(有2张剧照, 都有Kit, 可放大) http://www.todayonline.com/Arts/EDC100810-0000025/Love,-its-a-riot 05:55 AM Aug 10, 2010 Theatre Review: December Rains DECEMBER Rains is the type of homegrown musical that has "Classic" written all over it. A love story centred on a tragic heroine, gift-wrapped in beautiful melodies and grounded (at least for the first act) in a particularly explosive historical moment of the country's tumultuous pre-independence era in the 1950s. Dare we say it has an affinity with productions like Miss Saigon and Les Miserables? Restaged by Toy Factory, playwright/lyricist/composer Liang Wern Fook's 1996 Mandarin production (touted as Singapore's first Mandarin musical) tells of rich female student Li Qing (Kit Chan) and young Maoist Ying Xiong (George Chan), who yearns to help the revolution in China. They are brought together and torn apart by circumstances that haunt them and everyone around them three decades on, with some poignant (if not tragic) consequences. In a year of restagings, December Rains, like the rest, faces the question of whether it has adapted to the times. Considering that it revolves around events in the '50s and '80s, staged in the mid-'90s and re-staged in 2010, that's probably a hard question to answer. Then again, maybe not, when one hears laughter during supposedly crucial moments on which the musical's emotional pivot is hinged on. It is, perhaps, telling of audiences today that a touching scene between a Singaporean and a Chinese national who wants to become a Permanent Resident would result in guffaws. As if the China that loomed menacingly, bitterly and promisingly in the minds of people back then (and most likely in Liang's when he wrote the piece) has now been effectively reduced to simply where PRCs come from. Within the parameters of its own big-little world, however, director Goh Boon Teck does succeed in constructing a visually elegant tale. The stage's slanted platform, the inventive use of nylon ropes to convey rain, which double as curtains, highlighted the seemingly unreal situation the protagonists were caught up in. Everything was at an angle and everyone on precarious ground. As expected, Kit Chan's singing - predictably the musical's biggest draw - was heads above the rest of the cast. Perhaps too much, though, as her powerful, beautiful voice made practically everyone else sound, well, just okay. But in the end, we were partial to Jeffrey Low's Ming Li. His emphatic performance as the sickly, long-suffering friend who quietly carries the torch for his friend Li was what made us fall for this arguably predictable and rather contrived story. Despite a few quibbles (notably its rather inappropriate casting of boyish actors as adult businessmen in the first act) Toy Factory deserves applause for reviving December Rains. In this day and age of short-term memories, we can do far worse than allowing history to repeat itself before us. At least for two-and-a-half hours. December Rains runs until Aug 15, 8pm, Esplanade Theatre. With 3pm weekend matinees. Tickets at $69 to $129 from Sistic. Mandarin with English subtitles. --

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