My Valentine

My Valentine date this year was an old friend and one of my favourite people in the world. “It” shall remain sexless and anonymous, because “it” made a specific request not to be named on my blog for reasons I fully support.

So the well-dressed pair attended a double bill of Singapore Love Letters and Dark Knuts: Welcome to Avenue Quantum in celebration of togetherness.

Singapore Love Letters, doing full justice to its title, was made up of two beautiful works of writing in tribute to the old school romance of note-passing and letter-writing. The first was a coming-of-age love story with fetching new leads. It was a decent appetiser to prepare us for the main course. The second one is definitely more well-developed, emptied of obvious clichés and replete with sentimentality. Still, the latter would probably fare better as a reading piece. I love the way the written lines unfold to tell a restrained (but never repressed) love story panning decades between a wife and husband from our commonly forgotten past that really didn’t happen so long ago. There is amazing characterization despite the utter lack of visual action.

Casey and Kheng’s efforts to inject their roles with emotional gravitas and dramatic range in the way only theatre veterans could, were highly successful as far as the spilling of spirited spew goes. As wife #10, we see Keng’s phenomenal yet convincing growth from an indignant and thwarted young woman to a mature and understanding gentle woman who learns to love and respect her husband and the large family she marries into. Her education and temperament, moulded by the personal experiences, made her character and the eventual decision to leave, entirely believeable, as she reclaims her independence and lets go with grace when nature has run its full course. Casey, with his awkward truncation of words and direct pointedness as the practical businessman husband is the perfect foil to Kheng’s exhaustive run-on lines. Stage movement was minimal, and so while I was happily engrossed in the compelling story-telling monologues (wah, brilliant sarcastic come-backs; stunning turn of phrases; deftly wielded structures etc etc, and wanking intellectually to the excellent writing), I can also understand if someone else were to dismiss it as boring and indulgent. You have to focus on the vocal narration, as it is the only way of finding out what happened (unless facial expressions count as visual aids – which don’t work if you are seated far away).

My chestnutty evening was amusing enough, but as about 40% of the jokes were on Avenue Q and I didn’t think the original was that fantastically funny to begin with, it was a strange two hours of hits and misses. Nevertheless, I was severely tickled by the blasphemous mishmash that was Mama Mia! and Quantum of Solace (and finally, through one snippet, I learnt that I’m not the only one who finds the Quantum of Solace bizarre and meaningless – in fact I shared the theory of why!) and also The Dark Knight and Twilight parodied plot marriage.

The only throwaway line I remembered: You are so vanilla – you make my banana split.

My Valentine gave me a rose, glittery gold dust power for the peepers and also a hair accessory. Whee.