments”. Perhaps it is genius, and perhaps I just don’t get it.

“A Missed Opportunity”

Reviewer: Andre Theng
Performance: 25 July 2015

The LKY Musical is a competent production but is ultimately unremarkable and unmemorable.

[Some spoilers ahead]

It is not everyday that we produce an original Singapore musical, let alone one on the scale of The LKY Musical. Of course there is the inevitable presence of “foreign talent” in the production, for example the director, Steven Dexter, but this is as Singaporean as it gets.

This is a story set in Singapore, about a Singaporean by a largely Singaporean cast and with music written by one of Singapore’s best known composers, Dick Lee. The ambitious maiden production by Metropolitan Productions is staged at the Marina Bay Sands’ Sands Theatre. All this squares nicely with the recent passing of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, and the SG50 celebrations – the musical runs right through National Day.

I expect a spectacular, epic musical, in the vein of historical musicals such as Les Miserables and Evita. I expect, in the words of The Straits Times’ Corrie Tan’s review of another musical, that this one will “bring out the universal in the very specific”.

Instead, the result is a history lesson that went through 24 years of history chronologically, covering the major events of Lee Kuan Yew’s early life. I imagine that Singaporeans will be familiar with the racial riots, the communist problem and merger and separation of Malaysia and Singapore. Somehow, I doubt that someone new to Singapore will be able to keep up with these events (or for that matter, that interested).

Here’s the thing. The LKY Musical is a perfectly competent, professional and pleasant production. It has a good cast, an interesting score and spiffy staging. Adrian Pang, who plays Lee, does a commendable job of playing the well-known personality. His singing is on-point and as one would expect, delivers in his role as Lee. The rest of the cast (all-male, save for Sharon Au, who played Lee’s wife) are also professional and perform well as a tight ensemble.

Yet, I cannot but conclude that this is a musical with many caveats, as a result of the minor quibbles I had which unfortunately all add up. Au cannot match Pang in acting and singing, and struggles with some of the singing parts (she speaks with an inconsistent and rather bizarre accent at times). In order to make up for the gaps in story-telling, the musical is drenched with multi-media clips, making the musical feel documentary-like. Dick Lee’s score is good, and has hints of the standard Broadway musicals, but alas, none of the songs are memorable or ‘hummable’ after the show. The three-storey set is large but hardly impressive, and does nothing to bring to stage life in the 1950s and 1960s.

Most of all, I bemoan the rather poor story-telling. While the musical has a central character, it lacks a central plot. Yes, it is good spin on our history, but really not much else. The fabled love story between Mr and Mrs Lee is barely explored, and the role of Mrs Lee in Mr Lee’s life seems to have been grossly understated. The musical is content on getting from point A to point B in an almost linear fashion. I am unsure if I am watching a biopic, a historical drama, or a documentary.

To be fair, The LKY Musical does pick up towards the end, and ends rather poignantly. Throughout the musical, the different National Anthems used in Singapore at different points of our history are integrated into the music, and it ends with the cast singing the National Anthem of Singapore.

Ultimately, I am disappointed that the whole thing feels like a missed opportunity; an opportunity to bring out the most compelling elements of Mr Lee’s life and to create something truly soaring and awe-inspiring. Instead, it stays far too close on the safe side and is best described as good, but unremarkable.

And so, the last caveat is as such – go ahead and watch it, but make sure you bring along some patriotic pride and sufficient affection for Mr Lee himself when you enter the theatre.

“It’s a small world after all”

Reviewer: Andre Theng
Performance: 25 June 2015

In light of this year’s SG50 celebrations, I should first commend W!ld Rice for reviving an interesting premise for a theatrical production, one which answers the question of whether Singapore and Malaysia are in fact, different or the same countries. This is especially so for the audience members who had missed the previous iteration – the 2005 production, Second Link. Even for those who were there in 2005, Another Country presents updated texts and a refreshed production, resulting in an up-to-date anthology of sorts of Singapore and Malaysian literature.

Here’s how the second production in Wild Rice’s ImagiNATION series works: the first half of the show consists of a Malaysian cast playing a series of 35 texts about Singapore, selected by Alfian Sa’at and played in chronological order. These are a combination of both fiction and non-fiction texts, including newspaper forum letters, poetry, a song commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and excerpts from Singapore theatre such as Lim Chor Pee’s Mimi Fan and Michael Chiang’s Private Parts.

