MELISSA MAE - Emily Of Emerald Hill

Emily of Emerald Hill was just simply amazing. From the day that Ms Lenden told us that we were going to watch Emily of Emerald Hill, I was just really excited to watch it. My aunty is Ivan Heng's friend and she told me that the play was going to be worth watching. It was a 2 hour long monologue that was fantastically done by Ivan Heng. He did a really good job impersonating a local nonya aunty. He basically showed the audience how great he was at acting. He managed to change from character to character very distinctly and fast. There were a few scenes in the play where Emily would impersonate her sister in law, Suzy. She did this by dragging her words and the sound of her voice was as if she was pinching her nose to make that annoying nasal sound. Ivan's impersonation was very, very funny. Okay back to the point. When I was settling down in the theatre, I noticed that there was a chair on the right of the stage (facing the audience). During the play, I realised that the chair was significant as beside it, was a telephone. Emily call people from that phone. She even talked to people in "American" accents or Singlish accents. It was such a big change, but he managed to make it work out. The play started with Emily dancing towards the audience on the big stage; there were many doors on the sides. And she ended the play by dancing back into the back door of the stage. This was to show that she was opening and closing the play. The play also had many wonderful props. There was the dinner party scene where Richard (Emily's son) was celebrating the news of him going to England and his birthday at the same time. The prop was a moving staircase. Before the dinner scene, the "changing room" was joined to the staircase. The "changing room" just rose from the stage floor. It was really cool and people started going "ooooh did you see that?". I could also tell that Ivan Heng is quite a comedian. He made Mr Juraimy and Ms Tina stand up for coming in late and said things like "1050 people no traffic jam, you got traffic jam uh." Ivan also made them apologise to the audience for being late by repeating "I will never be late again". ALL of the KC girls who went were laughing so hard. This also showed that Ivan is a great stage performer/actor. He could come up with funny things to say on the dot and it ended up successfully. I almost cried when Emily got the telegram saying that her son, Richard had passed away due to suicide. The mood changed from "comedy" to "tragedy". It was really sad. However, I still found the play more comedic than sad.

Out of all this, I have to say that the play was very good. It was worth $58+. And it was worth my time. :)