2nd Link-ed

And so it was my last duty at the Drama Centre where Wild Rice is staging their inaugural Singapore Theatre Festival '06. Thanks to Ellen and all, I managed to sit in for Salsa Salsa Salsa last evening, and 2nd Link tonight. That marked the end of my quest to watch all 6 of the plays staged by W!ld Rice at the National Library's Drama Centre. Now even though I hadn't been paid for rendering my Front-of-House services (as opposed to JY who worked her ass off 3 weeks as a Wadrobe Assistant and earned more than a thousand buckaroos), I definitely enjoyed myself meeting new people and watching shows for free! Other than one pretty and attractive, but highly "tao" (dialect for proud or haughty) girl I met, everyone else was cool. Not that she wasn't cool, she was just too stuck up for my liking, plain and simple.

Anyhow, before I go on to talk about the audience and patrons as they typically are, I'll briefly mention about 2nd Link, where I had the privilege of sitting in Circle 2 all by myself. How cool is that! About the play,

"2nd Link is a provocative, insightful and humorous performance celebrating the work of Singaporean and Malaysian writers, tackling topics as diverse as Raffles, Sang Kancil, censorship, Singlish, race, nationality, sexuality and chicken rice. Featuring a stunningly accomplished company of 10 actors from the 2 countries, 2nd Link will surprise, delight, and reveal the obsessions and concerns of the cities' denizens and artists...Expect laughter and fresh points of view as the Singaporeans and Malaysians perform each others' stories, icons and idiosyncracies, even as they playfully invite you to make up you own tale of two cities..."

In my opinion and no way spoiling any part of the show in case you intend to watch, I found 2nd Link to showcase the best of talents from the 2 countries, though I am biased and found our Singaporean cast of Lim Yu-Beng, Johnathan Lim, Neo Swee Lin, Karen Tan and Gani Abdul Karim highly amusing and nimble, and more entertaining that the other. Whilst I found the 1st half a tad boring, I did enjoy the scene where one actor undertook the role of teaching Singlish 101 to the audience. If I recall correctly, one of the lines went like,

"Singlish is just English, spoken with Chinese grammar and vocabulary."

And citing an example of how one needs to carefully drop the grammar at the right time and place in order to speak Singlish, a normal English sentence of,

"I am going to the XXX Restaurant to eat seafood"

transposed to Singlish would simply sound like

"I going to XXX Restaurant eat seafood."

Now doesn't that make Singlish lazy?

There's just 4 more shows over this coming weekend, of which Sat night's performance is sold out. I'm not even promoting Salsa Salsa Salsa since the Black Box's capacity of 120 people was max-ed out even before the play premiered on Wed, ie, all shows are sold out. If you've got time to spare, do take your date down to the Drama Centre, and enjoy 50 texts compressed in 2 hours by 10 actors. 2nd Link gets 2 thumbs up!