Emily of Emerald Hill - An Introduction

This post is meant to give a brief introduction on theatre.

Before the review of the play, I would like to first introduce myself as an avid audience of musicals, operas, plays or any other forms of theatre. For those of you who might not be familiar with this aspect of performing arts, I shall give a brief introduction on this. The main distinction of theatre as compared to movies and other forms of literature is that in such a performance, live performers act out a scene on stage that makes use of backgrounds, lights, sounds, props, costumes, words, songs, gestures and the list goes on, to allow the audience to be fully immersed in the story.

Theatre branches out into many types and I shall only talk about the few types of drama which I most commonly watch. First of all, I would like to talk about opera. Quoting from a review I had done for The Magic Flute last year, "My impression of The Magic Flute then was beautiful music and a storyline which contained the themes of love, friendship and relationships between mother and daughter." Also, the dialogues, sound effects and music all contributed to the impression of the opera in the audience’s mind when it was performed live. The props and settings used were innovative and contributed to the success of the opera. Essentially, an opera merges music and drama into a single entity. I would like to share a fascinating music piece from the opera, the aria sung by the Queen of the Night (Der Hölle Rache: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2ODfuMMyss).

Next, a pantomime, which is specifically a musical-comedy theatrical production.

More explanation is in this blog post from last year:

My Language Arts teacher recently informed us that I and some other classmates would be going for the Animal Farm production by W!LD RICE theatre.

Before I continue, let me first introduce this company. This company was founded in 2000 by Ivan Heng, who is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning theatre practitioner. He is recognised today as one of Singapore’s leading professional theatre companies. This company uses fictional stories to come up with plays that celebrates our diversity, reflectes on the problems times, and these productions are both inspiring and entertaining.

Their website is: http://www.wildrice.com.sg/

A few years back, I have already started watching W!LD RICE theatre plays when my mother first knew about this theatre. Since then, I have been watching their plays in Singapore almost every year. Two of the several plays I have watched so far are Beauty and the Beast and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Comparing these two with other plays I have watch, I would give these a 5-star rating. They encompass many different aspects that would greatly appeal to the audience. There is a bit of humour, but not too much such that it destorts the storyline. Attention-grabbing would be another way I would use to describe the plays. The use of original and creative songs that appeal to both the young and old alike makes the play unique in its own way.

Both of these plays are also pantomimes, which are basically theatrical productions that are musical and comedic. They are usually, but not always, performed during the Christmas and New Year season. There are various roles in a pantomime but there are certain fixed roles that are common in almost all pantomimes.

They are:
- The main character (Protagonist)
- The character whom the protagonist loves
- The villain (Antagonist)
- The comic lead (The character who interacts with the younger audience
- The dancers (A group of children)
- The choir

Some features that diiferentate a pantomime from other theatrical production would be that they incorporate:

- Song
- Dance
- Buffoonery
- Slapstick
- Cross-dressing
- Jokes that are known by the audience
- Audience participation

To give an example, in the production Beauty and the Beast, the villain, who is the witch, is actually a male actor who cross-dresses. Also, China baby milk powder is mentioned as one of the ingredients for the poison apple that was given to Snow White by the witch. Many of you might know this incident as it caused quite a big hoo-ha at that time, where the Sanlu baby milk powder was found to contained dangerous levels of melamine that could kill a baby. This resulted in several babies dying and others having kidney stones. Both these productions are by W!LD RICE.

Following this, a musical is different from an opera, as such a production incorporates dialogue to move the story as well. The main "attraction" of a musical is its story, while it is music for operas. For me, I watched musicals when I was young, such as Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz and The Little Red Hen, both performed by iTheatre (http://www.itheatre.org/ACEF2010.html).

In conclusion, the mysterious power behind theatre that never fails to impress me time and again is how the producer actually manages to make use and combine the different elements of theatre, as aforementioned, to create a production that takes the audience aback and gasp at the beauty and sophistication of the piece of literature.