The cast of the ’90s sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” reunited on Monday for a catch-up.

In his Instagram page, actor Alfonso Ribeiro shared a snap of him posing with former co-stars Will Smith, Tatyana Ali, Karyn Parsons, Daphne Maxwell Reid and Joseph Marcell. “Always amazing to spend an afternoon with my Fresh Prince family. Wishing that James Avery was still with us to make this complete,” he captioned the photo.

Avery died in 2013 due to complications from open heart surgery. He played Smith’s affluent uncle Philip Banks.

Unlike other ’90s shows that were revived or developed into a sequel, “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” would stay where it last stood-in fans’ memories, Smith made it crystal clear.

“I don’t think ever, like pretty close to when hell freezes over,” Smith told E! News last year. “Like we’re going to leave that one alone.”

Ribeiro echoed Smith’s thoughts on a possible “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” reboot. “Since the passing of my favourite dad in the world, ever on TV, the chances of a Fresh Prince [cast] coming back together will not happen,” he said in an interview with E! News years ago. “I don’t think we feel as a cast that we would do even our fans justice. We all felt like he was the centerpiece or the nucleus of that show. Without him, it just doesn’t work. So even if the whole cast comes to support me on the show, we’re not looking for that to happen.”

“The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” began airing in the US in 1990 and ended in 1996 after a strong six-season run. It revolves around the unfortunate events of Will Smith’s fictional self after he was embroiled in a basketball scuffle with teenagers in West Philadelphia. Soon after the incident, Smith’s frantic mother forced him to move with his aunt and uncle in Bel-Air, California.

Expect a “small but impactful programme” for next year’s Singapore International Festival of Arts (Sifa), says the incoming festival director.

This is because Gaurav Kripalani has a tight timeline. Named festival director designate of the annual arts event from May 1, he will spend a few months consulting the arts community and audience members here to “see what excites them” before deciding on next year’s events.

That leaves less than a year to programme a national arts festival which usually ends by September. Still, Kripalani, 45, aims high.

His goal is a “must-see” festival, with the eventual aim of putting Singapore on the cultural map as the Edinburgh of Asia.

He tells The Straits Times that he hopes one day people will visit Singapore for Sifa, just as they head to Scotland for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

“It’ll take a decade and it’ll be longer than my tenure, but I would love to be part of that journey – growing the arts festival into something that would be internationally recognised.”

The festival director designate is also artistic and managing director of the Singapore Repertory Theatre (SRT).

He has finished programming its seasons from next year to 2020 to free himself for his tenure at Sifa.

His colleague Charlotte Nors, who is currently executive director of SRT, will take over as SRT’s managing director, but he remains involved in casting and strategic planning at SRT.

Kripalani says it is too early to say whether Sifa will follow the structure set by outgoing festival director Ong Keng Sen.

Under Ong’s leadership from 2014 to last year, a main season of performances was preceded by The O.P.E.N, weeks of exhibitions, talks and performances to engage the public.

For Ong’s final edition this year, Sifa is one long season of performances from June 28 to Sept 9.

Kripalani says the national arts festival must do three things.

“One, people who live here should get the opportunity to be exposed to arts and art forms that they wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to see.

“Two, there have to be opportunities for local practitioners to do work they wouldn’t otherwise normally do since the festival is able to fund them. Three, it has to inspire a new generation of arts-lovers.”

International collaborations can be key here, allowing an exchange of ideas between theatre-makers from here and overseas.

He brings up last year, when Sifa invited famed American choreographer Bill T. Jones and members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane company to present a production with students from Lasalle College of the Arts.

“That’s going to shape the students’ lives. I’d love to find ways to do that with some of the shows we will bring in.”

Kripalani also gives Ong kudos for making the festival relevant to audiences again.

Singapore’s earlier national arts festival, the Singapore Arts Festival, faced dwindling audiences, took a hiatus for a year and was relaunched in 2014 under the leadership of Ong, artistic director of TheatreWorks. Last year, Sifa and The O.P.E.N had a record high attendance of 155,000.

If Ong set the artistic tone of the new festival, Kripalani could improve Sifa’s sustainability.

In his 21 years with SRT, he has produced more than 100 plays, including successful musicals such as The LKY Musical in 2015 and Forbidden City, a 2002 musical based on the life of Chinese empress Ci Xi.

It will be restaged here in August.

Other projects include the co-commission Battlefield, legendary director Peter Brook’s coda to his epic Mahabharata, staged here in 2015.

From 2009 to 2011, there was The Bridge Project collaboration between The Old Vic in London, BAM in New York and well-known British director Sam Mendes.

The Bridge Project staged classic Shakespearean plays here with Hollywood actors such as Ethan Hawke (The Winter’s Tale, 2009) and Kevin Spacey (Richard III, 2011).

Kripalani says of his programming aesthetic: “I want a good story. It doesn’t have to be linear, it doesn’t have to be verbal, but it has to be a good story. I want the audience to leave the theatre debating the issues in the show, not where to have dinner.

“Even if they didn’t like the show, that’s fine, they should be debating why they didn’t like it.”

akshitan@sph.com.sg

This article was first published on March 29, 2017.
Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.

British veterans and Grammy winners Basement Jaxx are one of the top draws at the fourth edition of the Singapore International Jazz Festival (Sing Jazz) at Marina Bay Sands this weekend.

The odd addition of an electronic dance act to the jazz event is not lost on Felix Buxton who, with Simon Ratcliffe, makes up the duo.

