Joanna Bessey: "No Limits"..........Backstage!!! ;P

Wow! No Limits the musical was quite an experience and a fairly long journey, in terms of regular Malaysian theatre, as we were all involved in the process since March.
A launched&large-scale preview, lots of very late nights, long tech-rehearsals, many re-writes of the script and five months later, we finally arrived into performance mode at Plenary Hall, Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre (KLCC), which is a theatre that has a total seating capacity of three thousand!

Joanna and KK Wong

Box office was also unusual because the shows were mostly bought up by 'corporates' and the public only had access to a limited number of free tickets online. But since the theme of the musical was futuristic, I suppose this experimental method was apt. The only downside to this was that despite being already "sold out" and having pretty good audience numbers, it was never actually packed out.

Advertised as a Sci-Fi, Pop musical with lots of '80s songs, it promised nothing more than fun and light entertainment, as do most musicals. However, being bi-lingual, most of the sarcasm and humour was in Cantonese. So a few of my discerning, theatre-stalwart friends were sorely disappointed. Especially the non-Chinese speaking ones and understandably so. So I was really pleasantly surprised when a lot of the feedback from many others was very good! Being under no illusions, actually I was quite shocked. A lot of people and their kids had fun and really enjoyed it.

Tin, Joanna, Bella and Gloria Ting

I must confess that I myself, as an audience viewer, have never been the hugest fan of the Musical genre, but I've definitely caught the bug of enjoying being in one and the spirit of levity which it imposes! From the O.T.T. big acting (which I used to shudder at), to singing, dancing and outlandish make-up, I must say, despite the stress and set-backs of production that we inevitably had to deal with, I haven't laughed so hard during rehearsal and back-stage in a long time! Of course, having a great bunch of actors to work with really helped. A lovely cast and crew all round really (surprising as the cast, dancers, musicians, directors and crew amounted to a pretty huge group).

Having started in the theatre at the age of eleven, with twenty years of experience, but having only ever performed in a handful of musicals, I thought of myself as a very "serious" theatre actor. I even approached comedy very seriously. I mean I've spent years studying the art and various techniques with great discipline.....
BUT... the fact that, being complimented on my silly Britney Spears impression, to my cute-sy lovey-dovey scenes with Christopher, singing ability/bursting into song for no apparent reason, abnormally long eye-lashes, my cleavage-inducing corset to a rapper friend of mine even complimenting me on my dancing (?!); the fact that ALL of this still makes me chuckle happily to myself.....only proves that I'm just a much of a ham as the rest of them! There's just no denying it...