Skip to main content

Advertisement

Advertisement

All the world’s a stage

Everyone is lying on their backs, moaning and groaning. And somewhere nearby, amid all the ruckus, is Lian Sutton. And he’s having a bit of a crisis.

Everyone is lying on their backs, moaning and groaning. And somewhere nearby, amid all the ruckus, is Lian Sutton. And he’s having a bit of a crisis.

“I stand backstage and go ‘Why do I do this to myself?’ This is terrifying!” he said, half-jokingly.

It’s perfectly understandable, considering the 22-year-old Malaysia-born British and his LASALLE College Of The Arts classmates — the ones lying supine doing vocal exercises — are only a couple of hours from the biggest day of their lives to date. It’s the VIP Night for the BA (Hons) Acting graduating class’ final production and tonight’s audience includes some pretty important people in the theatre industry.

 

BATCH BY BATCH

The show is playwright-director Chong Tze Chien’s super-intense history-meets-fiction mash-up Starring Hitler As Jekyll And Hyde — and Sutton is playing the manic, ticking time bomb of an artist named Jekyll. Yes, it’s a pretty big role. And all eyes will be on him as he transforms onstage.

For Sutton, this moment is what the past few years have been leading up to. The culmination of a student life completely devoted to theatre, a minimum of 45 hours a week, non-stop. And he’s not alone. It’s the time of the year when lots of budding performers are taking to the stage at LASALLE, Nanyang Academy Of Fine Arts (NAFA), National University Of Singapore and School Of The Arts (SOTA) to show what they’re capable of.

Outside the venue, photos and bios of students have been posted and the audience is given their CVs at the entrance. Nearby, their Musical Theatre counterparts are doing the same thing for their production of The Wedding Singer. Everyone is taking it seriously. Their future depends on it.

These are pretty exciting times for the next generation of actors who, after living in the veritable bubble of school, will now have to make it in the real world. And it could get pretty tough, considering the competition. Twelve students will graduate from LASALLE’s theatre programmes. NAFA, meanwhile, is expecting to churn out over 50 theatre graduates per year in the next couple of years, with more than 60 per cent of these hoping to become actors.

Granted, it doesn’t sound like a deluge, but considering how the numbers pile up year on year, jostling with the veterans in a small theatre scene — you get the idea.

“To be honest, it’s a small island and there’s only so much growth we can have,” said Pangdemonium Co-Artistic Director Tracie Pang. “There is a limit. There will be a plateau.”

Sure, these graduates can try their hand at modelling or land some television or ad work. Getting a gig as one of the performers at Resorts World Sentosa can also help pay the bills. But if you’re talking strictly “theatre”, Singapore isn’t quite London or New York.

There could be opportunities outside of Singapore and indeed, some of its graduates have headed overseas, said Edith Podesta, LASALLE’S BA (Hons) Acting Programme Leader, though not always to do theatre. (Among their alumni is someone who became a pro-wrestler in Malaysia.)

 

TALENT SPOTTING

Still, theatre companies here want to keep an eye out for potential talent. Groups like Pangdemonium and W!ld Rice regularly attend school productions and occasionally invite students to audition for their shows. Podesta said that every year, the Singapore Repertory Theatre holds auditions for their Year 3 students.

Another way to suss out the students is when theatre practitioners do occasional guest teaching or directing stints at the schools. Cake Theatrical Productions Artistic Director Natalie Hennedige, for example, recently directed a show for the NUS Theatre Studies Programme’s graduating class called We, The Inhabitants. She said she often looks for a certain spark or talent onstage as well as other intangible qualities.

“It’s also attitude, perspective, mindset, endurance and hard work,” she said.

While she hasn’t hired anyone for any of Cake’s main season shows, she has asked students to come on board for smaller ones.

Mandarin theatre group Nine Years Theatre’s (NYT) Artistic Director Nelson Chia has a different consideration. “Most graduates are geared towards English theatre. A lot of them are very interested in Mandarin theatre. However, if I use classic works as a standard, then many young graduates need to seriously consider improving themselves at least in Mandarin,” he said, adding that he’d probably have trouble looking for young protagonists for his Mandarin-language version of The Seagull.

That said, Chia is still on the lookout at school shows — and NYT is holding Mandarin speech training classes as well.

Pangdemonium has got that youth vibe going on, with shows like Spring Awakening and Next To Normal. For the latter, Pang recalled: “We had to sit through 200 people to look for 12 kids, and it was a very tough choice in the end.

“Most companies may not be willing to take the risk of bringing in a completely new person, (but) we have always made it a point to look for new talent — even from the very start with The Full Monty. It’s a little bit more exciting to work with new people,” she said.

 

BEYOND SCHOOL

Among these “new people” is Mina Kaye, who’ll be playing the titular role in Pangdemonium’s next production, The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice. It’s the biggest role for the actress, whose first professional stage gig was playing Rapunzel in Dream Academy’s Into The Woods. At that time, she was a second-year Musical Theatre student at LASALLE and had to juggle schoolwork and working on the production. After graduating, she continued working with Dream Academy for a number of shows, but it was through the Stephen Sondheim production that she got to know co-actor Adrian Pang — who would remember Kaye when Pangdemonium decided to do Little Voice.

