Pangdemonium to stage award-winning musical Rent with star-studded cast in 2016 season

Actor Adrian Pang's (left) theatre company Pangdemonium will tackle the award-winning Broadway rock musical Rent next year. Cast members for the season include heavyweights such as actresses Tan Kheng Hua (centre) and Karen Tan. ST PHOTO: CHEW SENG KIM AND LIM WUI LIANG

SINGAPORE - Local theatre company Pangdemonium, helmed by husband-wife duo and theatre veterans Adrian and Tracie Pang, will tackle the award-winning Broadway rock musical Rent next year, marking the second time it has been staged here.

The 1996 musical, written by the late American playwright Jonathan Larson, chronicles the lives of eight bohemian artists living through an AIDS epidemic in New York's East Village. It has earned critical acclaim, racking up both a Tony Award for Best Musical and Pulitzer prize for Drama.

The musical is expected to run next October, and is among three productions in Pangdemonium's Season Of Love lineup for 2016. It was last staged here by the Singapore Repertory Theatre in 2001, and featured a mainly Filipino cast.

Cast members for the season include heavyweights such as actresses Tan Kheng Hua and Karen Tan, as well as fresh faces like Frances Lee and Benjamin Chow, most recently seen in The LKY Musical playing opposition politician Lim Chin Siong to Adrian Pang's Lee Kuan Yew.

Chow and Lee will star in Rent, joined by actors Juan Jackson, Aaron Khaled, Tabitha Nauser and Mina Kaye. Kaye was crowned Best Actress at this year's Life! Theatre Awards for her role in The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice, also a Pangdemonium production.

The other two Pangdemonium productions are The Effect, a romantic drama written by British playwright Lucy Prebble, which received the United Kingdom's Critic's Circle Award for Best New Play in 2012, and family drama Falling by American theatre professor and playwright Deanna Jent.

Audiences can expect to see actors Pang, Tan Kheng Hua, Nikki Muller and Linden Furnell in The Effect, while Falling will feature Pang, Karen Tan and Neo Swee Lin.

For more information, go to www.pangdemonium.com/season-ticket

jianxuan@sph.com.sg

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