Sunday, July 15, 2007

Dim Sum Dollies

I better note this down before I forget the euphoria of having watched this pretty phenomenal production. I have been getting jaded with some of the local productions that I have been watching. Sleeping Beauty was a snooze. Blithe Spirit was ok only. Many of the locally written plays are forums to air political views and criticism. There's only so much I can take of that. Granted, they have interesting points of view, but I'm tired of sitting through a play and getting a didactic and pedantic discussion of our political scene.

What made Dim Sum Dollies always an eye opener is how they throw out some of the prejudices that we already have and subvert it. Or how they actually dare to voice some of our hidden thoughts without blushing or being bashful about it. Because, they would say, we are Singaporean and we should learn to embrace our quirks and even oddities. And we need to learn to laugh about ourselves. Selena Tan's writing is hilarious. Pointed and witty and the characters are very endearing.

This time, it was more "Dim Sum Dollies AND Hossan Leong", not "Dim Sum Dollies, featuring Hossan Leong". I love his opening act, where he pops out as a myriad of great conquerors or pioneers, like Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, or Marco Polo, etc., and all of them dismiss the "island of Temasek" one by one for being too small.

I also like the opening of the second half, where all three Dollies are suspended by cables in midair, as Kamikaze pilots who ejected themselves out of the plane and got caught in a tree.

And then there was the blatant advertisement on behalf of Moove media. And Indian man tugging a fuchsia Moove cow with a rope and talking about how "sometimes we hold hands" really hit the right spot.

Oh there was also the song about "Instinctive Lee" and "Clever Lee".

We were sitting right in front, at the extreme end, but the view was still good. I could see every blemish, every detail of their makeup and the fishnet stockings. I could almost catch the actors' eyes. At the very end, like the last Dim Sum Dollies production, we were all given Singapore flags to wave around. My friend didn't wave his. Hossan Leong actually pointed at him until he picked it up and waved it!

Loved it=)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

haha. I loved the ching ho ching...part!! :P and that song about MonopoLEE.

ady