But it wasn’t smooth sailing for Kaye. She has also had to host mall shows for children, dinner and dance events and face rejections.

“But I was mentally prepared,” she said. “Every book I’ve read, everyone I’ve met, said 90 per cent you’ll get rejected. So I basically said yes to everything that I got after LASALLE! I probably got more yeses than noes, but I’ve been rejected (in auditions),” she said.

But there seems to be a growing consensus among theatre practitioners that the quality of the young talent is growing. “What I’m seeing coming through now, compared to five years ago, is very different,” remarked Pang. “And the fruition of SOTA will actually have a big impact on the scene within the next couple of years.”

Indeed, the presence of SOTA seems to have opened up a future of possibilities in the industry. From the school’s first two graduate cohorts, there were a total of 33 theatre students. SOTA’s theatre faculty head Sean Tobin said the numbers have increased to 40 or 50 a year. “The sheer number that is coming out is going to be much, much bigger,” he said, although he cautioned that only around 10 to 20 per cent eventually pursue a theatre career.

Which brings us to something that a lot of people have often overlooked about SOTA: It isn’t simply an assembly line to churn out future artists. It’s still a secondary school. While there are future plans to develop specialised programmes for those who really want to concentrate on specific careers, SOTA isn’t meant to just train students vocationally. “It’s mainly an arts learning environment,” said Tobin.

He added that it doesn’t expect every theatre student to pursue a career in acting, much less actually go into theatre, but conceded that its very presence as an educational alternative has set people thinking. “There’s a growing awareness of the possibilities of studying and learning (theatre), and of career opportunities where, once a upon a time, people wouldn’t have considered it.”

This public awareness has also attracted attention from parties of a more commercial bent. Tobin said he regularly receives email requests for students to appear in advertisements or television shows. “We’re not an agency, but an educational institution. We’re quite protective,” he said.

Even with theatre companies, which are more sensitive to the students’ situation, the school has been selective. One of the rare examples of a production dovetailing perfectly with the school’s aims was Hong Kong company Zuni Icosahedron’s mega show One Hundred Years Of Solitude 10.0, which was staged for the Huayi Festival. It was part of the show’s aims to engage younger people, said Tobin, and for good measure, one of SOTA’s faculty members, actor-director Peter Sau, was part of the show as well. So the chosen students were in good hands.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop graduates from trying their hand professionally. SOTA graduate Tyen Ying Fong took part in One Hundred Years. She would later audition for and get a part as a chorus member in the recent W!ld Rice production The House Of Bernarda Alba.

It was an eye-opening experience for the 19-year-old. “It’s definitely less forgiving. The level of professionalism is really amazing in the working world of theatre. But SOTA really prepared me for what to expect,” she said.

 

IT TAKES TIME

Right now, Fong is interning at a law firm while waiting to be accepted into a tertiary institution. Will she turn her back on theatre? Most definitely not — she plans to eventually form a theatre company with a friend. “We’re very serious about it. We want to create a community theatre company and engage people who aren’t necessarily actors or involved in theatre.”

Of course, not every graduate will succeed as an actor following the conventional route (or even pursue acting in the end). Some branch out to non-acting pursuits in theatre and there has also been a kind of DIY trend these days of younger practitioners setting up their own groups and staging works independently.

Long-time practitioners, while being very optimistic about the future generation, posited that it will take time for the new generation to take it to the next level.

Said Podesta: “It’s a struggle for two to three years, they get bits and pieces here and there, then they usually go off and do some more training. Then they come back and that’s when you see them slowly make a name for themselves,” she said.

That’s exactly what Kaye is doing. The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice will be her last production for the present time — she’ll be pursuing a Masters in Musical Theatre at the Boston Conservatory in August.

Besides, it’s very rare for a graduate to go from newbie to an actress of such calibre as, say, Noorlinah Mohamed overnight. “It takes years to become a Noorlinah,” said Hennedige. “You’ll need 10 to 15 years. To be able to nail it every time (like her), you’ll have to go through a journey. And it needs a fuller commitment. It’s gotta be a young person who says ‘I am in it for the long haul’ and deal with the successes and failures.”

Meanwhile, Sutton has already been auditioning for films, commercials and theatre productions. He was rejected for one, but he scored a role in a play by Lim Yu Beng and Tan Kheng Hua that’s slated for the Georgetown Festival in Penang this year. Independent shows with his fellow LASALLE alum are also in the works.

“My game plan is to get myself out there. I really feel like I’ve been prepared for this. The possibilities are endless,” he said.

But first things first. He’ll have to transform into Jekyll for a few more shows yet — and the cycle of stress starts all over again. “I can’t wait for the next day and the process of warming up and saying to myself: ‘Why do I do this to myself? This is stressful’!”

 

The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice runs from May 2 to 18 at Drama Centre Theatre. Tickets from SISTIC.

There are free student showcases at NAFA, visit http://www.nafa.edu.sg/ for details.

Nine Years Theatre will be holding Mandarin speech classes in June and August. Registration for the first class ends on April 25. For more information, visit http://www.nineyearstheatre.com/.

Read more of the latest in

Advertisement

Advertisement

Stay in the know. Anytime. Anywhere.

Subscribe to get daily news updates, insights and must reads delivered straight to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, I agree for my personal data to be used to send me TODAY newsletters, promotional offers and for research and analysis.