Monkey Goes West – A Fantastical Journey by W!LD RICE
PUBLISHED November 18th, 2014 10:00 pm | UPDATED July 25th, 2024 03:16 pm
One of the highlights of the year-end holiday season is the musical pantomime.
Over the past ten years, W!LD RICE has been presenting family-friendly holiday extravaganzas based on traditional fairy tales like Cinderella and Hansel & Gretel, granted with the usual tongues in cheek references to happenings in Singapore.
For their 11th edition of the pantomime, W!LD RICE has looked East for inspiration. Based on the endearing Chinese fantasy classic Journey To The West, which has been interpreted countless times for the movies and television, Monkey Goes West is the version re-imagined and relocated to modern-day Singapore by their Resident Playwright, Alfian Sa’at.
The original Journey to the West is a classic Chinese mythological novel of 100 chapters that relates the adventures of a Tang Dynasty (618-907) monk Sanzang (Xuanzang or Tripitaka) and his three disciples, the cheeky Wukong (Monkey), the brave but always-hungry Pigsy, and stubborn but loyal river ogre Sandy, who traveled to the “Western Regions” (India) to obtain sacred Buddhist sutras after many trials and tribulations. Featuring the 4 protagonists and other iconic characters like man-eating Princess Iron Fan, Monkey Goes West will be packed with catchy songs, hilarious gags, wushu and magic.
‘We’ve always prided ourselves on taking well-loved fairy-tales and giving them a distinctly local twist,’ explains Ivan Heng, Artistic Director of W!LD RICE. ‘We felt that it was time to explore the wealth of literature and adventure available to us from sources closer to home.’ Monkey Goes West also marks Sebastian Tan’s directing debut with W!LD RICE. He’s starred in their previous pantos Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs and Hansel & Gretel and was greatly acclaimed for his roles as the evil stepmother and the witch respectively. ‘I wanted it to be based on Tripitaka’s Journey To The West because, as a kid, this epic story captured so much of my imagination,’ says Tan. ‘We want to bring audiences on a funny, fabulous, fantastical journey!’
We Chat With Alfian Sa’at about Monkey Goes West
Wild Rice’s musical pantomimes have usually been based on traditional fairy tales. Why the switch to a Chinese fantasy classic?
Fairy tales might have specific settings, but the stories they tell are universal – the triumph of good over evil, for example, or how virtue is rewarded. I believe it’s the same case with ‘Journey To The West’. The story is of course set in China, but the lessons in the journey are universal, such as the importance of teamwork and conquering one’s baser instincts such as impulsiveness, or greed.
What were your biggest challenges when recreating The Journey To The West as a musical pantomime?
‘Journey To The West’ is an epic, which accounts for the fact that faithful adaptations are usually in the form of a long-running, multiple-episode TV series. So the challenge for me was to condense the journey into a two-hour ride while also featuring some of the most iconic characters from the text.
Audiences always enjoy the tongue-in-cheek Singaporean twists and references to current affairs in the Wild Rice pantomimes. Can you give us some hints about the twists in Monkey Goes West?
In our adaptation, a Singaporean boy called Ah Tang finds himself in a situation where he is mistaken for Tang Seng, or Tripitaka, the monk-pilgrim in ‘Journey To The West’. A lot of the humour comes from this fish-out-of-water context: all Ah Tang wants to do is head back to Jurong West but he keeps getting swept up in one incredible adventure after another. And of course some of the characters he meets are like the grotesque and exaggerated forms of the people he knows in real life.
What can we look forward to in Monkey Goes West?
I think they can expect kungfu, magic, and really great singing and dancing from the cast. Sugie Phua, who plays the Monkey King, is brilliant at physical comedy—there’s so much joy in his body, because he’s liberated from playing something human. On the other hand, you have Joshua Lim, who plays Tang Seng, and he does the straight foil very well, with his ironic quips and skeptical eyebrow. I also think that the pantomime draws from various great traditions, from wushu to Chinese opera, so you get all these colourful performance embellishments.
Does Monkey Goes West mark a new beginning for Wild Rice pantomimes? Will we be seeing more traditional Asian folktales in the future?
I always think that the essence of the W!ld Rice pantomime lies in bringing the stories closer to home. So the source of the folktales doesn’t really matter – because once we take a shot at it, it becomes a Singaporean folktale. This isn’t the first time that we’re doing an Asian folktale anyway. For example, ‘Aladdin’ from the 1001 Arabian Nights has become a British pantomime staple (Ian McKellan has famously played the role of the panto dame Widow Twankey for two seasons). So you have a story from the Middle East, making its way to Britain, and then finally to Singapore. Some people might call this globalization, but I’d rather see it as the enduring appeal of good stories across cultures.
Catch Monkey Goes West at the Victoria Theatre from 21 November to 13 December 2014. For more information and tickets, please see SISTIC or W!ld Rice.
Written by Nithia Devan
