Control freak playwright and fearless director: The duo behind Singapore’s biggest ‘experiences’

SINGAPORE – In 2017, actress and theatre director Beatrice Chia-Richmond hit rock bottom.

Her concert company Running Into The Sun had collapsed. Liquidating assets and clearing debts, she found herself exposed in a brutally public way. With no office, no team and, briefly, no sense of future, she was adrift.

Then her phone rang. It was Michael Chiang.

The publisher and playwright did not offer cliches. Instead, he handed her a physical key to a small office in Guillemard he had rented for The A List, a fortnightly arts magazine he helmed.

“Use this,” he told her.

No rent, no conditions – just a room to store her files, her stationery and, as she puts it, her dignity while she rebuilt her life.

“I will never, never forget this act of absolute kindness,” says Chia-Richmond, 51, her voice catching as she recalls the moment. “He gave me a place to land at the stinkiest, lowest point of my professional life.”

Chiang, 71, waves off the gratitude with the ease of someone who prefers his drama onstage. “I told her: ‘It will pass. Your reputation is strong. It won’t change anything.’”

He was right. It did not.

The gesture deepened a friendship and creative partnership that began when they met in 2006.

Individually, they are powerhouses. Chiang – a former journalist and magazine maestro who launched several titles, including entertainment and lifestyle weekly 8days – is the literary father of Singaporean pop-culture comedy, spinning national service, beauty pageants and gender politics into beloved hits such as Army Daze, Beauty World and Private Parts.

Chia-Richmond, meanwhile, rose through the ranks as an actress and theatre director before becoming the first woman to helm the National Day Parade in 2011 (and again in 2016). She has since commanded large-scale ceremonies, festivals and sporting spectaculars across the region. The former concert impresario also brought in K-pop heavyweights such as Super Junior, Shinee and Girls’ Generation.

Together, Chiang and Chia-Richmond have become something else entirely: a creative accelerant. Since 2019’s The Bicentennial Experience – an immersive, multimedia sweep through 700 years of Singapore history – at Fort Canning, the duo have crafted some of the nation’s most emotionally resonant public history works.

Their latest projects, the SG60 Heart&Soul Experience at Orchard Library and

The Albatross File: Singapore’s Independence Declassified at the National Library,

showcase that spark again. One uses artificial intelligence to offer Singaporeans a personalised glimpse into the future, while the other reveals newly declassified documents tracing the country’s break from Malaysia.

Interestingly, their relationship in 2006 began not with a bang but a “black face”. 

Chia-Richmond had been brought in to co-direct an anniversary staging of Army Daze – about five recruits undergoing basic military training – by theatre company Toy Factory. Things did not get off to a good start.

Sounding scandalised even nearly two decades later, Chiang says: “They wanted to update the jokes. I said, ‘No, if you want to rewrite, I’ll do it myself’.”

Watching from the sidelines, Chia-Richmond recalls having “absolutely no interaction” with him during that tense period.

“All I saw was Michael’s very black face coming into the office. I’d say to myself: ‘This true control freak is here again,’” she says, adding that he offered “no praise, no love, nothing”.​

The thaw came a few months later. Chia-Richmond was casting for Cabaret – the Broadway musical set in a seedy nightclub amid the hedonistic swirl of 1930s Berlin – and had her sights on Taiwanese-American star Kris Phillips, better known as Fei Xiang, for the pivotal role of the Emcee. She fired off a cold e-mail, fully expecting it to vanish into the void. Instead, 48 hours later, Phillips replied and asked her to dinner in Shanghai.

She recalls: “I couldn’t help myself and asked him, ‘Why did you agree to meet me?’ He said, ‘You come highly recommended.’ I asked who and he wouldn’t say.”

She later found out that Chiang, a close friend of Phillips, had vouched for her.

“He called this ‘b***h’ to check on me,” she says, affectionately pointing to Chiang. “To see if I was a fly-by-night or if I would crash his career.”

A deep creative partnership took root. Over the next decade, Chiang and Chia-Richmond worked on two more reboots of Army Daze (2012 and 2013), High Class (2013), Army Daze 2 (2017) and Private Parts (2018). They even adapted his 1989 play Mixed Signals, a wry take on love and dating in Singapore, into a TV series in 2019.

On paper, they should not gel. Both are, as Chia-Richmond puts it, “quite uncontrolled and chaotic in our creative ambitions”, which is why their long-time technical director Kenny Wong often becomes the voice of reason.

“Kenny tones us down, tempers us or filters out the stupid ideas we’re tossing around,” Chiang says. “Otherwise, we’d be uncontrollable.”

Chia-Richmond adds: “Our ambitions are always bigger than any budget.”

What really anchors them, though, is their ability to have hard conversations. “I never feel like I can’t say what’s truly on my mind, even if it’s difficult,” she says.

