Recently, I was having a nice conversation with an accomplished local writer and we were talking at length about the state of musical theatre in Singapore, and at some point “Phua Chu Kang – The Musical” was brought up…which was something I had completely forgotten about.
Well, I went home that night to do some research, and apparently the musical was given the astronomical production budget of $3 million.
Now that is something which is unheard of in local musical theatre.
You could put together a bare-bones musical for around $50,000. (That’s assuming it’s a professional production whereby everyone involved needs to be paid adequately…as compared to a school production perhaps.)
With a few hundred thousand dollars, you could possibly put together a pretty decent musical production.
But with $3 million?!?
That’s an incredible sum of funding right there.
Granted, I realise that a large part of it was due to the fact that they had government backing and massive corporate sponsorship and all that.
However, I think the sad part is that almost every review I’ve come across on the internet did not rate “Phua Chu Kang – The Musical” highly.
In fact, most of the reviews I came across were extremely unfavourable.
Examples can be found (here), (here) and (here).
(I shan’t elaborate on the actual details of the production, as they have been well-documented in the links above.)
Which makes me wonder what might have been, had the $3 million been put to better use to incubate and produce not just one, but maybe two, three, or even four local musical theatre productions of outstanding quality.
I’m sure it can be done.
We have the necessary talent – the writers, the lyricists, the composers, the musicians, the arrangers, the directors, the producers, the singers, the dancers, etc.
It’s just the funding that’s sorely lacking most of the time.