“It feels a bit funny, a bit embarrassing. So many great jazz musicians and we’re kind of playing stuff for people to dance to,” he says in a telephone interview from London.

Basement Jaxx will play a DJ set at The Late Show, a new addition to Sing Jazz which sees a variety of international acts play late-night indoor sets.

The duo are set to go on late on Friday, the first night of the three-day festival, which includes live sets by acts such as fellow Grammy winners Esperanza Spalding and Corinne Bailey Rae at the main stage outdoors.

Buxton is a big jazz fan though, and singles out American saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and Brazilian composer/musician Hermeto Pascoal as some of his favourite performers.

“They’re the kind of people I’d want to see, but I know the world has changed and jazz is not what it used to be. Of course, everything has to mutate and evolve. And dance culture has grown and there’s a definite crossover.”

Formed in 1994, Basement Jaxx rose from underground cult status to being known for some of the biggest dance hits of the last two decades – such as Red Alert (1999) and Where’s Your Head At and Romeo (both from 2001).

Their most recent album, 2014’s Junto, includes one of their most popular tunes, Never Say Never.

The London duo met in 1993 and immediately bonded over their mutual love for New York house music.

Ratcliffe was already making music in a studio in a friend’s mother’s basement and, by the following year, they had released their debut recording, an EP titled EP1.

While they initially called themselves Underground Oasis, they soon changed their monicker to Basement Jaxx, the name of a regular series of club nights they had started in nightspots around London.

In 1999, they released their debut album Remedy. Peaking at No.4 on the British charts, it cemented their place as one of the country’s top dance artists, eventually winning the Brit Award for Best Dance Act in 2002 and 2004.

Their third album Kish Kash, released in 2003, won Best Dance/ Electronic Album at the Grammys in 2005.

Buxton acknowledges that electronic dance music, or EDM, has since gone mainstream and is now the new pop music.

“That happened with disco and soul music and it’s part of the evolution. I feel happy that we were one of the shapers and there are people making a lot more money than we did.

“But in a way, it doesn’t matter because the main thing in life is to be authentic. If you’re authentic, you never have to hide, you never have to be ashamed, there’s nothing to hold you back, you can hold your head up high.”

Buxton adds that their DJ set at Sing Jazz will be quite the experience for festivalgoers, “something for the mind, the body and the soul”.

“What we do – we try to give it a shape and hopefully lift people up,” he says.

“So you’re making them not only work their bodies, but also bypass their minds and come to something higher, basically let go of themselves as individuals in the world and, hopefully, if we do really well, then they might touch something divine.”

BOOK IT / SINGAPORE INTERNATIONAL JAZZ FESTIVAL & THE LATE SHOW

• WHERE: Event Plaza and Sands Expo and Convention Centre Hall F, Marina Bay Sands, 10 Bayfront Avenue
• WHEN: Friday to Sunday, 4pm to 4am
• ADMISSION: From $108
• INFO: For full programme and tickets, go to www.sing-jazz.com

dinohadi@sph.com.sg

This article was first published on March 29, 2017.
Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.

I asked Singaporean Chinese actor Ng Chin Han if his race had any part to play in him getting the role of anti-terrorist operative Togusa in Ghost In The Shell.

The sci-fi action movie is set in a future Japan that is a melting pot of East and West.

Based in Los Angeles for the last two decades, Ng says his role was open to actors of any race, as is the case with roles in more scripts that he reads today.

He attributes the trend of “colour-blind” casting to the increasing importance of non- white markets for Hollywood content – people in those markets want to see more people like themselves on screen, he thinks.

While I applaud his optimism, I think he is wrong – for the same reason that he cites, that the box office outside America and Europe has so much clout these days.

Scarlett Johansson was cast as Major Motoko Kusanagi instead of a Japanese actress, Nat Wolff will play Light Yagami in the remake of the Death Note anime instead of a Japanese actor, and Emma Stone was cast as Allison Ng in Aloha (2015) instead of a Chinese actress because of, not in spite of, audiences in China, Japan and South Korea.

I strongly believe audiences in this region do not care about the issue of whitewashing, when a Caucasian actor is chosen over someone of a more appropriate race.

It is Asian actors struggling to find jobs in the United States and Britain who have become activists over this issue.

The casting of Caucasians instead of Asians and other races goes back to the dawn of Hollywood.

Examples include in 1972, with the casting of David Carradine in the lead of the Kung Fu television show. It carried on with Short Circuit (1986), 21 (2008), The Last Airbender (2010) and on to more recent films, such as Dr Strange (2016) and the bizarre eye-taping pantomime of Cloud Atlas (2012).

Let’s take Dr Strange as an example.

 It features British actress Tilda Swinton playing The Ancient One, which, in the source comics, is an Asian man.

In the Western media, the outrage was mighty and was reported here.

But audiences in Singapore flocked to the movie anyway, as did other fans in Asia, helping it earn more than US$650 million (S$906 million) worldwide.

It earned more than US$100 million in China and in excess of US$2 million in Singapore.

There are a couple of conclusions a Hollywood executive might draw from Dr Strange.

First, it points to how audiences in China, Japan, South Korea and Singapore are apathetic about the issue.

The second, and worse, conclusion is that Asians prefer to see a prestigious “imported” star such as Johansson, rather than, say, Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi (Pacific Rim, 2013).

So Chin Han might see more roles these days open to any race on paper, on a script.

But whether studios have the courage to follow through, when the box office in this region is telling them not to, is another matter.

This article was first published on March 29, 2017.
Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.