Adrian Pang and Kit Chan on playing the most important couple in Singapore's history
The LKY Musical returns to the stage following a successful first run seven years ago. Ahead of its premiere on Sep 7, Adrian Pang and Kit Chan reflect on their roles as Singapore’s founding premier Lee Kuan Yew and his wife, Kwa Geok Choo.
Adrian Pang is Mr Lee Kuan Yew
Seven years ago, The LKY Musical made its debut at the Sands Theatre. To call it a success is putting it mildly. The home-grown blockbuster show was watched by over 50,000 people, and it went on to win several awards, including Best Actor and Production of the Year (Readers’ Choice) at the Life Theatre Awards 2016.
Considered to be one of Singapore’s most well-received shows of all time, The LKY Musical tells the story of Singapore through the early life of its first prime minister, from his student days in 1941 to the country’s independence in 1965.
Thanks to entertainment production house Aiwei and Singapore Repertory Theatre (SRT), the musical will be making a comeback from Sep 7 at the same venue where it was first held – with Adrian Pang reprising his acclaimed role as Mr Lee Kuan Yew. This rerun, directed by veteran London West End director Steven Dexter, will also feature new musical arrangements and songs by local musician and composer Dick Lee.
In-between rehearsals, Pang tells us how he feels about playing Singapore’s most salient political figure again, and what he hopes for the audience to take away from the upcoming show.
What is it like revisiting the role after seven years, especially since you would have received public feedback or other observations in your maiden attempt?
I suppose enough time has elapsed – and in the interim, for me to have a healthy perspective as I take on the role again, because the first time around, there were a lot of expectations, pressure and unknowns about the whole enterprise. He was a hero figure to many and perhaps not so popular with others. How do you then tick the boxes for people on both ends of the spectrum? Having survived the first round, there is, perhaps, a measure of maturity. I know to shut out all the noise and do the best job that I can as an actor, as I would for any other role. I cannot try to anticipate or try to please anybody, because that is just counter-intuitive and counter-productive to creating anything meaningful.
How are you preparing for this role this time?
With the benefit of having gone through the process before, I feel that I’m able to hit the ground running this time around. The first staging of this production was fraught with all kinds of interesting struggles, as it was a brand-new script and a very tricky story. Now, there’s a template already in place, so it’s a matter of how to make it even better. Hopefully, this time, I’m able to dive deeper than I had the opportunity to do the last time, to really find more of the man behind the myth and legend, because a lot of the mechanics of the actual staging of the production will already have been taken care of. I’d love to be able to reveal even more of his vulnerabilities and his sensitivities that the public has never seen, or was never privy to.
Do you feel you have rediscovered LKY through this rerun?
The whole idea of struggle and having the single-minded vision that is beyond yourself, beyond what you want for yourself, is something that was an overwhelming concept to grapple with. And it’s by no accident that I’m about to revisit this role at a time when we’ve all been through a very challenging period of the pandemic. I’ve also spent the last two-and-a-half years struggling with my own challenges, and the last 12 months being the creative director for the National Day Parade and celebrating Singapore’s 57th anniversary. So the more I get into this man’s psyche and see what drove him to keep fighting, pushing through and surmounting all the myriad of obstacles and hurdles as a leader of a very young nation, the more blown away I am by how much guts and will this man had.
What do you admire most about him, and what do you disagree with, especially since we are talking about a much-admired but sometimes divisive political leader, a strongman and father of Singapore?
His legacy, I daresay, is one that can be very polarising. As much as he is revered by many people, he also had his detractors. He was an imperfect human being, and what was attractive as a proposition (for the role) was that it was by no means a vehicle to make this man out to be some sort of a saint. He was full of faults, frailties and follies, and he made some decisions that were unpopular. But he stood by them to the end of his days and this is something.
In researching Mr Lee, you’d also have learnt a lot more about Mrs Lee, the Lee family and its dynamics. What were some surprising things that you learnt about them?
It was no secret that his relationship with Mrs Lee was something that kept him strong. She was his rock. She, in her own quiet way, was his equal and was his match in every sense of the word. I believe that it was apparent to anyone that he was nothing without her. Theirs was a love story for our times. She stood by him through thick and thin, through all the difficult periods that he had to go through as a leader of the country, and through all the tough decisions that he had to make. This musical is also honest enough to show that things were never totally rosy between them and because of who he was. It was very likely that it had an effect on their marriage.
