Joash Tang and Ethel Yap play Danny and Amy in the gender-reversed version of “The Last Five Years”. Photo: Josh Cheah/Stay Films.
“But shouldn’t I want the world to see
The brilliant girl who inspires me?
Don’t you think that now’s a good time to be
The ambitious freak you are?”
These are the lines that the successful writer Jamie sings to his wife, a struggling actor called Cathy, in Jason Robert Brown’s acclaimed 2001 musical, The Last Five Years. Cathy never gets to be “the ambitious freak” in the original story, but now, with a project titled The Last Five Years: A Gender Reversal, local theatre actor and producer Ethel Yap has given Cathy the chance to finally shine.
The idea for The Last Five Years: A Gender Reversal had been brewing inside Ethel’s head for, well, the last five years, ever since she played the role of Cathy in Yellow Chair Productions’ staging of the two-handler in 2013.
“I felt as we were rehearsing the 2013 show that I enjoyed singing Cathy’s songs, but I really loved Jamie’s song,” Ethel remembers. “I mean they’re so fun, they’re so energetic, the lyrics are so witty, and as a character he’s really very compelling. So I thought, wouldn’t it be fun if I could just [play his part]?”
The more she thought about it, the more she realised that there was so much she could explore with a gender-reversed version of the musical, and that it would be an interesting and timely project to take on.
“What does it mean to be a straight man, and what does it mean to be a straight woman, and what roles do they play? And if we just turn those two genders on their heads, what would that show us about what we assume to be the roles of the two genders within this relationship [today]?” she questions.
She assembled a mostly female squad and, in August this year, began an 11-day residency under Centre 42’s Basement Workshop programme, which culminated in a public showcase in our Black Box on 1 September 2018. One of the first things they had to decide as a team was how to alter the original material to effectively engineer the gender swap: Should they just have the male actor read the female part and vice versa? Or should they swap the characters’ names? Or should they go all the way and give the characters new names and change the gender of the peripheral characters as well? After several meetings and experimenting on the rehearsal floor, they settled on the latter. Cathy was renamed and revamped as Danny (played by Lasalle Musical Theatre student Joash Tang), while Jamie was transformed into a new character called Amy (played by Ethel). All gender references to other peripheral characters in the piece are also swapped.
“We believe that it would be a more powerful way to engage the audience. Because if [we just swapped] the two main characters, then perhaps we would be able to easily dismiss them as anomalies, and not consider how we could learn anything from their journey,” explains Ethel.
Ethel Yap fell in love with the male character’s songs in “The Last Five Years” when she performed the musical in 2013. Photo: Josh Cheah/Stay Films.
But even after the logistics of the gender swap were settled, the team still encountered a plethora of creative challenges as they worked out how to alter the score and the script. Certain gender-specific lyrics had to be changed, with one example being the line “I could be in line to be the British Queen / Look like I was 17”, which was edited to “I could be in line to be the British king / See Niagara Falls in spring”. Then there’s the case of finding replacements for gendered insults, which proved to be surprisingly difficult.
“In one of the songs, we were trying to find a female version of ‘jerk’, but it was really hard to find a gendered insult for a woman that doesn’t attack her appearance or her sexuality,” says Ethel. “It’s got so much to do with sort of the history of how the language has evolved around gendered roles, and therefore the reversal isn’t as clean and direct. It was really eye-opening.”
Even the process of transposing the musical score turned out to be a time-consuming endeavour, even though the music director, Aloysius Foong, was already familiar with the material since he also worked on the 2013 Yellow Chair production.
“With the help of modern technology – thank god – you can put your score through this programme that will churn out the new notes for you in a different key, but there’s still a lot of weird technical things that Aloysius had to adjust,” says Ethel. “Like for example in the original version, for Cathy’s songs, there are parts where she sounds like she’s wailing or crying. But then when you put that in a man’s voice, what does the wailing sound like? Is it supposed to sound, like, high-pitched? Or can it go a bit lower?”
Nonetheless, the team managed to work through all these text and technical issues, while also figuring out blocking and other simple staging elements, all in the span of just 11 days. But while Ethel admits that it may have been easier if they had just treated this as text exercise, she also saw the value in translating it into a performance.
“I think when you have something embodied in a physical performance, then it really becomes something that you have to confront in a way,” says Ethel. “I feel like people’s reactions to it will be a lot more visceral, a lot more real, because it’s not just a concept on paper. If I’m seeing a woman but she’s not saying things that I usually associate with a woman, then how does that make me as an audience member feel?”
Her instincts were right, as audience members did have lots to discuss during the talk-back session, as well as in their feedback forms.
“We thought that the world of our workshop would be slightly foreign to people, but no, actually in the end it turns out that they do recognise people like this. A lot of the feedback we got was like, ‘Oh it’s so truthful’, or ‘It’s so relatable’, or ‘I know people who are like this, and this workshop has given a voice to them’,” shares Ethel. “So yeah definitely for me, I feel that we achieved what we set out to do.”
That said, Ethel believes that this is just the first phase of her experiment, and she and her team already have many other ideas of how they would potentially want to grow and further the piece in the future should the opportunity arise. But whichever direction Ethel and her team decide to take the work from here, one thing’s for sure: the world is, indeed, ready to see more ambitious freaks.
By Gwen Pew
Published on 28 September 2018
A work-in-progress showcase of The Last Five Years: A Gender Reversal took place at Centre 42 on 1 September 2018. Find out more about the work here.
