Come Home When It Gets Cold

天冷就回來 (If There're Seasons...), which literally means Come Home When It Gets Cold, is a Chinese musical set to the songs of 梁文福 (Liang Wern Fook) and written by acclaimed Hong Kong playwright 杜國威 (Raymond To). If you grew up listening to Chinese music, Liang's name will be a familiar one, seeing as how he was instrumental in the 新謠 (xinyao - local music, for lack of a better descriptive term) wave of the 80s and went on to pen many more hits for popular Chinese music artistes like Kit Chan and Jacky Cheung.


To took Liang's entire catalog of over 200 songs and pored over them, finally making his selection and weaving them into the plot of his play. Granted, the narrative itself is nothing to shout home about, with its overdone themes of lost love, unrequited love, searching for dreams and so on. In fact, sometimes it seemed overly insistent on nationalistic themes - why go abroad to chase your dreams when you can do it at home? - when we all know the reality isn't nearly as simple as that. In fact, I found that viewpoint mildly offensive, even. But the sheer quality of the music and lyrics overcomes all these shortcomings to make for a wonderful experience overall.

Even the hiccups were forgivable. At the matinee show I watched, neither female lead had warmed up their vocals sufficiently and ended up killing their first few numbers. It also didn't help that they were saddled with the more difficult tunes, originally sung by the incomparable Kit Chan, and they were simply not in the same league - 你酷 (You Are So Cool) was noticeably mangled in the constant switching to falsetto, a feat which Kit pulled off seemingly effortlessly. Sebastian Tan had a nice quality to his voice, but it unfortunately gave way while belting out 最後還是會 (In the End), and the poor guy croaked his way through the rest of the song. I had nothing but sympathy for him; I already feel embarrassed when I croak in karaoke - imagine what he must've felt in front of the entire sold-out Drama Centre. Of all the leads, only George Chan managed to escape unscathed from vocal issues, and sounded like the only person who had proper musical training (although Sebastian has also appeared professionally in musicals). But you know what, Liang's tunes helped me through all these.

The nostalgia factor probably helped in this. These were songs I'd grown up with, and even if I wasn't familiar with all the tunes, I'd heard all of them before, all 40 of them. As such, the emotions invoked went beyond the play into personal memories, which went a long way towards increasing my tolerance levels and feelings of goodwill. They were woven into the narrative smoothly and unobtrusively, for the most part, and it was surprising to find that sometimes, in the context of the plot, they even gained another level of meaning and emotional heft (細水長流, or Friends Forever, being a prime example). In fact, even though I was rather annoyed with most of the main characters for being wishy-washy for almost the entire duration of the play, I still teared multiple times. I think credit has to go to Liang and the music arranger Bang Wenfu (who rearranged all the songs wonderfully) for this phenomenon.

One point which I think has to be made is the fact that the songs were written over a period of 20-odd years, and solid crafting and artistry shows. Most musicals tend to have their music and lyrics churned out within a year or so, and as a result there tends to be lots of "filler" songs of inferior quality - I'd be glad if there was one particularly good song in an entire musical. Not so with this one; the quality is consistently high, and Liang's smooth melodies and deceptively simple, multi-layered lyrics have never sounded better, awkward deliveries aside.

So, in a nutshell, I don't much care for the narrative or characters, but it's got awesome music that adds so much to everything. You come out humming your favorite tunes that you loved all those years ago, with a warm fuzzy feeling inside the dark pit you call your soul. That's the main reason I like it so much, and that's also why I'm watching it for the second time next week. You should too.