How has your chemistry been with Kit Chan?
Kit and I have known each other for 28 years, and it’s the first time we got to work together in 20 years. I’m excited for the chance to work with her, annoy her, and laugh with her again. Being friends with a colleague makes work not so hard.
Like Mr Lee, you are a very public figure and you have spoken publicly about struggling with validation and public perception. Do you share similarities with him?
I’m probably the most different from Mr Lee than you could ever imagine. I’ve always been a bit of a misfit, a bit of an outcast and very much not part of the establishment, whatever that may mean. I’ve never had any aspirations to be a leading figure in any field, and I struggle even to give advice to my own sons, let alone make any kind of guidelines for a community on how they should conduct themselves. I basically keep to myself, and, as much as I can, keep up a quiet, peaceful life. This thing about validation and public perception, it goes with the territory of what I do as an actor with my own baggage, insecurities and everything else. Validation is psychology 101; everybody wants some sort of validation. As far as I’m concerned, I hope my work has some kind of meaning, and I try to divorce my work from anything that has to do with just feeding my ego, which, yes, of course, I do have. As I get older, I realise that drawing a healthy balance between the two is a tricky thing, and that’s what I’m trying to achieve.
Have adopting this role again and getting into the persona changed you?
As long as I’m open-minded and open-hearted, any role that I take on becomes a kind of osmosis. It is my person that informs the portrayal of the role, and vice versa. It becomes a learning process, a growing process. And this is only, I think, a recent evolutionary discovery. When I first started acting 30 years ago, it was very much an exercise of me trying to escape myself and run away from who I was – or who I thought I was. But in the recent 10 years or so, I’ve learned that I play all sorts of different roles to understand myself more and find out things about myself that perhaps I would not otherwise get the chance to. And that, in turn, deepens the portrayal of the characters.
What do you hope for the audience to discover and gain from the musical?
I hope the audience can appreciate what we have. I hope Singaporeans will feel gratitude for the Singapore that we are blessed with living in right now, warts and all.
Kit Chan is Mdm Kwa Geok Choo
Playing the role of Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s wife is singer-actress Kit Chan, who last performed in SRT’s Forbidden City: Portrait Of An Empress in 2017. Previously, Mdm Kwa was portrayed by Sharon Au during the musical’s premiere in 2015.
While The LKY Musical is centred around Mr Lee, the matriarch of Singapore’s most powerful family is really the driving force in the story, as she was in real life. As Mr Lee said in his eulogy for his beloved wife of 63 years, Mdm Kwa was his closest confidante, the main breadwinner of the family, and his political advisor who also helped draft the Constitution of the PAP, as well as the clauses in the Separation Agreement between the Malaysian state of Johor and Singapore.
What was it like getting under her skin? Chan lets us in on her learnings about Mdm Kwa, her chemistry with her co-star, and the biggest challenges in the role.
What is your impression of Mdm Kwa Geok Choo and what have you gleaned from studying her?
My impression of her is that she’s got this strong but quiet confidence about her. She is also what I’d like to call a quiet rebel. I think Kwa Geok Choo is totally cool – just look at her personal achievements at a very young age. In those times, to be the girl with the highest score in the entire Malaya – that was completely unheard of. She was the first female lawyer in Singapore. This lady broke glass ceilings, and did so without breaking a sweat, without drawing attention to herself.
She’s the original cool chick, too, marrying LKY in secret. There was this documentary in which she, already an old lady, described him as a “jaunty young man”. LKY had this bad-boy attitude about him when he was younger. He always had this wicked glint in his eyes. I think Mrs Lee snagged him because she was also a rebel herself, as it takes one to know one. They are perfect partners, like the good version of Bonnie and Clyde. It was very clear that she was involved in the big decisions and events in Singapore’s history, such as getting independence from the British and separating from Malaysia. Despite the spotlight on her family, I’ve also learnt, through reading about her and talking to people who knew her, that she had a very full, very normal life. I think she knew how to live.
