FORBIDDEN CC
- our open house at Siglap South CC, celebrating our residency there with a series of new items and hits from past shows.
- including Shakespeare in the Garden, poems from On The Verge, some Sondheim songs, 3 Chestnuts hits (Moulmein High, Ivan and of course, War Diary)
- featuring STAGES vets like Annie Lim, Alan Johnson and Melissa Kwek and new faces like Daphne Quah, Tan Shou Chen and Du’c Hoang in their STAGES debut

Chestnuts Unloaded - Curse of the Black Pearl Bubble Tea
- 17-23 December at the DBS Arts Centre, Home of SRT, Robertson Quay
- this year, Chestnuts moves away from Christmas (despite being a lot closer to the 25th than ever before) and becomes a full-on sketch and spoof show
- targets zeroed in on this year include Lord of the Rings, the Matrix trilogy, Finding Nemo, the Esplanade, Eight Mile, Bent and Mardi Gras, Forbidden City, Chicago the Movie, Oliver! and Heartlanders...

^ back upstairs ^

SHAKESPEARE @ THE COURTYARD
- more fun with Shakespeare scenes, selected from Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet and Macbeth
- presented at the National Library courtyard in conjunction with NLB’s Expressions @the Courtyard series
- this cast featured Kevin Murphy as Romeo, Candice de Rozario as Nurse, Jonathan and Gui Wei Hsin as R&G with Edward Choy as Hamlet.

HARK THE JINGLE RED-NOSED CHESTNUTS – the REAL millennium edition
- The classic madcap Xmas revue returns – bigger, better, longer, uncut
- presented by i theatre in TWO versions at TWO venues - Drama Centre and then DBS Arts Centre ! Also a one-night charity performance at Tan Tock Seng Hospital.
- targets included China Dolls, Moulin Rouge, Moulmein High, the General Elections and Talentime together, reality tv, Paradise, House of Gan, and many others.
- the central theme this year was para-para dancing, which popped up in such items as Para-Para Sakura, Para-Para Taichi, and Para-oke where every KTV song turned into a para dance hit...

Ooh! ~ the absolute highlight of the year was War Diary, our tribute to Mediacorp war dramas thru the years, from The Awakening to the recent War Diary…

Ooh! ~ Chestnuts became a bit cruder this year, with sequences of masturbation on stage in.. of all places, our Moulmein High spoof.

Ooh! ~ we were banned! For one night. After some itchy itinerant parent complained about their kids exposed to vulgarities in the show. Our response ? We did say Adult Content.

^ back upstairs ^

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD by Tom Stoppard
- reviving Tom Stoppard’s classic absurd romp in a whole-new locale by the sea
from Cable Car Tower to World Trade Centre to the Singapore Maritime Showcase
- Brendon Marc Fernandez joined us as The Player, Melissa Kwek as Ophelia, Andy Tan as Hamlet, Alan Johnson as Claudius, Tan Shin Yi as Gertrude, Emeric Lau as Polonius and Jonathan Lim and Gui Wei Hsin as the lead characters.
- performed at the World Trade Centre and its surroundings

Ooh! ~ this featured one of our most challenging venues – on a breakwater almost underneath the Coast Guard pier near the Cablecar Tower. R & G are discovered by the audience flipping coins right by the water, having apparently just been rowed ashore from the English ship in a dinghy (that could be seen bobbing under the pier).

Ooh! ~ the WTC management also gave us free play of the S,pore Maritime Showcase, which had been closed to the public. So Elsinore now had secret tunnels, an observation dome with glass cage, view of the sea and a HUGE scale-model of the entire Danish port facilities… and R & G get to tower like giants over them, yet still feel dwarfed by the sheer quantity of toy containers and ships and forklifts.