The second half comprises texts about Malaysia curated by Leow Puay Tin. However, there is an additional twist: the pieces are not played in chronological order, and instead, before the intermission, the audience is invited to play a game of “tikam-tikam”, and the order of the pieces are decided there and then. A timer was set up at the corner of the stage, and at the end of an hour, the Singapore actors playing the Malaysian scripts would stop and perform just one more piece. That means that not all the pieces would be performed, and that the pieces each night would be different. The same devise was done in the 2005 iteration.

Throughout the performance, which flits through each (unrelated) piece of text and there seems to be little effort to make links between the pieces, I ask myself how the entire experience helped to answer the question presented in the premise.

Strangely, by the end of the nearly 3-hour performance, it works. The sum of all the parts clarifies that culturally, Singapore and Malaysia are quite the same after all. Many times, it is indeed difficult to identify whether a certain piece is Singaporean or Malaysian – many of the Singapore pieces are about Malaysia, such as Claire Tham’s Highway and Alfian Sa’at’s A Visit to a Relative’s House in Malaysia. This shows that geopolitical boundaries are not as clearly demarcated culturally, and perhaps, we have something in common after all.

Presented shortly after a run in Kuala Lumpur, I concur with the Malaysian reviewers that the Malaysian texts, presented by the Singapore cast, are more entertaining and well-paced than the longer and slower first half. I am not sure if it is the cast that lack energy and synergy on stage, or if it is the nature of the pieces chosen by Alfian that had resulted in this. The performance doesn’t start strong and only picks up in segments featuring song-and-dance. The Malaysian pieces, on the other hand, given their random order are high energy and on point, and you can look forward to Lim Yu Beng playing a chicken and Siti Khalijah, the crowd favourite, playing Emily. There are no sets and the production is accompanied by some video clips and props.

All in all, I must say that I enjoy the romp through Singapore and Malaysia, and if anything, I discover many new literary works which I will be sure to look up.

“Enigmatic Emily”

Reviewer: Andre Theng
Performance: 4 April 2015, 3pm

I should begin with a disclaimer: I love Emily. Even though this is the first time I am watching Emily on stage, I have already fallen in love with her in my imagination based on the script I have read and re-read for theatre classes and academic papers. Here is one play that is perhaps as Singaporean as it gets – complete with some serious code-switching, and truly offering a window into a particular culture and at a particular time period in Singapore history. All this is told through the eyes of a woman so full of contradictions, a character so strong yet so weak, submissive but also complicit in perpetuating the same injustices she suffered.

So I am glad that The Esplanade has decided to re-stage Emily as part of its SG50 series. As Corrie Tan of The Straits Times noted, it is difficult to reinterpret a play that has been staged and re-staged so many times in many different productions including those overseas. While I have never watched Emily on stage before, I have some experience of them from watching clips online of previous productions. The main difference in this production is the thrust stage, featuring the iconic chair and rotary telephone, as well as plain white steps in the background. I find the blocking rather bizarre at times – Emily frequently turns her back to the audience to face the black wall on the other end. I feel that it could have done with less movement up and down the stage (which is something like a catwalk) overall.

Karen Tan is a competent Emily, bringing out the multiplicity of emotions and she succeeds in presenting that tentativeness within Emily. Emily is always on the run, almost as if she’s talking to multiple people at the same time. She has busied herself with her duties as wife and mother. But towards the end of the play, in a rather poignant moment, we get a glimpse of what drives her: how she had grown up believing that being a dutiful wife and mother is her sole purpose in life. This bit, to me the climax of the play, is a let-down because Tan narrates it sitting in far corner of the stage, speaking softly and drenched in blue light. It can easily go unnoticed to someone not anticipating this moment. I also think that Tan’s code-switching could have been more marked; it is only most apparent at the market scene and was not too obvious in the opening scene. Credit must be given as Tan shone when she came out in the final scenes as a much-older Emily, reflective on her life and almost senile.

I do not think that this was Emily’s best outing yet. But this production does not take away Emily’s enigma, and to me, that is enough. Although written 30 years ago, she continues to endure and endear as the Singapore ‘bibik’ and from the looks of it, will be around for years to come.

“Old is Not Gold”

Reviewer: Andre Theng
Performance: 29 March 2015, 3pm

I have been thinking of this “Pioneer” label – it is currently bandied around everywhere, and I find it somewhat strange. When I think of ‘pioneers’, I think of older folks who have lived through wars, not people of my parents’ age. That not withstanding, Haresh Sharma’s latest play, Pioneer (Girls) Generation (PGG) tackles the issue of ‘pioneers’ in an ageing population, and is certainly very relevant social commentary in a society with a greying population and falling birth rate.

