A local original musical, “The Walk-in Family”, will be shown at the Macau Cultural Centre (CCM) from tomorrow to Sunday. The four independent creators of the play shared their stories about producing the show in an exclusive interview with The Macau Post Daily at the centre on Tuesday.
The story is about a “family” of several completely unrelated people who happened to slip into a furniture store and take up residence there. “People seem keen to ‘pretend they have a life’ in the store”, playwright Mok Keng Fong (莫敬鋒) said, adding that those people seem happier than in their original homes, which is how the story is started.
“They are not actually family members, but they’re more like a family than a real family,” Mok said, adding that the furniture store seems like a home that invites people to stop by.
“Can people who are not related by blood be family members?” Mok asked rhetorically.
Music & dance tell the story
Music director EK Wong (黃以禮) underlined that the music plays an important role in telling the story, just as the dance and dialogue in the script, which altogether make the story compelling.
“When words cannot express the emotions of the actors, that’s when the music comes into play. And when the emotions get even higher, the dancing begins,” Wong said, pointing out that the music helps drive the plot of the play and gives the audience a better understanding of the characters’ minds.
Wong admitted that it was a lot of work to do the composing, lyric writing and music arrangement by himself, with a total of 14 songs for the entire musical. “I found myself constantly battling with different ideas in my head,” Wong said, adding that the creation process involved a lot of work balancing what was in the lyrics and spoken lines.
The show’s choreographer, Annette Ng (伍淑華), said she and her team had been working to make the choreography carry the story, so that the emotions could be fully conveyed, and they wanted to make the dance part interesting and just right so that the whole process would work organically.
“Our job was to avoid making the audience feel jarred when the music and dance elements are present,” Ng underlined.
Wong admitted that he never considered his work “perfect”, and that’s why he is constantly improving it. Saying this, Wong said his motto was “maybe when you wake up from sleep, new ideas will enter your head.”
Different roles in real life
The four independent creators come from different fields, and have been working together since 2019, with Wong noting that “there is always be a strong chemistry when the four of us get together”.
“During the day, we are educators, and at night, we are creators,” said Wong, who is a music producer, and has a lot of experience in holding music workshops in the community in Hong Kong. Ng is a dance teacher, while theatre director of the play, Mabina Choi (徐靈芝), is a drama tutor. Mok is a full-time playwright.
Choi said the story was about the different difficulties people face in life, and she believed these actors can be great storytellers because they have the unique characteristics for their roles, as the actors come from different backgrounds but share the same passion and pure love for performance.
Wong said he believed that theatre comes from life, and actors from different backgrounds could give the show an even more lively vibe in their performance, and the team has tried their best to activate their life experience to make it a more vivid performance.
Local theatre to go further
The team said they want to take their Cantonese musical even further, as theatre transcends language, and they believed that Cantonese plays should have a place in the world with their own unique value.
Wong said he insists on writing Cantonese musicals because it can bring Cantonese culture to the world and make it accessible to people elsewhere.
“I see more theatre workers trying to promote theatre in Macau,” said Choi, who is from Macau, and studied at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts and returned to Macau to devote herself to theatre, pointing out that there is no professional theatre education institution that plays a role in educating professional theatre workers in Macau, which made it difficult for local theatre groups to develop.
According to Choi, the team sees the whole production process as climbing Mount Qomolangma, [known as Mount Everest in the West] which is difficult but is also accompanied by great joy. “In order to create great work, we are willing to bear the suffering,” the team said.
The team also expressed special thanks to the Cultural Affairs Bureau (ICM), which gave them strong support in making the idea happen, saying that the team hope to continue to improve their play and showcase it in different places, and these performances will be the start of it all.
The musical runs for five performances from tomorrow to Sunday and ticket prices are 180 patacas. Tickets for The Walk-in Family can be purchased at http://www.macauticket.com/TicketWeb/ProgramInfo.aspx?proCode=P-003409.
The shows are on at 7:45 p.m. tomorrow, 2:45 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. on Saturday and 2:45 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. on Sunday.
This poster downloaded from the IC website yesterday promotes The Walk-in Family show.
These undated photos provided by The Walk-in Family production group yesterday shows actors rehearsing for the show.
This photo taken by The Walk-in Family production group recently shows the four main creators, playwright Mok Keng Fong (left), music director EK Wong (second from left), theatre director Mabina Choi (second from right), and choreographer Annette Ng posing to “beg for donations”.