CYBERCUM : Looking For Love In All The Wrong Spaces
- a devised R-rated poetry-performance exploring online chatrooms and the encounters they engender. The 6 chatroom scenarios included a Peanuts room, a gay husband posing as a gaybasher loose in a gay chatroom abusing his own wife pretending to be a gay man, and a roomful of religious fanatics.
- featuring STAGES’ Jonathan Lim with aussie performance poets Mar Bucknall, Ashley J. Higgs and Meg Canto. Our PM was Chew Keng Kiat.
– part of the Sonikdosage festival of poetry performance and part of the WA Fringe Festival 2000 at EAST Amphitheatre, Perth

Ooh! ~ some of the poems used here (such as The Ocean Is A Lesbian) also appeared in Toy Factory’s White Sails Over Blue Blue Sea.

THE RE-TURN OF THE SCREW
- a hollowing-out of Henry James’ gothic thriller, exploring fear as a psychological force and the thinning of the veil separating us from the dead. This was not so much a show as a series of theatre experiments presented to the audience, in which we explored the relationship between Man and the Presences around us. Ghosts appeared among the audience, telling their death stories. The audience are ushered into a funeral wake where the dead man lingers among his family. In toilets and stairwells, the actors suddenly treat the audience as unseen bodies, and go through paroxysms of fear.
- presented as part of the first [names changed to protect the innocent] : Circus Of Fear, an initiative of The Necessary Stage
- featuring a LOT of joss paper
- devised and performed by an ensemble cast including Adelina Ong, Brendon Marc Fernandez, Tan Lueneng, Jonathan Lim, Kua Wui Sing, Melissa Tan, Nur Ashikin and Emeric Lau
- in and around the Marine Parade Community Centre

Ooh! ~ this featured the famous longkang sequence, where the audience crossed the traffic junction to the storm drain diagonally opposite TNS, while the cast went underground through the sewer, did a quick-change by candlelight in the drain tunnel, then emerged from the drain opening as waterghosts.

Ooh! ~as part of the process of being hantu, we developed a terrific tag-game that we played in the void decks near TNS, where we took turns being ghost ‘haunters’ that trailed after humans, first casually, then pursuing as they ran, until the ‘haunted’ reached a state of absolute terror and frenzied panic, utterly oblivious to the fact that the ‘haunters’ were their friends. Quite a high…

HARK THE JINGLE RED-NOSED CHESTNUTS – the millennium edition
- Sean & Jonathan return to take millennial Singapore by storm with some old favourites and some hot new material. Music once again by Bang Wenfu.
- presented by Caldwell Arts and performed at CHIJMES Hall
- targets included PCK, Zoe Tay and Darren Lim in the President’s Star Charity, Sleepy Hollow, Popstars and many others.

Ooh! ~ this was the show that gave birth to the Chestnuts multiple spoof device. In this case, in the form of an extended Chang & Eng spoof, using tunes from Chicago, King & I, Cabaret and You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown.

Ooh! ~ the weird success previous Chestnuts’ spoof of Theatreworks’ fountain-fest Destinies of Flowers In The Mirror led to a new spoof vehicle this year – Theatrewirks Goes To The Movies, where we spoof the year’s big films in a stylized montage reminiscent of Ong Keng Sen’s most striking works. We spoofed Blair Witch Project, X-Men, American Beauty, The Perfect Storm, The Matrix and others, but the highlight was the wayang kulit version of Titanic.

^ back upstairs ^

CHINKS IN THE ARMOR (PERTH TOUR)
- an original 3-man comedy exploring the dilemma of being Chinese in a rapidly Westernising world, and mocks stereotypes of both East & West; engaging themes of cultural displacement and homelands in a series of sharp and poignant vignettes at The Rechabites Hall in Perth
- featuring the hilarious Reduced and Completely Biased History of China, the rather serious parody Madame Mao Meets M Butterfly, and the intensely disturbing Tiananmen piece I Love Liu Si.
- starring Tiffany Wee, Jonathan Lim and Gui Wei Hsin
- devised by the cast and co-written by Gui Wei Hsin and Jonathan Lim
- with the support of the Western Australian Chinese Chamber of Commerce and the Chung Wah Association

Ooh! ~ the publicity photoshoot was done on the premises of the Singapore Chamber of Commerce, and featured the trio dressed first as glorious Red Army propaganda posterkids, then as student protesters storming and annexing the building. Scandalous if leaked to the press… but you get to see them soon, only on www.nowstagethis.com !!

