HOT PANTS by Dick Lee

“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.

The ensemble cast of (from left) Denise Tan, Joakim Gomez, Windson Liong, Tabitha Nauser, Dwayne Tan, Cheryl Tan, Eleanor Tan, Kimberly Chan, Ebi Shankara and Nikki Muller. Photograph: Singapore Street Festival Ltd.

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.