Saturday, December 10, 2005
twoandahalfmoredays

in a few days' time, i'll be in perth!! YAY!!! do you have any idea how eleven months can seem like twenty years and yet twenty minutes, all at the same time? i can't wait to see chris and hug her again and have pillow fights and spend all day eating and talking nonstop. it's killing me to wait 2 1/2 days. then again i've waited so many months. and i have to finish my homework before i go. down to one book review and four drqs. when i think about meeting her, it somehow makes it easier to drag my mind away from endless daydreaming and reading. it helps that i have three very nice new instrumental cds - the hi-fi sound of orchestra and natural, the best of sens.

last night van and i watched oi! sleeping beauty!! the wake up musical. i wasn't too impressed at first. maybe because i am no longer five years old. i mean it was funny, in a toilet-humour kinda way. as van said, those were the kind of jokes we'd crack. nothing too intellectually stimulating, but maybe that was the point. a little too loud and brash, and self-conscious. one thing i've noticed about singaporean productions - they tend to make everything too self-consciously racially harmonic. i mean, one witch to represent each race? and the evil white witch turning out to be a lonely expat? this all too common tactic only drives home the point that we haven't reached the stage yet where we are actually as racially harmonic as we say we are. if skin colour truly didn't matter, we wouldn't have to put in so much effort to ensure that the four are always represented in this manner. and as van mentioned, you would only notice that someone was telling a racist joke if your ears were tuned to pick out the race of the person in the joke. i also found the little references to politics rather annoying. will there ever, for once, be a show or play or movie that doesn't have to keep refering to the singapore-malaysia politics (think: water issue), singaporeans' apparent inability to dream (after being constantly advertised by everyone from the ministers down, i think we've got the point already) and that doesn't have to resort to singlish to make people laugh. i doubt it speaks very well of us as a community if our artistes think that the only things that make us laugh are rude-sounding comments yelled in dialects, or broken (and barely understandable) english. fortunately, most of us can and do appreciate wit. but apart from that the show was fine. very elaborate costumes and stage props; the three fairies in drag looked positively pretty from where i was sitting, and the batik really was beautiful. there were only three parts in the entire musical that struck me. the first was when the queen realised she wouldn't live to see her daughter wake, and began singing a terribly touching song to her. okay i'm a sucker for that sort of music, but there was something about that scene. they say you should never have to bury your children, and i guess that's what she was doing, in a way. the second was when the prince had found the princess and was reading the letter left next to her. as he read it out loud, i could hear the queen dictating the letter to the royal scribe in the background, like echoes from the past. they stood to the side, like an afterthought beginning to fade, with the earlier song playing softly. somehow those two very short parts struck me as the most sincere, the most real. the rest just seemed like a huge laugh. the third part wasn't even part of the musical. as the cast danced to the last song after bowing, a little girl dropped her christmas cap, but couldn't pick it up, so she went on dancing. the cat saw this, and rushed to the front of the stage, picking it up as he went, and put it on his head, posing for the audience like it was part of the act. after that he put it back on her head as he went past. the expression on the little girl's face caught my eye; she seemed so surprised and grateful and glad all at once, and i found i was willing to write off his painfully exaggerated acting, simply because of that small act of kindness. okay that was very long. oops. i wonder if anyone survived reading to the end.

don't want something just because you can't get it; want it because you can't live without it, because you need it, because you love it.
7:05 PM ; 0 comments