“Retro revival“

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 19 August 2014

Dick Lee takes us on a raucous trip down memory lane with an updated version of Hotpants which unfortunately ends up being more lukewarm than hot.

It’s 1972. Winds of change sweep into Singapore. Fascination grips us as we discover things that challenge conventional decency: pop music, extra-marital affairs, and but of course, hotpants.

Hotpants, first staged in 1997, returns for a second run as part of director Dick Lee’s 40th anniversary in showbiz. Featuring an updated cast and script, it channels the spirit of 1970s Singapore, delivering a heavy dose of nostalgia whilst cranking the feel-good factor all the way up.

The show was carefully crafted and well executed by the ensemble cast, who were sufficiently engaging with their tight choreography and harmonies. It was especially evident that the payoff scene was in the final number “Changes”, with a superb combination of beautiful harmonies, lights and a strategically-placed disco ball.

Lee’s updated script also featured gratuitous sexual innuendo that was not lost on the older crowd, yet made cheeky references to the contemporary context (“WTF Records”) that resonated with the handful of younger audience members in attendance.

However, despite the winning formula of timeless nostalgia and a tried-and-tested script, the show did not quite live up to the hype.

Was it the cast? Though they hit all their notes competently, at times I couldn’t make out what they were saying. This could have been due to two reasons.

One, their enunciation kept bouncing back and forth between a “proper”, newscaster accent and the localised Singlish inflection. The obvious culprits (no need to name names) were the more inexperienced theatre performers, who garbled their lines because they couldn’t switch between both accents quickly and proficiently.

Two, they were not projecting their voices loudly enough. The balance between the performers’ voices and the live band was off, probably due to the settings of the microphones used. But this shouldn’t have been a problem for a 10-piece ensemble cast with 10 pairs of lungs, no less, backing them up.

Perhaps it was the set design. It was most puzzling for a musical to feature a bare-bones set that severely skimped on props, and to have striped LED backdrops that felt asynchronous with the milieu of the 70s. Surely the exorbitant ticket price and $5-a-piece programme booklets could have financed a few spare pieces of furniture from IKEA? I wonder?

But whatever the case, these factors all came together to give a performance that might have looked okay on paper, but felt sorely lacking on stage.

So should you catch it? Maybe. If not for the current glut of musicals clogging up the local theatre scene, Hotpants might have proved to be a success with its local flavor and saccharine musical arrangements. Alas, it does not stand up to its more polished counterparts imported from Broadway.

Hotpants simply fell short.

“Selling Nostalgia“

Reviewer: Andre Joseph Theng
Performance: 16 August 2014, 8pm

Upon entering the Drama Centre Theatre, oldies by the likes of The Carpenters and Barry Manilow are playing to the audience comprising mostly baby boomers, some of whom have brought their families for this revival of the 1997 Dick Lee musical, Hotpants.

That is essentially the point of the production – a nostalgic look back to wilder teenage years and the pains of growing up. The musical is set in 1972 and the cultural references (Capitol Theatre, Anita Sarawak) are true to its time period. It banks on more universal themes of growing up and self-discovery to connect with audience like myself who may not have lived in that time period.

Hotpants revolves around three mother-daughter pairs, where the three mothers, (played by Denise Tan, Nikki Muller and Eleanor Tan) previously classmates, are reunited when their daughters (played by Kimberly Chan, Tabitha Nauser and Cheryl Tan) form a group to take part in a Talentime competition organised by their convent school. Their main competition comes from fictitious boys school St Peter’s Institution, where two boys (played by Windson Liong and Joakim Gomez) have formed a group and take part in the Talentime. Side-plots include extra-marital affairs, and relationships between different cast members too complicated to explain here. In short, all ten cast members are in one way or another linked to each other, often romantically.

All the cast members sang well, doing justice to the catchy music written by Dick Lee. Memorable numbers include the titular “Hotpants”, “Not Afraid to Fly” and “Changes”. By and large, this was a feel-good musical, and even when things were supposed to be serious, the music remained relatively upbeat and there was the inevitability that the musical would have a happy ending.

Unfortunately, the production seemed stuck in the 70s and left a little to be desired. The stage was mostly bare for most of the 150-minute performance, and the most prominent set pieces were large stylised backdrops which did not do justice to bringing the 70s into the theatre. The choreography was not particularly dynamic and is best described as being “simple”.

For me, the star of the show was not any particular cast member, but Lee himself who is credited as writer (of both the script and the music), director and choreographer of the musical. This is no mean feat and what Lee has written is something uniquely Singaporean, a little like a musical version of Adrian Tan’s Teenage Textbook. One can only hope that there would be more such musicals in time, which feel naturally and comfortably Singaporean.

That said, a feel-good performance cannot be faulted simply because it lacks the gravitas of a more serious theatrical production. The musical numbers left audience members humming the theme song all the way to the lifts on the way out and judging from the enthusiastic laughter, the audience had lapped up all the jokes regardless of how corny they were.

And so on that note, I must deem Hotpants a successful performance for it gave the audience exactly what they wanted – an enjoyable evening where they could reminiscence days past, complete with corny jokes and catchy music. It was a good night at the theatre.