One Meenah, One Cheenah, One Singapore
Reprising its 2016 success, Meenah and Cheenah is uproariously navigates of Singapore’s murky ethnic waters with humour, flair and dizzyingly quick costume changes. Judee Tan and Siti Khalijah shine on stage as comic archetypes of the ‘meenah’ and ‘cheenah’, exploring racial identity in Singapore not only as independent quantities but also as a point of intersection. The thread that weaves through the narrative seam is the story of two childhood friends – one Malay, one Chinese – who grow up against a backdrop of familiar Singaporean settings and questions.
But make no mistake: Meenah and Cheenah’s first aim is to delight. From a show-stopping opening number that sets the ecstatic tone of the production, to wigs in every size and colour, to skits that dare to imagine and stretch everything from racial origin stories to multicultural afterlives – there is little that seems out-of-bounds. Social critique and commentary come only as by-products of gags that, on less winning personalities, could be hackneyed or overdone. Jokes that rely on more stale racial stereotypes still form the bulk of the production’s humour, but come creatively repackaged. For instance, Chinese miserliness follows into the afterlife in one scene, while anthropological definitions of the “meenah” and “cheenah” are explored through rather interactive PowerPoint “slides” in another.
Perhaps what is most enjoyable about Meenah and Cheenah is how it celebrates the local vernacular, a ‘quintessential Singaporean-ness’ that can generate a huge sense of camaraderie in its audience. The fourth wall is broken – not just explicitly, such as when Siti and Tan cheekily apologises to the audience for not casting a full CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others) spectrum, but also because the audience can see fragments of themselves onstage.
Meenah and Cheenah, ultimately, offers an example of how race can be explored and celebrated on the local stage – provided you have the magnetism, warmth, and comedic prowess of actors of Tan and Siti’s calibre to bring the show to life.