Rooting/Routing for the Future

Baba Alvin Tan, Artistic Director of The Necessary Stage, charts a blueprint for the future of Wayang Peranakan, while Baba Richard Tan recounts the inspiration and process of creating Nya, Jangan Marah

The Peranakan Magazine engaged Baba Alvin Tan on the evolution of Peranakan community theatre.

What is the key challenge when working on community theatre projects versus commercial productions?

Alvin Tan (AT): The essential challenge is excavating materials of heritage value. Creating plays beyond entertainment enables us to facilitate communal reflection on what aspects of our heritage to preserve, what to adapt or renovate to keep them relevant to the times, and what to do away with because they may perhaps be negative traits, such as sexism, racism, and toxic elements and values embedded in our cultural thinking.

Secondly, I consider how to apply the sensibilities and worldviews excavated to storytelling so as to decolonise Singapore’s contemporary theatre.

Working on several projects, locally and regionally, would allow us to develop a pedagogy of contemporising the Wayang Peranakan and fueling contemporary theatre in Singapore.

When we work on more commercial works, our focus is to align the composition to the capacity of the audience as it needs to fulfill their needs for the works to be sustainable. Whereas working with a community would require the practitioners to draw on the principles of applied theatre to distill the heritage-worthy materials to generate new materials for theatre today.

Any thoughts about the importance of value transmission, which is a much deeper part of our heritage as compared to a more visceral fascination with our food and fashion?

AT: Beyond the colours of our batik and kebayas, and the gastronomical pull of our cuisine, our values, worldviews, and sensibilities are equally important and urgent to preserve, discuss and engage. That can only happen if and when we work intergenerationally, meaning having the veteran babas and nyonyas work collaboratively and meaningfully with the younger generation Peranakans, and those who are interested in the heritage.

Equally important is for us to work with a spectrum of babas and nyonyas in the Southeast Asian region (not just Singapore, Malacca, and Penang) so we grow in our consciousness with regard to the diversity and complexities of the multiple cultural manifestations of the Peranakan heritage.

Babas Alvin Tan and Richard Tan collaborated with a cast of veteran and newer Wayang Peranakan performers to create Nya, Jangan Marah, which was staged on 30 August 2025 at the Feative Arts Theatre in Tampines Hub.

The production was a playful yet poignant evening featuring four stories that delve into the tug-of-war between tradition and transformation within the Peranakan community. Set against the backdrop of contemporary Singapore, where rapid change often outpaces cultural continuity, these stories peeled back the intricate layers of heritage, memory, and identity.

Richard Tan: Together with Baba Alvin Tan, when we started out with Tapestry of Peranakan Stories last year, our dreams and visions to bring Perankan Theatre to a new stage, germinated. Nya Jangan Marah is a milestone, charting new ways of telling poignant, true to heart, Peranakan stories, with relevance to where we are today.

Four short stories emerged with the potential to expand further into four full plays (all in good time), that covers past, present & future situations as we Peranakans now ponder, wonder, reflect on our identity, our way of life.

We considered our cherita dulu kala: those long gone grand and glorious achievements, our finest collection of artefacts (they’ve found their place in museums and antique shops), it is now time to take our history and heritage forward with stories that resonate with the present to connect to our next generation.

When first approached by producer Rashida Arshad to come up with a modern Peranakan musical, I recalled how Baba Alvin and I started by looking at everyday situations that our parents faced. We studied their ways of coping and overcoming them, then applied how we could have done it differently with our creativity and years of theatre experience. Perhaps we can encourage others to share their diverse stories too.

With this, we go forward – no more looking back.