Hungry

Whenever my husband and I collaborate, amazing things happen. True story. "The Geongxi Is A Vamp", "300 million: The Reconceptualization of a Conception" and now, "Hungry".

We've always been regulars in the Short + Sweet Musical Category. But this year, we teamed up again in Short + Sweet Song instead. We wrote somewhat of a one-song-musical about 2 ghosts, disgruntled about the food they are being served during the hungry ghost festival that did not match their tastes when they were alive. After all, the Short + Sweet Song festival coincide with the actual Hungry Ghost Festival month!

We never thought we'd win anything in a singer-songwriter competition because let's face it, we're not actually singer-songwriters. We are musical actors, who happens to be very experimental. We love the Short + Sweet Festival as it is our playground platform to experiment. We wanted a very traditional Chinese feel for the song but we both don't play a single Chinese instrument, nor could we find a Chinese instrument band in time. Instead we got help from a super talented musician singer friend, Jee Yan to arrange the backing track for us, which he did beautifully with the full glory of guzheng, pipa, dizi and all!!!

As typical actors, we were super excited about creating our characters Hu Ah Yew and Soo Fah Nee. We really went all out to look like actual Chinese ghosts for the performance and stayed in character during prize-giving and even backstage once our full costumes were on.

From left: Soo Fah Nee and Hu Ah Yew

As it turned out, we won 1st Runner's Up in the Short + Sweet Song competition this year. On top of that, we won the Glitz & Glamour Award too (that one was a no brainer, just look at our costume!).

A double award!

Other than the performance itself, we met many awesome people back-stage... newbies and oldies, comedians and other singer-songwriters. Oooooh, just think of all the possible collaborations!!! We also accidentally scared the shit out of an intern who thought she really had a paranormal encounter backstage. Sorry!

For all of you who missed the show, here's a video of Hu Ah Yew and Soo Fah Nee's performance!

Hungry (2015)

Lyricist: Alvin Looi

Composer: Karynn Tan

Musical Arranger: Choong Jee Yan