Charmed

Yesterday saw something rare for us - a rather late night out. The musical didn't finish until well after 11.00 pm, running more than three hours, despite being billed as a two and a half hour show. Then we found that the hawker stalls previously situated next door to the Esplanade had been closed down (pity, one did a great roti john) which meant we had to catch an MRT train to Eunos (we hadn't bothered to go by car to save on parking) from whence we found our way to Geylang to our favourite teh tarik centre where I hungrily consumed a chunky piece of murtabak having not eaten anything before the show. We missed the cup final, but it sounds like a pretty drab affair from all accounts.

In contrast P. Ramlee, The Musical was far from drab, being cheerfully bright and colourful, though a bit overlong. According to Noi even that meant we got our money's worth so that's hardly a criticism. There's was certainly a lot of music. As well as a few P. Ramlee classics the show featured a slab of original material by Dick Lee all of which was, typically, easy on the ear, though a bit bland, especially in contrast to the maestro's material. Of course, that's rather unfair considering our lack of familiarity with the new material and it's true that Dick Lee's songs have an instantly hummable quality about them which means they work in the theatre. But I find his stuff has an oddly generic quality and when juxtaposed to the startling originality of P. Ramlee's blend of 1950's western popular music with the strains of the middle east and Malay folk music it came a distant second.

In fact, the essential triumph of the production lay in the way it brought out just how wonderful the classic songs were and are. There was a lovely sequence in the second act with Ramlee rehearsing Getaran Jiwa at the piano as a work in the making, then going on to a tentative duet with wife-and-singing-partner-to-be Saloma doing Senandung Kasih with her complaining about not understanding the metaphorical lyrics, in the course of which the audience burst into spontaneous applause on a number of occasions simply because it was just so uplifting. I'm smiling now thinking of it.

One obvious problem faced by the producers was that in the context of Malay culture a musical based on possibly the most beloved modern son of that culture couldn't really be anything other than celebratory in nature, to the point of the hagiographic, and that doesn't help in terms of putting genuine drama and tension on stage. But there was a real attempt to suggest the disappointments of our hero's life and the sense in which his very creativity took on an obsessive dimension, almost burning him up. There was also an extraordinary charm about the show drawn from deliberately reflecting the breezy optimism and occasional melodrama of the movies themselves.

It helped more than somewhat that the actor playing the lead, a P Ramlee impersonator called Musly Ramlee, was absolutely brilliant. This was more than impersonation - it felt close to a channeling of the great man's spirit, especially in the comic scenes.

There's not a lot in the way of simple charm in today's popular culture. The easy, good humoured tolerance and delicacy of those wonderful films doesn't find much of a echo in tv schedules these days. It was good to feel some measure of that humane decency and goodwill in the theatre yesterday.