Secondary: The Musical, The Finger Players win big at ST Life Theatre Awards 2025

SINGAPORE – Playwright and composer weish’s take on Singaporean schooling life, Secondary: The Musical, is The Straits Times Life Theatre Awards 2025’s Production of the Year.

The 34-year-old’s outrageously successful debut has swept the grand prize. The large-scale musical, partially inspired by her six years as a literature teacher, featured 15 original songs and was staged by Checkpoint Theatre as its season opener at Victoria Theatre.

ST’s review lauded its “effortless script”

capturing the natural banter between students and “an immensely talented cast”. The impeccable blend of humour and pathos helped it find its target among educators, students and parents, garnering unusually widespread, effusive praise when it was staged in March 2024.

Weish, who has a new solo presentation at

Singapore International Festival of Arts (Sifa) 2025

titled Stray Gods, said: “I’m most moved by all the teenage students who came forward to share the many ways in which they saw themselves in the play.

“It was a hugely cathartic and humbling journey for me, especially to work with a stellar team where every single collaborator brought so much love and generosity into the work.”

Director Huzir Sulaiman added: “I’m very proud of spending three years working on Secondary: The Musical with weish, creating something wholly original, deeply Singaporean and vibrantly contemporary.

“I had a dream team of collaborators and their work was validated by the standing ovations and glowing reception from critics and audience members alike.”

Secondary: The Musical is Checkpoint Theatre’s largest production to date, and gently satirised the way Singapore’s system sorts students and the inordinate pressure heaped on teachers.

It was shortlisted in six categories – the most of any production – when

nominations were released on ST’s website on Feb 26

. It managed to convert only the biggest of these, however.

The most dominant winner is puppet company The Finger Players (TFP), which has bagged wins in five categories, primarily with its two retellings of Chinese classics, Transplant and Dream Of The Red Chamber.

These include a Best Director win for artistic director Oliver Chong, whose eerie

combination of live actors, puppets and Vedic metal band Rudra rejuvenated 18th-century horror collection Liaozhai Zhiyi, or Strange Tales From A Chinese Studio.

His haunting adaptation in Transplant follows the breakdown of a family plagued by demons, belying puppetry’s general association with children’s entertainment with its daring leaning into mature innuendo.

Chong, who won Best Script for his one-man play Roots in 2013 and Best Set for Citizen Dog in 2019, said: “The challenge lay in integrating Vedic metal and puppetry to create something greater than the sum of its parts.”

It was the first time Rudra incorporated Chinese lyrics. Guitarist Vinod said: “We thoroughly enjoyed the process of reshaping the music and pushing our creative boundaries. Challenging ourselves to honour both our craft and TFP’s artistic expression was a truly fulfilling experience.”

Newly appointed Sifa festival director Chong Tze Chien’s Dream Of The Red Chamber triumphed in three of the four categories it was nominated in, snagging Best Set, Best Sound and Best Costume.

For the tale of corrupt wealth and ill-fated romance told with a Shakespearean flavour, the actors crouched and scuttled on a sunken stage littered with lotus flowers made of organza and netting, in the manner of a Vietnamese water puppetry show.

Mask designer Loo An Ni’s crude but expressive masks captured the essence of characters’ cunning, frivolity and beauty, while sound designer Ng Jing toggled the volume of the many speakers in the space so the recorded dialogue seemed to follow the actors as they moved.

Ng said: “The level of detail of the sonically ambitious design was precise and dimensional, allowing the audience to perceive the sounds directionally. I’m glad we persisted as the end result was worth the effort.”

Chong, who conceptualised the set with Grace Lin, said: “The brief yet intense creative and rehearsal process brought out the best in all of us – designers, performers and puppet makers alike – fostering a collaborative spirit that infused the entire production from start to finish.”

ST’s review said it made for “surreal, operatic viewing”,

and that the overall effect was alienating in ways that suited its cosmic themes. “While impeding emotional connection, they elevate actors’ plangent sighs and serpentine mischief to a universal timelessness.”

Best Lighting was also awarded to a TFP production,

Puppet Origin Stories @ One-Two-Six: Temporary Occupation.

Light designer Faith Liu Yong Huay created three distinct looks for the weird and affecting triptych, which split audiences into two groups to experience the stories at various locations in Cairnhill Arts Centre.

Liu said the question that confronted her was “how to consider lighting not just as illumination but also as spatial design”.

“Rows of bulbs lit in sequence could signify the flow of information. Lit bird masks created larger-than-life shadows of birds. Fairy lights meant little hopes and wishes for a new life.”

Acting categories and others

Actor Ghafir Akbar triumphed for the second consecutive year in the Best Actor category for his versatile portrayal of an arrested maniac in Wild Rice’s black comedy Accidental Death Of An Activist.

Ghafir was also nominated for Best Actor as lawyer Amir Kapoor in Singapore Repertory Theatre’s identity play Disgraced, but judges chose to recognise the rigour of his shape-shifting between psychiatrist, forensic scientist, actor, punk and a RuPaul-style drag queen in Wild Rice’s play, filled with vaudeville routines and gender-bending musical numbers.

ST’s review congratulated him on accomplishing this with “much ease and flair”.

The actor, who in 2024 won for his dual roles of Theseus and Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, said: “I really consider the Madman a privilege to play. Especially at a time when activists struggle to keep their voices heard.

“Before we opened, I didn’t even think I could do it. I share this award with all the tireless activists who summit the mountain every day in the name of justice and humanity.”

Best Actress also went to a Wild Rice play fuelled by activism. Farah Ong’s solo performance in The Death Of Singapore Theatre As Scripted By The Infocomm Media Development Authority Of Singapore was

praised by ST as “preternaturally relaxed yet magnetic”.

