Chestnuts 3D : yeah yeah yeah

This was my first ‘Chestnuts’ outing and it was hilarious. Ok, the full name of the show is “Chestnuts 3D: Fried Monty aka A Nightmare on Glee Street Oh Yeah Oh Yeah Oh Yeah!”. As you can see, one can expect many subjects, but of course injected with lots of local flavours(or gossip). And true to Jonathan Lim’s style (as I heard), it had quite a lot of sexual references, like gay themes or words used to describe various aspects of (you know what). As a general impression, I enjoyed the second part more than the 1st half. The whole show was an array of segments, mixing themes, so I shall go by these, or at least what I remember.

1) A Nightmare on Glee Street (aka Glee vs Freddy)
This was the opening segment and of course, with strong reference to Glee or (Ghee?), a very popular TV series that I sometimes follow. A spoof of Glee would of course not be complete without ‘Sue’ (Jonathan Lim) who gave a report of what to adopt of Singapore measures. And they threw in Freddy Nightmare, who went around killing the characters off. Actually, I think this segment wasn’t so funny unless you follow Glee, and know the characters. It felt a bit long.

2) Customer service contest
The finals of this contest would be providing excellent service as pimps and mamasans. I think the more funny parts were the jokes about SIA girls, like when Judee Tan said “I’ve been in SIA for 6 years so there’s nothing new.” (something along that line)

3) The school rugby/club incident(s)
I actually kind of liked this segment as they portrayed the way it would have been if it were to happen in other clubs in school, like the debate society, contemporary dance club, air rifle club, drama club, choir, etc.

4) the IP Man
Ip Man versus I.P. (Intellectual Property) Man. The funniest part of this segment was the subtitling. Although it was a bit fast for some, I guess one tried to catch as many parodies as possible. You’ve got to understand the Mandarin speech to fully appreciate the jokes where similar sounding Chinese words were translated to hilarious phrases/terms, e.g. 规矩 translated into tortoise department (龟局). Haha…talk about creativity. Think I might look at subtitles differently now.

5) Inception
Opening the 2nd Act was a spoof of Inception. This was a total dig at “the Singapore Dream”, i.e. this year’s NDP theme of “Live Our Dreams, Fly Our Flag”, and it’s laws and regulations (specifically fines). One would think about how we’ve been fed with all these notions of patriotism since young. Not that we’re not lah…right?

6) December Drains
Nope, no typo there but a hilarious spoof to the recent Toy Factory musical December Rains. This was one of the main highlights of the show and guess what? Kit Chan was sitting just in front of me! She was enjoying herself nevertheless, laughing lots. A natural inference of “drains” would be the reference of the flooding incidents around the island plus the “50 years theory”. Naturally, what Ying Xiong was protesting here would be on this issue and the “people up there” and they really brought out the question in my mind about the song 《抉择》 – 这是梁文福写的吗？Other songs adapted were 《最幸福的事》 (iPhone)、《我该怎么做》 and 《请你告诉他》. Jonathan Lim did very well when he played Kit Chan, if National Day didn’t fall on Monday – he alternated between singing Home and 《请你告诉他》. A mighty feat!

7) Ivory Low Ah Kew (aka Ris Low’s sister)
A bimbotic display by Judee Tan with all the “Boomz” read as Ivory Low IQ. Ha! She did an excellent job and took digs at YOG and of course, the YOG song by JJ Lin “Oh Yeah”, teaching us how to remember the cheer actions. She was a natural as she made seemingly bimbotic responses.

Ah well, there were actually a lot of references but I can’t list them all out. What was interesting of the scene transitions was the use of those irritating call transfer mechanisms that companies put in place – “press 1 for…”. However, it was a bit over-used, so didn’t really have that punch anymore along the way. But it was just to buy time, so I guess it was ok.

The highlights of the show would have to be the spoofs of December Rains and the Ris Low’s sister segment, which drew the most laughs and applause. The cast was great with special mention of Judee Tan. Rodney Oliveiro has much improved from when I first saw him on stage (JBJ?), which wasn’t that bad lah. I think I saw him on TV before long ago, which wasn’t too impressive then. Didn’t know he spoke Mandarin. What I didn’t enjoy would probably be the times when the joke was lost on me, which might not be a bad thing (coz I think they might have been sexual references), and also the dig at churches (I was especially sensitive when reference to FCBC was made).

Interestingly, the audience were pretty generous in their laughter; they laughed at almost everything, even though I was thinking if those parts were really funny. But it was an entertaining experience.