Saturday, July 29, 2006
My parents left the country early this morning but far from being all happy and celebrating, I actually feel kinda lonely at home.
Split personalities... I'm weird.
Oh, I watched Cabaret just now... excellent, totally excellent. The stage set was really nice, the music, songs and dances were good, the costumes lovely, the actors marvellous... and Fei Xiang... when you see him perform on stage for something like this, you can't really picture him as being Fei Xiang the chinese star, but rather, you start seeing him as Kris Philips the broadway theatre actor (Kris is his realy english name, by the way). And he really shone on stage.
Even better than all that... Beatrice Chia was excellent as director... the directions were so good... she knew what to draw your attention to, how to work some of the really important scenes so it'll impact you with a bang. And no, the really important scenes were not the lovey-dovey ones though they were nice... but it's the socio-political ones that were woah!
Cabaret, as an art form, in case you didn't know, didn't really start as the whole Moulin Rouge garters, fishnet stockings, wine and sex thing. When it first started, it was more a means for artists to comment on contemporary issues. Later on, sometime after the 1st WW and when it had moved into Germany, then the more lewd form emerged (gee, I wonder if there's a link there!).
So this muscial Cabaret, was really a smart way of blending both cabaret as the original art form that it was, and that which people associate a cabaret with, fantasy and sleaze. There's the Kit Kat Club with all its sleaze, and oh yes, in the SG production there was a LOT of sleaze (the Kit Kat girls have names like Lulu, Rosie, Texas, Frenchie and Syphillis, and they dressed as cowboys, french maids, and various underwear and leather gear). Yet, there was also a strong socio-political message underlying it all - bear in mind that the time period for this musicial was that just before Hitler came into power.
You have the real events happening in the lives of the two couples in the muscial, and then you have the cabaret performances at the Kit Kat Club, which basically features songs which comment on the events happening to the couples. Example, the main lead, Cliff, accepts an offer to smuggle goods for the easy money, and immediately after that the Emcee and his girls sing 'Sitting Pretty', a song about different currencies.
And that's when you realise just what cabaret is all about. Yes, it's sleazy and humurous, but aren't the more outrageous stunts the ones that bring the message across better, with greater impact? So you see what happens in real life, and in case you've missed it, the cabaret people come in and do a piece about it that makes you sit up and go, wait a min!
There was one song 'Tomorrow belongs to me' which was quite chilling... and the performance was done in such a way that I thought of Les Miserables and the scene where the cast went 'Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men!' It was THAT powerful. Lol... I also had this image of Mao's communist party when I saw that scene.
Some of the verses of 'Tomorrow belongs to me went like this:
" Oh Fatherland, Fatherland,
Show us the sign
Your children have waited to see.
The morning will come
When the world is mine.
Tomorrow belongs to me!"
And then the cast does the Hail Hitler sign...... then Act 1 ends.
Guess what the opening scene of Act 2 is?
A cabaret performance, with the Emcee comes out with a Hitler moustache, is handed a big inflated ball with the world map printed on it, and a machine gun. He sits on the balloon and guns all the cabaret girls down. The scene ends with the cabaret performancers marching off, the sounds of their boots so loud and hollow... and as the next scene opens to show the Jewish guy, the sound of the boots can still be heard... so chilling.
And as the couples get more desperate, whenever the Emcee comes out to perform, his clothes get more slobby and he starts looking more pained, like he is in despair, forced to put on a smile and appear happy.
Anyway... you wanna find out more... go do a Google search.
Really good performance I tell you... I hope they bring it back again... in the meantime, I'm gonna look for the movie version.
Split personalities... I'm weird.
Oh, I watched Cabaret just now... excellent, totally excellent. The stage set was really nice, the music, songs and dances were good, the costumes lovely, the actors marvellous... and Fei Xiang... when you see him perform on stage for something like this, you can't really picture him as being Fei Xiang the chinese star, but rather, you start seeing him as Kris Philips the broadway theatre actor (Kris is his realy english name, by the way). And he really shone on stage.
Even better than all that... Beatrice Chia was excellent as director... the directions were so good... she knew what to draw your attention to, how to work some of the really important scenes so it'll impact you with a bang. And no, the really important scenes were not the lovey-dovey ones though they were nice... but it's the socio-political ones that were woah!
Cabaret, as an art form, in case you didn't know, didn't really start as the whole Moulin Rouge garters, fishnet stockings, wine and sex thing. When it first started, it was more a means for artists to comment on contemporary issues. Later on, sometime after the 1st WW and when it had moved into Germany, then the more lewd form emerged (gee, I wonder if there's a link there!).
So this muscial Cabaret, was really a smart way of blending both cabaret as the original art form that it was, and that which people associate a cabaret with, fantasy and sleaze. There's the Kit Kat Club with all its sleaze, and oh yes, in the SG production there was a LOT of sleaze (the Kit Kat girls have names like Lulu, Rosie, Texas, Frenchie and Syphillis, and they dressed as cowboys, french maids, and various underwear and leather gear). Yet, there was also a strong socio-political message underlying it all - bear in mind that the time period for this musicial was that just before Hitler came into power.
You have the real events happening in the lives of the two couples in the muscial, and then you have the cabaret performances at the Kit Kat Club, which basically features songs which comment on the events happening to the couples. Example, the main lead, Cliff, accepts an offer to smuggle goods for the easy money, and immediately after that the Emcee and his girls sing 'Sitting Pretty', a song about different currencies.
And that's when you realise just what cabaret is all about. Yes, it's sleazy and humurous, but aren't the more outrageous stunts the ones that bring the message across better, with greater impact? So you see what happens in real life, and in case you've missed it, the cabaret people come in and do a piece about it that makes you sit up and go, wait a min!
There was one song 'Tomorrow belongs to me' which was quite chilling... and the performance was done in such a way that I thought of Les Miserables and the scene where the cast went 'Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men!' It was THAT powerful. Lol... I also had this image of Mao's communist party when I saw that scene.
Some of the verses of 'Tomorrow belongs to me went like this:
" Oh Fatherland, Fatherland,
Show us the sign
Your children have waited to see.
The morning will come
When the world is mine.
Tomorrow belongs to me!"
And then the cast does the Hail Hitler sign...... then Act 1 ends.
Guess what the opening scene of Act 2 is?
A cabaret performance, with the Emcee comes out with a Hitler moustache, is handed a big inflated ball with the world map printed on it, and a machine gun. He sits on the balloon and guns all the cabaret girls down. The scene ends with the cabaret performancers marching off, the sounds of their boots so loud and hollow... and as the next scene opens to show the Jewish guy, the sound of the boots can still be heard... so chilling.
And as the couples get more desperate, whenever the Emcee comes out to perform, his clothes get more slobby and he starts looking more pained, like he is in despair, forced to put on a smile and appear happy.
Anyway... you wanna find out more... go do a Google search.
Really good performance I tell you... I hope they bring it back again... in the meantime, I'm gonna look for the movie version.
