My Perfect Weekend with actress-playwright Jo Tan
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Singaporean actress Jo Tan (right) with her husband Edward Choy (second from left), and friends Mina Kaye (second from right) and Wyatt Biessel (left) playing a board game on Nov 17.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF JO TAN
Who: Singaporean actress-playwright Jo Tan is a familiar face in the local theatre scene. The 42-year-old won the Best Actress accolade at The Straits Times Life Theatre Awards in 2020 and 2022.
In October, she starred in dinner theatre show Por Por’s Big Fat Surprise Wedding, which she also wrote.
She has been a member of Dream Academy’s three-woman musical cabaret troupe Dim Sum Dollies since 2016 and will star in the upcoming production Dim Sum Dollies: The History Of Singapore: Sixty Sexy Years, which reflects on Singapore’s journey over six decades.
She is married to fellow theatre actor Edward Choy, 44.
“One highlight of my weekend is playing board games with my friends. Every two or three weeks, we go to the HDB flat of my buddies Mina Kaye and her husband Wyatt Biessel – she’s an actress and both are also drama educators – and break out the games to while away an afternoon or evening.
One game we are obsessed with is Ticket To Ride Legacy: Legends Of The West (2023). It is a railway-themed strategy game set in 19th-century America, in which each player manages a railway company through various campaign adventures.
The game’s objective is to be the player with the most money. But, for me, playing board games is more of an excuse to socialise.
I am an introvert and can run out of energy talking to people. But if there is a task before me, I can focus on it and have found it easy to strike up conversations when the game constantly introduces new elements.
Through playing, I have also learnt things about American geography and history, including where the region of Cascadia is and how people flocked there during the Gold Rush.
Since it is hard for people to get together two days in a row, another thing I love to do is chill at home with my dog. She is a maltipoo, which is a cross between a maltese dog and a poodle, and we estimate she is 11 or 12 years old.
She is a retired breeding dog and we adopted her through animal welfare group Voices For Animals in 2019. Her tail wobbles a lot, so we named her Wobbles Woo, which is also a cheeky twist on Dr Woffles Wu, a prominent plastic surgeon here whose name I have always found delightful.
Jo Tan (left) at home with her husband Edward Choy and their adopted dog, Wobbles Woo.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF JO TAN
She is the sweetest thing and we love cuddling with her on the sofa while watching Ranma ½, a Japanese anime series released in the 1980s and 1990s, on Netflix.
Although my husband frowns on it, I give her little treats of human food from my lunch, like bits of fish or noodles – anything really except chocolate, grapes, onions or other things toxic to dogs.
She hardly ever barks and only pokes people she likes with her nose. She likes it when we throw stuffed toys for her to fetch and we have even managed to teach her some tricks. She has really brightened up our lives.”