When asked to describe their relationship as a hawker dish, Chiang quips: “It’s like Hokkien mee. It has a lot of ingredients which you think shouldn’t gel. The dollop of sambal makes all the difference.”

Chia-Richmond adds: “And the lime. I love squeezing the lime.”

The duo remember pitching The Bicentennial Experience against teams far bigger and more seasoned than theirs.

With only a few weeks over Christmas to prepare, they worked straight through the holidays, fuelled by instinct and adrenaline.

Later, project director Gene Tan, chief librarian of the National Library Board, told them his team would have walked if they had not won the job. Their vision, he said, was simply that compelling.

Chia-Richmond recalls spending much of that year explaining to puzzled people why it was called an “experience” – not a play, museum or movie – while they wrangled a huge creative team that included historians, aerial and fight choreographers, architects, lighting designers and young experience designers.​​

The project’s success – so popular it was extended – turbo-charged their careers and helped cement experiential storytelling as a serious mode for national narratives here.

It also set up the next wave: 2025’s SG60 Heart&Soul Experience and The Albatross File: Singapore’s Independence Declassified.

For Chiang, who built his reputation chronicling the foibles of ordinary Singaporeans, taking on a project that deals with raw political history felt daunting. He worried about whether he could do justice to something so serious and so close to the national bone.

When the file was finally opened to the creative team, in the middle of SG60 Heart&Soul, he took three days off just to sit in the National Archives reading room and read the entire trove in one disciplined gulp, determined not to be distracted.​​

Chia-Richmond, meanwhile, read the Albatross documents in a plastic chair on a night when she was sleepless and wired, feeling the weight of each page. Both emerged with a radically altered sense of Singapore’s origin story.

Like many Singaporeans, they grew up hearing that the island had been “kicked out” of Malaysia, until the documents showed otherwise. What emerged was a far more complex and courageous story: leaders who ultimately chose a perilous separation rather than accept terms they felt were intolerable.

That knowledge has rewired Chia-Richmond’s sense of agency. Instead of feeling grateful simply to be given “a seat at the table” in life, she now feels licensed to walk away when that seat comes at too high a cost.

The work has also triggered intimate family conversations. Her 81-year-old father, a former policeman during the 1960s racial riots, began sharing stories he had never told – of barricaded station doors, terrified colleagues and a young constable’s sense of helplessness when law-and-order decisions were still controlled from Kuala Lumpur.​

Chiang’s bond with the story is rooted in his journey. At 11, he was sent alone on a bus from Muar to Singapore in late 1965, so he could stay in an English-medium school system that was about to disappear back home. Living with an older brother, he spent years feeling like an uninvited lodger.

Later, still not a citizen, he volunteered for national service, to the disbelief of classmates doing everything to dodge it. Because national service was not open to non-nationals, he had to sign a three-year regular army contract, then waited for more than a decade before securing permanent residency and, eventually, citizenship.

To him, staging The Albatross File is less about glorifying leaders than honouring a cast of characters – from Goh Keng Swee to S. Rajaratnam – who took extraordinary risks with very little in their pockets.

For all the scale of their recent work, both speak wistfully about going small. Chia-Richmond – fresh from three years of designing the Dream Sphere, Singapore’s acclaimed Osaka Expo 2025 pavilion with German studio Milla & Partner – says that after years of “serving the national narrative” (work she values precisely because it is not about her own voice), she sometimes longs for a black box, a modest story and the space to refine a personal signature again.

Her dream project is national in scope but human in scale: a dramatised series about a young Lee Kuan Yew, told through his early courtroom battles for unions, nurses and everyday Singaporeans, essentially a Singaporean answer to The Crown (2016 to 2023), the Netflix series about the British monarchy.

Chiang, meanwhile, takes great pleasure in defying every stereotype of a septuagenarian. He recently curated The Cathay Gallery for the cinema chain, crafting a slice of history designed to hook the TikTok generation. And he has just written his first action-movie script, spending the past couple of months in remote corners of Malaysia, where the film is being shot.

“That’s all I’m allowed to say for now,” he says.

The pair’s next collaboration may not yet be on the calendar, but it already feels inevitable.

“It’s a privilege to be asked,” Chiang says. “If it’s something new, something I’ve never tried, I’m game.”

Book it/SG60 Heart & Soul Experience

Where: Orchard Library, orchardgateway, 277 Orchard Road
When: Till Dec 31, Mondays, 9am to 6pm, Tuesdays to Sundays, 9am to 9pm
Admission: Free. Go to

str.sg/fJLH

to book tickets

The Albatross File: Singapore’s Independence Declassified

Where: Level 10, National Library Building, 100 Victoria Street
When: 10am to 9pm daily, closed on public holidays
Admission: Free. Go to

thealbatrossfile.nlb.gov.sg

to book tickets