To some of us, Mrs Lee has been an enigma as she was a very private individual. How do you intend to flesh out her character to the audience?
When LKY was the prime minister, we knew very little of his private life. By the time we got to know Mr and Mrs Lee, they were already much older. Other than a few photos, we don’t have moving images of them in the 1950s and 60s, in which we can see their body language, how they spoke and how they moved. We can only imagine what they were like when they were younger. It can be fun, though, to animate and inject life into an obscure character, because, sometimes, when there is too much known about the person, it becomes mimicry.
Being so accomplished and so rebellious at that age, I believe Mrs Lee can’t be too much of a wallflower. I think there must be a subtle swagger about her beneath the air of elegance and sophistication. That said, this is really the story of Lee Kuan Yew and the story of Singapore. Kwa Geok Choo played an important role, but she was always in the background as a supportive partner. She might be strong, but she was silent. I’d like to bring that dichotomy out somehow, through the songs. In a musical, the music is the soul of the story. Yes, people suddenly bursting into song is unrealistic, but it is precisely that improbable moment, in which only singing will suffice in expressing what is needed to be expressed, that the actor or the scene takes flight.
What are some elements of her personality, such as quirks or favourite expressions, that you’d adopt for the musical?
One thing that I find interesting about her is that she had a low voice for a woman, and it’s something I’d like to work with. I find her extremely feminine and masculine at the same time, which makes for an intriguing interplay. I’d like to adopt that tenor to alto quality in her voice, while lending a sort of tenderness in the way she spoke to her Harry. She knew her husband as Harry and called him such, even after he dropped his English name and became Lee Kuan Yew.
What is also worth noting is that we have a pretty long run this time. When you open the production, you have a particular understanding. As you do more shows, you get deeper into character, which only comes with time and repetition. I’ve been lucky to have done a lot of musicals to know that there is no shortcut in role immersion. The only way is to do it over and over, and eventually you’ll get to that new place.
What do you think are the biggest challenges for this role?
While Mr and Mrs Lee are no longer living, they didn’t depart this world too long ago. Maybe in 50 years, or 100 years, there will be new revelations. I believe that the further you’re from the subject matter, the more clarity you gain. So I think our biggest challenge in this production is striking a balance between what we perceive as reality and how much creative licence we can take. I choose to let the music take over whenever a song comes into play. To me, the song takes you through the emotional highs and the lows.
Do you think you share similarities with Mrs Lee? Or are you worlds apart from her?
We do share some similarities. We have a preference to be private and in the background as introverts, which is paradoxical because we both have very public lives. Besides being a lawyer, she was the prime minister’s wife and that is a full-time job. She had to appear at public events, and speak on occasions. I can relate to that. Like her, I have a certain “masculinity” and quiet self-confidence about me that can be intimidating. People have said that I was “like a man”, but for people who know me well, they disagree. These are where we are similar. As to how different we are, one would be that she was an Anglophile. I’m Westernised, sure, but I’m also very traditional Chinese in my upbringing.
How has working with Adrian been for you so far?
I think we have great chemistry. We’re both serious actors, and I’m looking forward to learning a lot from him because he’s a much more established and experienced actor than I am. I’m also confident that we’re going to have a lot of fun, and that is important. When you do a musical or any kind of stage production, you spend a lot of time together and it really helps to have fun.
What do you hope for the audience to take away from the musical?
I’m a showgirl, so I always think people should enjoy themselves at a show, at any show. Having said that, enjoy is a broad term. You can take pleasure in a play that is serious and provocative; heavy and emotional; light-hearted and funny; or inspired and angry. I think The LKY Musical has a bit of all – it is going to be entertaining, moving and blood-boiling. I really look forward to creating the romance between Lee Kuan Yew and Kwa Geok Choo, too, because it is a reminder that he, the founding father of Singapore, is just a man. He was in love with this girl from school, they got married and had kids. I’m glad that he had Choo in his life before all the burden of the world came upon him. I believe in the power of love, and that with love, we can overcome many things. So I hope the audience will walk away feeling more love for this couple, and ponder about the relationships in their own lives. I also hope this musical will stir up positive feelings for Singapore.
(Main and featured image: David Tan for The LKY Musical)
The information in this article is accurate as of the date of publication.
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