SHAKESPEARE IN THE CARPARK
- a site-specific presentation of scenes from Macbeth, Merchant Of Venice, Romeo & Juliet and The Taming Of The Shrew, the launch of STAGES’ ongoing commitment to bringing Shakespeare to life for literature students
- cast included Brendon Marc Fernandez as Romeo and Antonio, Chio Su Ping as Lady Macbeth, and Jonathan Lim as Friar Laurence and Macbeth.
- presented specially for school audiences and performed in and around the Substation Garden, National Library and the carpark in between.

Ooh! ~ this featured the powerful juxtaposition of Romeo doing his suicide speech at one end of the underpass and Juliet doing her vial speech at the other end. Audiences on either end could hear the other lover’s voice coming through the tunnel, and the scene ended with both lovers united in oblivion but tragically apart.

Ooh! ~ this also featured a finale in which we commented on how local schools make students study literature – by mugging. The cast were praying to the texts, burning notes and swallowing the ash, eating crumpled pages of text, etc. Meanwhile, Brendon was the spirit of the iambic pentameter, galloping around chanting ‘a horse a horse my king dom for a horse”. Then we liberated ourselves from the studying and each wrote a few words on pieces of paper that we joined on the grass to form the Puck epilogue ‘If we shadows...’, an installation epilogue rather than a spoken one. The students really enjoyed that.

ARTS CARES
- an 8 hour interactive site-specific installation performance piece
- at Tan Tock Seng Hospital as part of Care Month 1999
- an unused shop unit on the ground floor was converted into a ‘ward’ using old beds, tables, signs and equipment from the old TTSH buildings. After much research, the performers each played patients with various conditions ranging from breast cancer and HIV to spinal paralysis. The audience was free to wander from bed to bed, watching them write in their diaries, try to relate to each other, and perform short devised vignettes revealing their experiences. Other performers engaged the audience in activities such as cutting paper butterflies and writing messages on them for a butterfly mobile dedicated to Lupus patients. There was also a photograph exhibition by Han Guan.

Ooh! ~ this production was a wonderful reunion, bringing together a whole gang of past and present STAGES gangmembers, some performing throughout the 8 hours, others coming by to take turns manning the various interactive stations. Plus the 8-hour cast actually stayed over in the ‘ward’ the night before, bathing with the other patients, sleeping in the beds in hospital wear and having hospital breakfast and lunch. All part of the magic…

LAUNCH OF THE WESTERN AUSTRALIAN FRINGE FESTIVAL, PERTH (SEPTEMBER 1999)
- STAGES was invited to be part of the inaugural Western Australian Fringe Festival launch. Director Jonathan Lim was flown up to speak and perform at the launch ceremony at the QVB building in Perth.

ON THE VERGE (with Touch Arts)
- an exciting site-specific multi-art festival at the heritage venue Far East Square, featuring dance and theatre groups in a variety of locations around the square
- STAGES served as coordinator and journey ambassadors. Our focus was the memory of the river that once ran by and the hypocrisy of today’s heritage policies.
- We guided the audience through the event with character guides, and presented along the way several pieces featuring performed poetry and a lot of water.

Ooh! ~ While this was going on, others of the STAGES team were at Kallang Theatre, working on PAP At 45, a docudrama of the party’s history performed by the NUS TS students, written by Haresh Sharma, directed by Jonathan Lim. So between that and On The Verge, ALL the STAGES gang were on the go at the same time!

