Performance Schedule

 

Venue address: Drama Centre 100 Victoria Street, Level 3, National Library, Singapore 188064

CAST
Actor (In alphabetical order)	Role
Isabella Chiam	Quibble
Chio Su Ping	Torville
Candice de Rozario	Mayoress
Trey Ho	Quisk
Matthew Jasper	Eli
Dwayne Lau	Punch
Windson Liong	Nip
Andrew Lua	Mayor
Juliet Pang	Lucia
Mariel Reyes	Sharply
Magdalene See	Tuck
PRODUCTION TEAM
Director	Brian Seward
Script and Lyrics	Brian Seward
Music Composition and Arrangement	Bang Wenfu
Musical Director	Sara Wee
Choreographer	Cathy Kee
Costume and Set Design	Hella Chan
Lighting Design	Suven Chan
Technical Manager	Purpink Chung
Production Stage Manager	Mohd. Hatta
Assistant Stage Manager	Seri Chokri @ Danna
Lighting Designer	Fiona Lim
Costume Realisation	Joanne Ng Mui Huang
Stage Crew	Mohamed Farez Bin Mohamed Najid
	Khairul Anuar Bin Hamid
	Nurul Ain
Front Of House Manager	Esther Teo Kim Luan
Marketing Manager	Sharon Yusop
Administrator	Jennifer Ong
Movement Consultant	Christina Sergeant
Set Illustration	Marcus Lim
Set Design Assistants	Wong Mei Kuan
	Nur Farina Binte Sidik

 

You Are Special is the biggest production in our six-year history.

 

It all started in 2005, when a Church group, who wanted to put up a musical, approached me. They suggested Max Lucado’s wonderful book, “You Are Special”. I read it and was convinced we could do something good with it. However, I felt that the story was a bit short to create a full scale musical. We found that another in his series of “Wemmicksville” books would fit very well – “You Are Mine”, so I began work on combining the two stories. The result was a 70-minute musical, with a cast of almost 50 church members, from the age of 6 to over 50 years from Moriah Assembly of God. Bang Wenfu wrote the music, the very excited and enthusiastic group of actors, singers and dancers worked their hardest, and managed to produce a wonderfully exuberant production, which ran for four sold out shows at Alliance Française Theatre.

Although it was great fun, we thought that was going to be the end – but it wasn’t.

 

Earlier this year, we found that the production we had planned for November 2007 was no longer available for us to do. What could have been a disaster was changed to a challenge. I suggested that we re-stage “You Are Special”, but this time with a cast of professional actors. We contacted Max Lucado, who generously gave us permission to use his work again, and even more generously allowed us to use his artwork for our production.

 

To re-stage this show at the prestigious and much larger Drama Centre meant a major re-write, shrinking the cast to just eleven actors, trimming some of the scenes, and expanding others, writing new songs, and finding a team of actors, designers and creative directors who were up to the task of putting this story of ten wooden puppets and a woodcarver on stage!

 

For fans of the books, you will notice a few unfamiliar characters on stage, as well as some familiar faces. We expanded and developed the story line, and explored characters who were just briefly mentioned in the books. I added one character. When I asked the question, "who do they buy the boxes from, and who comes up with all the money-making schemes?" the answer was… Torville! Torville adds another dimension to the story - the pursuit of money and possessions at all costs. Thankfully Max Lucado was fine with the idea.

 

We hope that you will enjoy, be enlightened and hopefully be touched by this musical production. We believe that there’s something here for everyone, whether you are a child, or a parent – and we hope that, like Punch and his friends, you will realise that every one of us is special, not for anything that we can do, or possess, but for who we are – as unique and beautiful creations.