[TODAYonline] Love, it's a riot
(有2張劇照, 都有Kit, 可放大)
http://www.todayonline.com/Arts/EDC100810-0000025/Love,-its-a-riot
05:55 AM Aug 10, 2010
Theatre Review: December Rains
DECEMBER Rains is the type of homegrown musical that has "Classic" written
all over it. A love story centred on a tragic heroine, gift-wrapped in
beautiful melodies and grounded (at least for the first act) in a
particularly explosive historical moment of the country's tumultuous
pre-independence era in the 1950s.
Dare we say it has an affinity with productions like Miss Saigon and Les
Miserables?
Restaged by Toy Factory, playwright/lyricist/composer Liang Wern Fook's 1996
Mandarin production (touted as Singapore's first Mandarin musical) tells of
rich female student Li Qing (Kit Chan) and young Maoist Ying Xiong (George
Chan), who yearns to help the revolution in China. They are brought together
and torn apart by circumstances that haunt them and everyone around them
three decades on, with some poignant (if not tragic) consequences.
In a year of restagings, December Rains, like the rest, faces the question of
whether it has adapted to the times.
Considering that it revolves around events in the '50s and '80s, staged in
the mid-'90s and re-staged in 2010, that's probably a hard question to answer.
Then again, maybe not, when one hears laughter during supposedly crucial
moments on which the musical's emotional pivot is hinged on.
It is, perhaps, telling of audiences today that a touching scene between a
Singaporean and a Chinese national who wants to become a Permanent Resident
would result in guffaws. As if the China that loomed menacingly, bitterly and
promisingly in the minds of people back then (and most likely in Liang's when
he wrote the piece) has now been effectively reduced to simply where PRCs
come from.
Within the parameters of its own big-little world, however, director Goh Boon
Teck does succeed in constructing a visually elegant tale. The stage's
slanted platform, the inventive use of nylon ropes to convey rain, which
double as curtains, highlighted the seemingly unreal situation the
protagonists were caught up in. Everything was at an angle and everyone on
precarious ground.
As expected, Kit Chan's singing - predictably the musical's biggest draw -
was heads above the rest of the cast. Perhaps too much, though, as her
powerful, beautiful voice made practically everyone else sound, well, just
okay.
But in the end, we were partial to Jeffrey Low's Ming Li. His emphatic
performance as the sickly, long-suffering friend who quietly carries the
torch for his friend Li was what made us fall for this arguably predictable
and rather contrived story.
Despite a few quibbles (notably its rather inappropriate casting of boyish
actors as adult businessmen in the first act) Toy Factory deserves applause
for reviving December Rains.
In this day and age of short-term memories, we can do far worse than allowing
history to repeat itself before us. At least for two-and-a-half hours.
December Rains runs until Aug 15, 8pm, Esplanade Theatre. With 3pm weekend
matinees. Tickets at $69 to $129 from Sistic. Mandarin with English subtitles.
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