^ back upstairs ^

KIDZ BLITZ TOWN
- a five-show promotional launch of TV 12's Kidz Blitz programming, featuring the Teletubbies and Sesame Street.
- at the Great World City atrium
- featuring Bavani S. as Nursie and Jonathan Lim as a rather sleazy Dr Spexx.

Ooh! ~ Bavani and Jonathan had to learn and teach the Tubbercise. Which is better than any drug.

OCTOBER AND OTHER DISQUIETS
- a quadruple-bill of dark disturbing plays of terror and inhumanity: E.W White’s “The Monkey’s Paw”, Muriel Spark’s “The Party Thru The Wall”, Roald Dahl’s “Lamb To The Slaughter”, and Ray Bradbury’s “The October Game”
- directed by Jonathan Lim
- featuring an ensemble cast running through all four plays, including Sharon Ismail, Gui Wei Hsin and Jonathan Lim.
- at the Drama Centre

Ooh! ~ this featured STAGES’ most impressive special effect so far – in The October Game, the lights come up on a gory tableau – the daughter in an angel costume with her torso slit open and her entrails out. Her eyes and tongue and heart were also on the floor. This sight lasted about 5 seconds and till today still haunts some audiences…

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDERNSTERN ARE DEAD by Tom Stoppard
- the award-winning inversion of Hamlet by Tom Stoppard, given a site-specific treatment using the entire building of The Substation (once a power station), the surrounding alleys, car parks, underpasses; and the Asian Civilisation Museum next door.
- meeting at the underpass near ROM, the audience follows our troubled duo on their journey to Elsinore, and wanders the halls of the castles in search of the Dane, ending up on the Substation roof for the final tragic shipboard scene
- starring Keagan Kang, freshly flown in from Perth. Also featuring Gui Wei Hsin as Guildenstern and Jonathan Lim as Rosencrantz.
- in collaboration with The Substation

Ooh! ~ Sean knew Keagan while he was studying in Perth, and introduced him to Jonathan when he was there with NUS TS on a kabuki tour. Jon invited Keagan to come over and play The Player, and the rest is history.

HARK THE JINGLE RED-NOSED CHESTNUTS (PERTH TOUR)
- the script was submitted and the show chosen and invited to the prestigious The Blue Room in Perth
- starring Sean Yeo & Jonathan Lim

Ooh! ~ One night, the cast of the Celtic Women’s Circle’s Cloud Nine came to the show (on Sean and Jon’s invitation), and the duo spoofed their show by scattering familiar Cloud Nine lines throughout the sketches, such as “The park is so big the grass seems to tilt.”

^ back upstairs ^

HARK THE JINGLE RED-NOSED CHESTNUTS II
- second installment of the irreverent Xmas comedy, this time featuring our first musical parody, a Yuletide adult version of Les Mis – Les Mistletoe, in which Eponine has a crush on Santa Claus and Valjean and Javert develop an S&M relationship in prison
- at the Jubilee Hall, Raffles Hotel

Ooh! ~ Previews of this show were held at Olio Dome II and Borders.

SMOKE’S NO JOKE – the video & TV ads
- the funniest, funkiest anti-smoking show ever is now made into two videos for cable TV and school distribution
- shot by Petal Productions and cinematographed by David Yeung, known for his work on Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan’s films, as well as Hollywood films like The American President.
- starring Sean Yeo and Jonathan Lim, the chestnut duo in a lot of weird costumes and weirder locations, including the incoming tide, the MOH rooftop, in 8 inches of water in the drainage canal along Ulu Pandan Rd, and a deserted railway siding.
- a series of 8 TV commercials were shot as companions to the videos, and screened for years afterwards on prime-time TV, as well as in cinemas and video walls in major malls and public squares.

^ back upstairs ^

RED PACKETS: A DOUBLEBILL
- combining Red Packets and The Murayama in an all-new production
- of the original cast, Nelson, Jonathan and Lee Hsiang reprised their roles. Among the new cast was Sim Pern Yiau. - at the Guinness Theatre, The Substation

Ooh! ~ at the very same time that Jonathan was directing Nelson and Pern Yiau in Red Packets, Pern Yiau was directing Nelson and Jonathan as a pair of dysfunctional roomies in Killing Radio, a play of his presented by NUS Campus Concerts. Fun fun fun.

