Beacon of hope
The main thing that struck me about Refugee: Images was not the singing. Yes, the singing was spectacular, but that came second. What struck me was the musical's history.
Playwright Chin San Sooi wrote the script for this musical in 1979. Do you know how long ago that was? In 1979, I was only one year old -- that's how long ago that was!!!
Unfortunately, it was banned the following year. Six years after that, the authorities allowed San Sooi to stage the musical, provided certain parts of the script were edited / modified. It's only now, in 2006, TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS after first writing it, than San Sooi has been able to stage the full musical as it was originally written.
Imagine that. Twenty-seven years.
One wonders what he did with the script during those intervening years. Did he despondently bury it under a pile of other old, dusty scripts and try to put it out of his mind? Did he file it somewhere, and every time he caught sight of the file, sigh and shake his head and think that it was such a waste he had never been able to see it staged properly? Did he keep it in a special drawer, determined to see it staged someday, confident and optimistic that eventually the political climate was bound to change and the authorities would become a little less Big Brother-ish?
In particular, I'd like to know if he ever gave up hope of seeing it staged in its entirety, or if he always believed that one day the time would be ripe and his musical would see the light of day.
I thought it so amazing, the fact that he had waited twenty-seven years for this to happen, and that it was finally happening. Twenty-seven years is a long time to wait, and many must have thought that this day would never come. It reminded me not to give up hope, to hang in there despite the setbacks, to keep trying, and to wait PATIENTLY (pah! I know patience is a virtue, but still--!). We cannot predict the future. We can only work and wait and trust and stay faithful in the meantime.