Her rawness on stage and fierce intelligence imbued playwright Alfian Sa’at’s lecture on Singapore censorship history with heart and a visceral anger.

The first-time Best Actress winner said: “This was one of the most challenging works I’ve ever done. It’s written as a performance lecture, but I guess you can’t take the playwright out of Alfian, so a lot of the scenes wouldn’t have worked if I simply read off the script.

“Most importantly, this work addresses a very sensitive yet important topic that affects the entire arts community, and it’s a narrative/history that is really necessary.”

Both supporting actors were first-time winners.

Rafaat Haji Hamzah’s down-to-earth technician was the bright spark in Checkpoint Theatre’s environment play, Playing With Fire,

which earns the veteran Best Supporting Actor.

A largely verbatim play, Playing With Fire is whittled down from interviews with those in the energy and petrol industries by debut playwright Cheyenne Alexandria Phillips.

The actor says: “My main challenge playing the technician was to dig deep into this man who keeps his fears, disappointments and worries all to himself. I had to digest his hidden self internally and put on a simple and contented front.”

Vocal powerhouse Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai has her efforts recognised with Best Supporting Actress for her role as mother Heidi in Pangdemonium’s Dear Evan Hansen.

Her “incredible stage presence” that “strikes the perfect balance between poised and emotive”, according to ST’s review

, caps off an impressive year for the actress. She was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress as the strict head of the literature department in Secondary: The Musical.

Working on Dear Evan Hansen was a dream, she said. “It combines everything I love about my craft. As an actor, I love the gritty, the dirty, the messy. Adding music on top of that is icing on the cake.

“It gave me the chance to be silly and goofy, growl in rage, cry like a mess, all while singing my heart out.”

Meanwhile, Checkpoint Theatre’s playwright Faith Ng logs her second Best Original Script win in three years with Hard Mode, her immersion into the world of Gen Zs and Gen Alphas on their own terms.

She had previously said she felt the urgency to write for this demographic to get a head start before her six-year-old son grows into a teenager.

Her script “takes myriad teenage drama and turns it into nuanced elegy”

and is one that “manages to repeatedly bring fresh tears into the audience’s eyes with just a few lines of incisive dialogue”, according to ST.

Ng dedicated the win to actor Shahid Nasheer, who helped develop the script and died at 28 while being treated for leukaemia in 2024.

She added:  “I got goosebumps hearing how loud the cheers and laughter of the young people were in the theatre. I’m proud that Hard Mode made them feel so seen and heard.”

Best Ensemble went to

The Necessary Stage’s cast for Hi, Can You Hear Me?,

comprising Doppo Narita, Rodney Oliveiro, Sharda Harrison, Sukania Venugopal and Zelda Tatiana Ng.

Speaking – and singing – in English, Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish and Cantonese, they embodied playwright A Yagnya’s cosmic tragedies in their trembling and defiant frames and ensured it was no mere cognitive exercise.

Harrison, who played a stalking tiger, said: “The conceptual piece is brilliant, and to bring it to life in a way where it becomes humanised took hours, weeks and months of work. It was really a team effort to negotiate space, time and story. I really enjoyed being in that rehearsal room.”

Ng was a Bible-quoting Chinese deity Guanyin who also sang in Spanish. She said: “When I first read the script, I proposed an unconventional and even slightly controversial take on her, and I’m so grateful to the directors for trusting me with that vision.

“Together, we developed her into a multifaceted, multilingual and multicultural character with a rich and diverse personality, whom I absolutely adored.”

Video artist Nick Roux wins Best Multimedia for his work on the all-too-brief One Day We’ll Understand, visual artist Sim Chi Yin’s first foray into performance distilled from more than 13 years of her research into various archives for information about her grandfather. He was one of 30,000 people deported to China during the Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960.

Roux constellates Sim’s videos and photographs to provide an elegant mirror to her understated performativity on stage.

ST called the performance,

produced by arts consulting agency CultureLink Singapore and Australian theatre company Chamber Made, “a fascinating window into how an artist reads into the gaps of a silenced archive”.

Roux said: “The challenge was how to turn the journey of research into a physical unfolding on stage. The four terabytes of images, videos and documents that Chi Yin handed to me on a hard drive needed to be reshaped as landscapes, set pieces and co-performers that she could interact with.”

The judging panel for 2025’s ST Life Theatre Awards comprises arts editor Ong Sor Fern, arts correspondent Clement Yong and arts journalist Shawn Hoo.

This is the 24th edition of the awards, the longest-running accolade recognising the best in Singapore theatre, organised every year since 2001, bar the pandemic year of 2021. 

Here is the full list of winners

Production of the Year
Secondary: The Musical, Checkpoint Theatre

Best Actor
Ghafir Akbar, Accidental Death Of An Activist

Best Actress
Farah Ong, The Death Of Singapore Theatre As Scripted By The Infocomm Media Development Authority Of Singapore

Best Supporting Actor
Rafaat Haji Hamzah, Playing With Fire

Best Supporting Actress
Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai, Dear Evan Hansen

Best Director
Oliver Chong, Transplant

Best Original Script
Faith Ng, Hard Mode

Best Ensemble
Hi, Can You Hear Me?, The Necessary Stage

Best Set
Chong Tze Chien and Grace Lin, Dream Of The Red Chamber

Best Costume
Max Tan and Loo An Ni, Dream Of The Red Chamber

Best Lighting
Faith Liu Yong Huay, Puppet Origin Stories @ One-Two-Six: Temporary Occupation

Best Sound
Ng Jing, Dream Of The Red Chamber

Best Multimedia
Nick Roux, One Day We’ll Understand