Singapore singer Jacintha steps beyond comfort zone in Lush Life to mixed results

Lush Life

Ong Keng Sen/T:>Works, Jacintha and Dick Lee
Victoria Theatre
May 29, 8pm

Lush Life is an odd chimera – part confessional, part therapy session, part cabaret, part theatre.

This sold-out Singapore International Festival of Arts (Sifa) commission brings together three familiar veterans of Singapore’s arts scene – director Ong Keng Sen, jazz singer Jacintha Abisheganaden and composer-entertainer Dick Lee. 

Ostensibly centring on the tumultuous life and loves of Jacintha, Lush Life suffers from internal contradictions which also highlight, in damning fashion, a broader lack of context in a Singapore that has seldom paid much attention to its cultural, let alone pop culture, heritage. 

Ong, long-time friends with his two stars, makes a bold argument for the status of Singapore pop culture in the first half of his staging. 

Visuals borrowing from Renaissance paintings, classical European sculpture and Belgian Surrealist artist Rene Magritte’s works accompany the narration by Jacintha and Frances Lee playing the young Jacintha, setting these home-grown talents on the same playing field as Western cultural icons. 

Jacintha’s stint living in Hawaii is accompanied by illustrations of tropical fruit reminiscent of Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s lush cornucopias.

The impending fate of her real-life marriage to former husband Dick Lee is signalled by decaying flowers and skulls in memento mori fashion, even as Frances Lee is happily discussing wedding plans.

Subsequent anecdotes about differing marital expectation unfold against Magritte’s famed works The Lovers, in which veiled figures kiss, and Golconda, with a pink-suited Dick Lee replacing the original’s dark-suited men. 

While Frances Lee performs against these visuals, Jacintha is highlighted in a live video feed, larger than life, for the opening sequence.

Ong is uncommonly gentle with Jacintha, framing her performance with supportive staging that reiterates her star status while minimising complicated stage directions so she remains still at centre stage.

Frances Lee deserves a shoutout – stepping up to sing in a beautifully clear soprano and ceding the spotlight in unobtrusively gracious fashion to Jacintha when needed.

Jacintha’s strength is her singing, not her acting, and her nerves show in some flubbed lines not helped by a malfunctioning mic on opening night. But she does recover for a movingly vulnerable delivery of American singer June Christy’s 1950s song Something Cool, full of plaintive regret, in the second half where the stripped-down staging – just her and accompanying pianist Weixiang Tan – best suits her intimate crooning style.

Jacintha deserves kudos for attempting something so deeply personal and obviously out of her comfort zone – no mean feat for a 68-year-old. 

Ong also tries valiantly to recast songs from Dick Lee’s discography, but this revisiting strips bare some of the latter’s more obvious borrowings. Tropicana is really a straight steal of Copacabana and music fans will be able to pick out chord references to 1960s and 1970s Top 40 hits in some of his other early tunes.

There is no avoiding the fact that the script, written by Ong after hours of interviews, tries to mediate – with fitful success – between revelatory material and respect for privacy.

There are audible shocked gasps from audience members when Jacintha talks about suffering the violent temper of her third husband, who is not named.

When Lee recalls their quarrels on a Japan tour, which raged so badly that producers stepped in to put them in different hotel rooms, viewers cannot help but feel there are bigger issues that have been left diplomatically unsaid. 

With its coy narrative gaps, the show feels too insider – #iykyk – and yet not insider enough. Part of the issue is also, as mentioned above, the lack of cultural context.

In Singapore, people are likely to be more familiar with the love lives of Hollywood stars and to cite chapter and verse of the latest K-pop hits. But there is little knowledge of Singapore’s own cultural personalities and histories.

Only a limited demographic will be aware of the early heyday of Singapore English pop, when variety show Talentime made a star of Jacintha and Lee built his Japan pop era as well as a thriving Cantopop stint off the success of his Mad Chinaman persona.

The oversupply of more mature audience members on opening night is testament to this circumscribed demographic.

While this show fits in the theme of Legacy Sifa festival director Chong Tze Chien has programmed for his first year, it also unfortunately highlights how ignorant audiences here are of home-grown cultural legacies.

Lush Life is completely opaque to people who have no prior knowledge of Jacintha and Lee’s accomplishments. The work is thus weirdly contextless and bewildering to anyone under the age of 40.

Ironically, while she says her early bond with her former spouse – they met when she was 16, he 17 – was strengthened because she could sing his songs, the most heartfelt delivery here belongs to the jazz tunes she performs in the last quarter of the show.

But audiences expecting a rendition of the titular Billy Strayhorn tune are out of luck. This final omission, in retrospect, is reflective of the production’s misses and compromises.