Interview: Cheeyang Ng Tells Underrepresented Stories in FAT, FEMME AND ASIAN at Joe's Pub

Cheeyang Ng is going to be back at Joe’s Pub this Saturday October 5th with their new solo show, Fat, Femme and Asian. The 7 pm show will feature Ng, