Pulling out the Ko Hung play.
an extract from www.alivenotdead.com/thomaslim
Saturday, Feb 2, 2008 11:22PM
Feels good to be home, I'll tell you that. So previously, I was in Macau, then Thailand for a 10 day vacation before returning home for Chinese New Year. And now that I'm back, I'm busy re-connecting with old friends and contacts, eager to re-establish working relationships with my home industry that I've neglected for awhile since I started living in Beijing 4 years ago. Now that I plan to relocate in the Hong Kong/ Macau region, I plan to do more work that link the 3 territories.
I recently got going an idea for a play that would tell of theme Survival through a real life story of the veteran Hong Kong actor Eddy Ko Hung. I linked up well known theatre director Dominic Cheung to direct this play and I would act as the younger Ko Hung in the play, with Eddy acting as himself.
The deal was to stage this play in Macau as a first stop and have the rest of the cast and all crew members come from Macau. As my newly founded company MAM is not a non-profit group, it couldn't be the representing company for this play, and as such, I allowed another theatre company BBK to handle the project. Now, BBK is a new company with no portfolio to speak of, and the reason why I agreed for them to be in charge was because my MAM partner part owns BBK too. One of MAM's missions was to work towards creating a more professional acting scene in Macau with hopes that more artists can turn full time in the near future. The first thing that we're pushing is for all actors to go through auditions before getting their roles (sounds like a no brainer for the industry outside of Macau I know). And since my MAM partner was going to be producer of this play, I thought it was understood that other than myself and Eddy, all other actors would be selected through professional auditions set up by MAM.
Unfortunately though, BBK decided to automatically cast a Macanese actor without audition and included his name in the proposal for the Macau Cultural Centre. I was furious and confronted (in a gentle manner) BBK regarding this matter. To my shock, BBK kept coming back with 'This is BBK's show, your everyone-has-to-audition rules apply only to your own MAM shows' to all my requests to remove the automatic casting of the Macanese actor. Well, ok then, if you don't know how to respect the creators of the play, and you think that now BBK is in charge and I should just step aside and be quiet, then BBK is not representing the play anymore. So I pulled Eddy and director Dominic out of the play and asked BBK to withdraw their proposal. It's a shame though, as Macau would really have benefitted from the experience of working with Eddy, Dominic and (dare I say) myself.
And BBK should have known better that Eddy and Dominic and I are still good friends and are still talking about staging the play in HK or Singapore, with or without Macau's involvement. It's such a shame really that BBK chose to behave badly. Perhaps they were just too overwhelmed with trying to make a name for themselves and the new power they would find through doing this play...
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Dec 07 Macau updates
13 Jan 14:44hrs. Flight FD3603. Macau – Bangkok.
Writing on the plane has somewhat become common practice now and I guess it’s a good thing as that should mean that I didn’t have too much free time to write recently.
So, after an extremely quiet 3 months or so in Beijing, I found a fast forward button in good old Macau and things have been racing ahead since 5 days before Christmas.
I spent 3 weeks and a bit in Macau and have got almost everything I went there for, and perhaps more. The purpose of this trip was to start a cake shop in Macau with Anna and the first two things we were most concerned with was the high cost of commercial ren
