Twenty years ago in a small basement\nroom in a school in Singapore there was a piano, and on weekends a secret\ngathering took place around it. Young aspiring divas would convene and live out\ntheir dreams of stardom, emulating their favourite Broadway heroines belting\nout show tunes with attitude and imaginary feather boas and bosoms. It was my\nfirst education in the genre. Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome! Money makes the\nworld go round… I had the rare privilege to witness this covert extravaganza\nif only because I had made the piano my home away from home and would not be\nremoved from its side. I did not actually play the piano — a young medical\nstudent did all the work, and one might say I was the audience of one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am always amazed at how life turns\nout — fast forward 20 years and I am hearing the very same songs on stage at\nToy Factory’s sumptuous staging at the Esplanade Singapore, directed by Beatrice\nChia-Richmond, and choreographed by the very same young diva from those days in\nthe basement. For Zaini Tahir, Resident Choreographer of the NUS Dance\nEnsemble, dreams do come true. There is possibly hope for the rest of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hope, however, is in short supply\nfor the characters in this latest Toy Factory venture. The company has taken\nthe 1987 Broadway revival of the famous musical Cabaret<\/em> and strips off its glamour and glitz, exposing the dark\nheart of the story of a decadent world on the brink of World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Set in 1930s Berlin at the threshold\nof the Nazi Party’s rise into power, Cabaret\n<\/em>takes us into the heart of the city’s seedy nightlife, which unwittingly\nbecomes the last post of resistance to a world collapsing into fascism. Here at\nthe Kit Kat Klub, the infamous Emcee holds reign over his bevy of beauties and\nboys. China’s pop sensation Fei Xiang dons the mask of the Emcee as King of the\nKlub or Queen of the castle, take your pick. At the front of the club’s\nsizzling line-up is the mercurial Sally Bowles, played by Singapore’s feisty\nEmma Yong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Moulin Rouge<\/em> fashion, struggling American journalist Cliff Bradshaw\nfalls in love with Sally. Parallel to their doomed affair, his elderly landlady\nFraulein Schneider finds a budding twilight romance with her tenant, the fruit\u00adseller\nHerr Schultz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Together their affairs represent the\ntwo biggest obstacles to love — class and race. Cabaret<\/em> asks if love can conquer all. The answer at the end of the\nmusical is sadly definitive to this very day — you need look no further, just\nlook at what happened to the film Gubra<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Toy Factory team scores a real\ngem with their ravishing new production. The sets are as gorgeous as they are\nclever and slick, the cast is wonderfully engaging (so much so I zid not notice\nzat almost all of zee Germans verr actually Singaporeans), and the music is\nbrilliantly executed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From the dancing pineapples in\n“It Couldn’t Please Me More” to the naughty nuns in “Don’t Tell\nMama” to the brilliantly choreographed “Money Song”, Cabaret<\/em> takes a devil-may-care look at a\nserious subject and does it with style. It’s the sort of production that has\npotential to stay in the circuit for a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Director Beatrice Chia-Richmond\nacknowledges the invaluable contribution of a trio of Malaysia’s brightest\ntalents: music-director Saidah Rastam (“she has balls bigger than the\nmoon”), bandleader Michael Veerapen (“a real treasure”) and\nlighting designer Mac Chan (no words, just oohs and aahs). “They really\nreached for the highest apples,” says Chia, echoing a line in the musical\nabout always striving for the best despite the challenges (a concept often\nalien to our people, who have been told to reach for the lowest apples so that\neveryone can have a bite).