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New musical imagines Lee Kuan Yew and Kwa Geok Choo's romance
The Straits Times
|July 17, 2025
Founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew famously called poetry "a luxury we cannot afford" in public.
But, every night of his wife Kwa Geok Choo's final two years, when she was sick and bedridden, he read her favourite poems to her.
While shows like The LKY Musical (2015) have dramatised the late Mr Lee's public and political life, a new Mandarin musical peers behind the curtains to speculate on the private romance of Mr and Mrs Lee through a great deal of extrapolation and imagination.
Toy Factory Productions' Moonlit City plays at Gateway Theatre from July 25 to Aug 3. It is directed by Goh Boon Teck, who felt there were more intimate and emotional stories of the couple to explore after he directed Toy Factory's play Kwa Geok Choo in 2022.
Debut playwright Jedidiah Huang, 30, who is also a spoken word poet, says of his script: "While no one can ever claim to know their true thoughts or actions behind closed doors, I tried my best to piece together their psyches based on a collection of different sources."
This story is from the July 17, 2025 edition of The Straits Times.
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