Re:Kindle Love
Ko-Nen Creative Arts House and The Arts House
The Hall @ The Arts House
It is hard to put one’s finger on exactly what emotion this Mandarin musical fanned the flames of most, but it definitely was not love.
Was it the incredulity one felt when 20something protagonist Feng Qi (Trey Ho) and single mother Ai Ling (Renee Chua) bump into each other and, in the next breath, are crooning a love duet even though she has barely registered his presence?
Or perhaps it was the bewilderment one experienced when Feng Qi buys a bracelet with the words Zai Jian Ai for the one he loves? The show translates the phrase awkwardly as Rekindle Love but the first translation that popped into mind was actually Goodbye Love.
When not engineering convenient run-ins between characters, film-maker Gloria Chee’s script merrily marries old-school melodrama with eyebrow-raising inanities. We get an orphan with a terminal disease, three women entangled with one man and a confrontation at the cemetery that had even the unusually forgiving 60-plus members of the audience tittering.
Add to the mix the heavy-handed direction by Jalyn Han and it is little wonder that the fresh-faced cast, including Ho, Regina Tey as Feng Qi’s good friend Mei Qin and Lee Qian Yu as Ai Ling’s rebellious daughter Ai Ai, never stood much of a chance despite some promising singing.
Given that singer-songwriter Jiu Jian was part of the 1980s xinyao movement and has also penned compositions for the likes of Jacky Cheung, his musical numbers in the show should have been engaging.
Unfortunately, they were not always cogent to the admittedly challenging plot.
The best number was The Seventh Day In The Desert, which was previously recorded by Taiwanese singer Cyndi Chao. But alas, given that most of its lyrics were too location specific to be shoehorned even into this show, we had to be content with just the chorus as Ai Ling mourned her late husband.
This musical purports to be an earnest exploration of love but it falls far short of its lofty intentions.
In the end, it was the English surtitles, with their cavalier attitude towards punctuation, grammar and meaning, which proved to be more entertaining.
(ST)