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Notable are Saidah Rastam’s musical\narrangements, which give the familiar score a slick 21st<\/sup> Century\nfinish, stripping off the dusty Americana of the original and the leery\nOktoberfest of the Fosse film version, for a more Kurt Weill grotesquery spiced\nwith Rastam’s very own contemporary style. Michael Veerapen with the 9-piece\nband fashions a warm, flexible jazz combo sound that perfectly balances present\nday with 1930s Berlin, weaving a sound that is, in my view, superior to the\nsound of Sam Mendez’s 1998 revival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rastam adds her unique fingerprints\nto the music with her perky instrumentation and grungy feel, sneaking in plenty\nof contemporary touches such as the mischievously dissonant “Auld Lange\nSyne” during the New Year’s party and the dark, unnerving sonic landscape\nthat accompanies the Emcee’s final monologue “I Don’t Care Much”\n(Hearts grow hard on a windy street, Lips grow cold with the rent to meet…).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Centrepiece to the music is her\natonal sonic orgy that replaces the original Act 2 curtain raiser. And what a\ncurtain raiser — a shadowplay of the Kit Kat Club’s most dubious activities\nunveils a grimacing, grotesque Kick Line that shatters the Moulin-Rouge romance\nof the first Act for the stark hopelessness of the second Act, as the horror of\nthe 3rd<\/sup> Reich slowly winds its slimy fingers around the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is plenty of humour still — Hitler gets to screw the world in a tutu in the Act 2 opener and some Malaysians will be pleased to see a Jew portrayed as a gorilla in “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes”. Cabaret<\/em> hits hardest in its final moments when all illusion of glamour is consumed by the suffocating calm that precedes the Holocaust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the eye of this coming storm\nBeatrice turns the musical’s biggest tune Cabaret<\/em>\ninto a bitter soliloquy for Sally. With just a spotlight and a darkened set\nEmma Yong delivers her winning performance, a gutsy defiant anthem that is the\nvery antithesis of the song that Liza Minelli had burned into our consciousness\nfor nearly 30 years. It left the audience somewhat stunned. “I wanted to\ndepict the disintegration of the world rather than showstopper, to highlight\nSally’s emotional journey. World War II was coming, how can I have a chorus\nline?” says Chia-Richmond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s a bold gamble but does it pay\noff? Only time will tell, but that Emma got a huge ovation for it may be an\nindication. Without the big finish Cabaret<\/em>\nends in a huge question mark, and the audience is shell-shocked as the lights\nfade on the Kit Kat Klub’s slow mutation into a Nazi haunt, the Emcee, off to\nprison, and Sally drifting off to the great boudoir in the sky. It’s a cruel\ndose of reality that perhaps the audience did not expect, but one that will\nsurely stay in their minds for a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We may not have gotten our big\nfinish and left somewhat hungry, but Toy Factory’s Cabaret<\/em> has given us plenty to chew on, and one might definitely\nreturn for second helpings. Who knows, the Kit Kat Klub may one day open its\ndoors in holding-hands-not-allowed Malaysia, and hopefully, before we too fall\nto fascism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ~~~ <\/p>\n\n\n\n CH Loh is a Malaysian writer based in Singapore. <\/p>\n\n\n\n First Published: 03.08.2006 on Kakiseni <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Twenty years ago in a small basement room in a school in Singapore there was a piano, and on weekends a secret gathering took place around it. Young aspiring divas would convene and live out their dreams of stardom, emulating their favourite Broadway heroines belting out show tunes with attitude and imaginary feather boas and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":5,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7758,7764,7773,7774,7762],"tags":[4166,4168,1138,4169,4167,4165,853,1131,233,4171,494,266,665,4170],"language":[7785],"writer":[7831],"class_list":["post-27574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artikel","category-muzik","category-muzikal","category-ulasan","category-teater","tag-beatrice-chia-richmond","tag-broadway","tag-emma-yong","tag-esplanade-singapore","tag-fei-xiang","tag-kit-kat-klub","tag-mac-chan","tag-michael-veerapen","tag-musical","tag-nus-dance-ensemble","tag-saidah-rastam","tag-singapore","tag-toy-factory","tag-zaini-tahir","language-inggeris","writer-ch-loh-ms"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27574"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38886,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27574\/revisions\/38886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27574"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=27574"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/writer?post=27574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}