Hysterically Brazen: Meenah And Cheenah Says Everything We’re Too Shy To Say

If you could find a way to extract, purify and condense the crude, coarse humour of every diehard Singaporean kopitiam connoisseur with coffee-stained teeth and darkened gums, you’d get one half of Meenah And Cheenah’s heady concoction of razor sharp humour. Distil one potent teaspoon of deadly sarcasm from a makcik in Geylang selling goreng pisang and mix it together with the crystalized essence of an ah lian’s crude sense of speech. Blend all these ingredients together with the collective experience of living in Singapore’s dense social ecosystem, and you’ll end up with a play so funny it’ll leave you in stitches for weeks.

Featuring Siti Khalijah and Judee Tan, Dream Academy’s Meenah And Cheenah is one local production you don’t want to miss out on. Written by decorated playwright Alfian Sa’at, the play is a series of sketches describing the tenuous friendship between a meenah and a cheenah in its different forms and intensities. To loosely quote an expression used in the play, it was so crazy I could have had my breasts slip out from all that havoc on stage. This alone should reassure you of any doubts about catching it before the end of its run.

Siti and Judee carried out their parts as executors of Alfian Sa’at’s comical endeavours, without so much as a step out of place. Both actresses juggled several sketches by fluctuating their mannerisms and character quirks with laser-sharp precision in between scenes. From two preteens on the cusp of puberty fawning over a mutual love interest to eccentric office ladies sharing a table at dinner time, each scene gave ample opportunity for our comedic veterans to feed off of each other and bring some of Singapore’s craziest characters to life. Some scenes left me in stitches at how painfully accurate certain clichés were, whereas other scenes pushed certain stereotypes to the moon and back.