In Forbidden
Kitty (one of the segments in Forbbiden Chestnuts), Jonathan
Lim, replete in a garish Cheongsam and two Singapore flags stuck into
his hair, crows mockingly, “We’ll sell out every night because
Kit Chan gives you a thrill”. One could point out that Forbidden
Chestnuts sells out every night because Jonathan Lim does give
you a thrill; and that Chestnuts, like Forbidden City,
also exploits a winning commercial formula that draws huge crowds every
year and establishes a large following. But why bother? Lim would probably
have simply wiggled his behind and blown a kiss typical Chestnuts
style to such a riposte.
It is an indecent accomplishment that Chestnuts rips through
many of last year’s theatre productions with unabashed glee, yet
never falls into the ultimate trap of being the unwitting subject of
its own parody. After all, in a production that spoofs other productions,
irony abounds. But Chestnuts does not avoid this irony - it
ensures that the joke is on them as much as it is on everyone else.
Everything about Chestnuts reeks of a good kind of shamelessness
– in spoofing anything and everything, they are not afraid of
taking potshots at themselves. It is this winning Chestnuts
philosophy that is central to Portrait of A Brokeback Geisha,
the latest Chestnuts edition that tears through the most tantalizing
highlights of last year – both within and without theatre –
with comic vengeance.
It is this no-holds-barred brand of Chestnuts humour that
dramatically lifts this production’s comic quotient. In Portrait’s
parody of Notre Dame, a campy Judy Ngo skips around the stage
fawning over Quasimodo’s hump (who Rodney Oliveiro plays to dim-witted
perfection) to the hip-hop beat of - you guessed it - The Black Eyed
Peas’ My Humps. Ordinarily, this would have invited cringes
aplenty, maybe even derision. However, you cannot help but laugh along
because, as a fellow theatregoer puts it, “It is so bad it actually
works”.
Unfortunately, this edition of Chestnuts wildly oscillates
between two kinds of bad: one that has you clutching at your sides,
and the other that has you going “uh-oh”. In parts, Portrait
is so crass without being funny that it deserves to be the subject of
its own quick-fire ridicule. The Brokeback Mountain parody
- billed as one of Portrait’s major spoofs, no less –
is essentially a string of excruciating fillers featuring Lim and Oliveiro’s
shadows copulating wildly in the wilderness while making juvenile wisecracks
about sex. Later on, Oliveiro is also involved in the criminally unfunny
parody of True Files: impersonating the show’s staid
Lim Kay Tong, he makes an utterly pointless comparison between the modern
“ring folder” and “brown paper files”. Huh.
However, Portrait does mine enough gut-busting thrills to
make you forgive its awful lapses. At its best, Portrait brandishes
a sparkling comic inventiveness. In Portrait’s parody of Thunderstorm,
a play closely linked to cult movie hit Curse of The Golden Flower,
Judy Ngo magically captures the overblown Gong Li- like intensity of
Cao Yu’s period drama and sends you into sidesplitting laughter.
What follows is a stroke of comic ingénue: the scene brilliantly
segues into a dead-on spoof of Stomp, and the cast erupts into
a frenetic drumbeat using whatever they have on stage – chopsticks,
wooden stools, and in Hossan Leong’s case, clogs (he plays a eunuch
in the Thunderstorm parody – ‘nuff said). Thunderstorm
to ThunderSTOMP, get it?
In keeping with Chestnuts tradition, Portrait also
exploits the full comic potential of its legendary gags with equally
funny sequels. In a spoof of The Matrix, Oliveiro and a devilishly
deadpan Lim continue their epic battle over an ez-link card from where
they left off in previous editions of Chestnuts, conjuring
up some hilarious tongue-twisting dialogue. The inimitable Pondan
Air also returns to stage, starring Leong and Lim as lascivious
stewardesses engaging in lewd, crowd-pleasing antics, sending the audience
into fits.
Stages took a risk when it initiated Oliveiro and Ngo into the Chestnuts
fraternity: these additions to an already combustible cast of Leong
and Lim could have amounted to overkill. Fortunately, they gelled into
a riotous foursome, their comic timing marvelously in sync. More importantly,
the gags suited the four-member cast effectively, not the other way
round. It also gave each actor more time to prepare for the next gag
without Portrait having to resort to too much flat filler material.
In this sprawling two-and-a-half-hour production, a lot more editing
would help. At times, especially when jokes dragged on for far too long,
its slapstick momentum was uneven, giving it the feel of a work-in-progress.
Yet, one can hardly deny that, when Forbidden Chestnuts takes
flight, it is a thoroughly perverse romp through the Singaporean psyche.
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"This edition of Forbidden Chestnuts wildly oscillates between
two kinds of bad: one that has you clutching at your sides, and the
other that has you going “uh-oh”."
Credits
Director: Jonathan Lim
Executive Producer: Adrian Tan
Cast: Jonathan Lim, Hossan Leong, Rodney Oliveiro,
Judy Ngo
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