PGG is set in an unnamed, upmarket retirement home in Singapore and revolves around four residents played by Thomas Lim, Irene Ong, Padma Sagaram and Catherine Sng. While they are initially good friends, various issues tear them apart, especially when rent at the centre is raised. Eventually they all leave the centre for another one (spoiler alert) in a neighbouring country. Accompanying the cast of seniors are Dwayne Lau and Audrey Luo who play multiple roles as, among others, a Filipino helper at the home, a volunteer and a Chinese TV news anchor.

Sharma has produced much good work and unfortunately, PGG is not his best outing and the script feels raw and slightly undeveloped. The use of many sexual references as comedic devices is bizarre and there is scarcely much else holding the play together – surely rising rent is not the biggest problem faced by old people, who emphasise that they live in an upmarket home and that they are “not needy”. The play also suffers from hesitant delivery from the older cast members who stumble on their lines.

Short of studying the script in-depth, I sense a lurking meta-narrative in the story where the retirement home was a metaphor for Singapore society in Singapore – where its residents are dependent on the management to solve their problems, where the home’s gardens are demolished to build additional units and how there is a lack of consultation with residents before decisions are made. But if this is Sharma’s intention in a short 1.5 hour play, then none of them are fully developed and they serve to distract from the primary “ageing population” narrative.

PGG has potential to be something quite powerful but does not live up to that potential.

There are funny moments and the subject remains a pertinent one. It is commendable that Sharma and The Necessary Stage have taken it on amidst a nation-wide celebration of “pioneers”. And yes, there were many pioneers themselves in the audience who seem to appreciate all the jokes and the nostalgic music. Further adding to PGG’s woes was the fact that it was providing social commentary in the middle of the week of National Mourning for Mr Lee Kuan Yew (Of course, through no one’s fault), and although there is a moment’s silence observed at the beginning of the play, it is just bad timing.

“More Transformation Needed”

Reviewer: Andre Joseph Theng
Performance: 7 February 2015

In the days preceding the play, I contemplated the title of the production – “Circle Mirror Transformation“. I struggled to make heads or tails of what this not-quite-grammatical title can possibly mean. So I set out to discover the reason for the rather cryptic title.

I guess it kind of made sense: the circle referred to the circle they were constantly in during the class and the mirror is a metaphor for self-reflection, resulting in “transformation”.

Pangdemonium begins its new season with an Annie Baker’s script, a play about four misfits who attend an acting class at a Community Centre, taught by Marty, a misfit herself, played by Neo Swee Lin. In the course of the two-hour intermission-less play spanning six weeks, the characters (played by Adrian Pang, Selma Alkaff, Nikki Muller and Daniel Jenkins) reveal snippets about their lives, their pain and their insecurities.

The greatest joy about the play is the memories of drama class exercises; walking around the classroom and trying to stop together and those dubious exercises that don’t seem to have anything to do with acting. Indeed, this is echoed when Alkaff’s character, Lauren asks Marty if they are going to do be doing any “real acting”.

There is nothing particularly bad about Circle Mirror Transformation, but nothing exceptional either. My feeling is that it has been let down (once again, just as Fat Pig was) by a lacklustre script. Firstly it is set in a small-town in Vermont, USA and fairly removed from the average local audience member. The series of far-fetched coincidences and their resultant ‘cathartic transformation’ fall short due to undeveloped characters.

That is not to say that Pangdemonium did not a good job with the production; and the acting was commendable. There is a lot of energy and enthusiasm. Newcomer Alkaff puts in the best performance, appearing natural in her character’s awkwardness and providing much of the comedy in the production. I commend Pangdemonium for giving fresh arts graduate their first break.

The Wong Chee Wai set is excellent. At first glance it is merely a sterile and generic room with white walls and fluorescent lights. On closer inspection, one discovers the many wonderful details built into the set. The walls are not perfectly white, but feature water stains as if the ceiling was leaky. The false perspective was a nice touch as well, and a notice-board on one side was not rectangular but followed the lines of the ceiling.

After watching a production, I like to look up what people are saying about it online and on social media. Predictably, most people ‘loved it’ and everyone seems to have had a good night out. While this is obviously not a scientific survey of popular opinion, or of the production’s quality, I think that the Singapore theatre scene is big enough to give plays like Circle Mirror Transformation some space – unexceptional and not particularly memorable, but good enough for a few laughs, and some ‘life lessons’, all resulting in a pleasant night out.