If There're Seasons...
The Theatre Practice
Drama Centre
Last Saturday


One of the early xinyao tracks written by Liang Wern Fook asked the question: “Where Are Our Songs?” Happily, one need not ask that of the composer whose name is synonymous with the Singapore folk music movement which took root in schools here in the 1980s.
Hong Kong playwright Raymond To has stitched together a musical tale based on Liang’s songs and the result, If There’re Seasons, was a 19-show sell-out hit when first staged by The Theatre Practice in 2007.
The restaging of the three-hour musical follows a young Singaporean A-Le (George Chan) as he leaves for America after the death of his girlfriend Xiao Jing (Sing Chew Sin Huey).
There, he meets his fellow countrymen chasing after dreams of their own. There is A-Qiang (Jeffrey Low), also a budding musician, and Rose (Joanna Dong), an aspiring actress whom A-Le is attracted to.
A recent point of reference would be Mamma Mia!, which is built around existing pop hits by Abba. The challenge is to weave together a coherent work from songs which were not specifically written to be parts of a whole. Not surprisingly, the plot can sometimes feel like a mere ploy to shoehorn as many songs as possible into the proceedings.
While Mamma Mia! has laboured multiple storylines, it does preserve the giddy joy of the Swedish group’s infectious music.
Raymond To had a more difficult task with Liang’s works, which have diverse themes, including those of school life, friendship, love, growing up and Singaporean identity. To his credit, he did not take the obvious route – portray school friends who embark on different paths after graduation.
But the end result did not always work and was head-scratchingly baffling at points.
The love triangle with A-Le, Xiao Jing and Rose was never very convincing. It was hard to understand why A-Le was so conflicted over his affections for Rose and it was hard to accept that the sassy modern miss Rose would fall for the indecisive and reserved A-Le.
Setting the action in New York for the large part was also a strange choice which made the songs about identity seem more removed, despite the notion of homesickness being added to the mix.
It certainly did not help that the production’s risible idea of SoHo was Rent’s lower east side by way of Miss Saigon, a lawless neighbourhood thronging with street musicians and Asians.
With the exception of this glaring mis-step, some thought and money had clearly gone into the effective, handsome set.
More importantly, given that this was a musical, the saving grace was that the key leads were competent singers.
Dancer-actor Chan had a bright, pleasant tenor that was a good fit for the xinyao vibe, though too often in solos, he would lapse into the same stance – body facing the audience, head tilted upwards.
Singer-actress Dong handled the part of Rose well, and even turned her into the most sympathetic character as she juggled love and career.
Project Superstar alumnus Sing Chew seemed to be nursing a sore throat and had some trouble with the high notes. Unfortunately for her, she was also stuck with the ghost plot device which quickly became cloying.
Low as A-Qiang could belt it out and he would sometimes slip into exaggeration, but it worked when his intensity matched the lyrics on the track In The End.
A-Qiang’s strained relationship with his boyfriend, which earned the show an advisory for mature content, gave a gender twist to xinyao classics such as As The Night Falls Gently.
For fans familiar with Liang’s works, such moments of genuine surprise were, alas, few and far in between.
An early ensemble number, One Step At A Time, was nicely executed and included a well-choreographed sequence with pizza boxes.
When A-Le sings A Break From Love to a drunk and tormented A-Qiang, it was the perfect choice of song with its lyrics of drowning one’s sorrows in drink.
While the idea of putting together a musical using Liang’s songs is an excellent one, you cannot help but feel that his thoughtful, poetic and incisive works deserve a better vehicle.
(ST)