INVADE MY PRIVACY
- a musical comedy revue featuring the songs of revue-meisters Maltby & Shire and the poetry of Frans Landesman, Stevie Smith and Shel Silverstein
- accompanied by Bang Wenfu, our musical director
- in collaboration with the NUS Literary Society at the NUS Theatrette

Ooh! ~ this revue featured then-undergrads EJ, Loretta Tan and Serene Sng

FUNNY BRIEFS
- a collection of absurd comic sketches originally performed by classic British comedians like Fry & Laurie
- presented by NUS Campus Concerts and performed at the NUS Theatrette, Shell Theatrette and DBS Auditorium

SMOKE'S NO JOKE by Jonathan Lim
- a 2 man stand-up comedy on the dangers of smoking, featuring FAME Awards Comedian winner Sean Yeo & Jonathan Lim
- commissioned for the launch of the 1996/7 National Smoking Cessation Campaign for the Ministry of Health

Ooh! ~ This was the very first hint that Sean and Jon could be rather funny onstage together.
Ooh! ~ This was later developed into an hour-long piece that toured 60 secondary schools, VIs and ITEs in 1997, and returned to the school circuit in 1999.

HARK THE JINGLE RED-NOSED CHESTNUTS
- newborn comedy duo Sean & Jonathan in a madcap collection of Xmas sketches & songs, including an original spoof of Dickens (Not) The Christmas Carol, featuring Sean as Scrooge and Jon as all the ghosts, male and female...
- at the Jubilee Hall, Raffles Hotel.

^ back upstairs ^

RED PACKETS by Jonathan Lim
- a bilingual / dialect play of ten vignettes musing on the true meaning of Chinese New Year in modern society and our grasp of the Chinese heritage, written by Jonathan Lim
- performed in English, Mandarin and Chinese dialects Hokkien and Cantonese
- featuring an ensemble of 6 playing over 30 roles, directed by Jonathan Lim
- for the Shell Lunchtime Cultural Programme at the Shell Theatrette

Ooh! ~ The play was revived at the Substation the following year, and later restaged with original cast for the Bank of China’s Chinese New Year banquet in 1997.

THE MURAYAMA by Jonathan Lim
- a one act play about the ancient tradition of sending dying parents up the mountain to die away from society
- written and performed in quasi-kabuki style, directed by Jonathan Lim
- for the Shell Lunchtime Programme at the Shell Theatrette.

^ back upstairs ^

PASSIONPLAY by Jonathan Lim
- a short original 2 man play about a young couple trying to discover true passion
- featuring Sean Yeo and TCS’s Eileen Wee in the lead roles
- performed for the NTU Hall 4 Dinner & Dance at the Goodwood Park Hotel

Ooh! ~ In 1997, the play was selected for recording on the NAC radio station FM 99.5.

SOONER OR LATER - THE MAGIC OF STEPHEN SONDHEIM
- a revue of songs and scenes re-interpreted from the musicals of Stephen Sondheim
- special guest-of-honour Ned Sherrin, famous British director, writer and broadcaster
- In collaboration with The Stephen Sondheim Society of Singapore
- the ensemble cast included Sean Yeo, Jonathan Lim, Zann, Serene Chen, Justin Cheong, Denise Chak and Annie Lim. Arrangement and accompaniment by Foong Tak Hoy.
- at the Jubilee Hall

Ooh! ~ STAGES appeared on BBC London’s Loose Ends hosted by Ned Sherrin, in a special anniversary episode broadcast live from Singapore. In the segment, Jonathan Lim and Annie Lee performed highlights from Sooner or Later, including the rarely-heard song Two Fairy Tales.

^ back upstairs ^