nationalist surge
to see a sold-out crowd at the esplanade theatre waving singapore flags, clapping and laughing and showing genuine appreciation and love to a made-in-singapore production, and know that the play has been funny and oh-so-clever, yet irreverently light-hearted and at times slapstick yet never too farcical…
…made me, in that moment, proud to be singaporean.
barber of fleet street.
the place: the dark surroundings of london, industrial london i think. for there was thick black smog that was abound, somewhat mismatched with the beautiful architecture that typifies london. where the rich trod on the poor, where the law was freely and unjustly effectuated by one man.
and this was where a story of love was set. love so strong it lit the streets so dark. strong enough to drive three men on paths irreversible.
there was the barber, separated from the love of his life, driven to madness and relentless vengence. his thirst for revenge grew so strong that it, alas, outgrew his love and good sense and in an unfortunate twist, this vengence took his lover even further away when she had once been a breath away.
and there was a journeyman, good-natured and well-intentioned but timid. driven by love to great heights of courage, to stand up in the face of authority and bodily pain and the odds.
and the third man, perpetuator of the law and in the upper echelons of society. who would rape and banish, who would sentence a young child to death without batting an eyelid. and yet this same man breaks out in song and tears, for this love so true in his eyes. this love clouds all good perception, and where the barber was once an enemy to him, the barber became a friend on the simple lie that his love has come back for him. and it is with this love he goes to get shaved like everyone else and dies like everyone else, coming down from a pedestal, however sickening, that he built for himself.
and for all the blood, the emphasis may not really be on the gore and violence seeing how it’s really fake, like as if there was no attempt to make the blood look real. sweeney todd’s a tale of love, i say.
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if you need another reason to watch sweeney todd, the reaction of the audience to sasha cohen is just pure magic. before he could say a word, his ridiculous costume (deja vu?) and comedy facial expression (hmm..) had the crowd roaring in laughter before he even spoke. the laughter got harder as he began, speaking in a funny accented manner (erm..) which sounds less of italian and more of kazakh (ah.) no one else could have done it nearly as brilliant. cohen is such a legend!
the phantom of manhattan..
(by frederick forsyth) ..is really a sequel to phantom of the opera!
in fact in early last year composer-extraordinaire andrew llyod webber had announced that he was working on the musical adaptation of the phantom of manhattan.
(somehow to me “phantom of manhattan” just doesn’t have the same ring to it as the original)
but if the daily mail (newspaper) is to be believed, and i am not commenting on its credibility in case i get sued in case anyone at all reads this, a somewhat strange mishap has put the production of the new musical on hold. seems like lloyd webber’s cat (a very rare turkish breed) had one day climbed onto his really really expensive digital piano and deleted the entire score! attempts to recover it have been in vain.
i remember the first phantom of the opera play i went to. it wasn’t that long ago really. but the romance, grandoise and excitement still remains lurid till this day, especially when the soundtrack’s playing on my ipod. every note resonates, stirs imagination; its corresponding images i gathered from my far-away seat at the esplanade display themselves like a long filmstrip of still photographs, except with more life, more light and more love.
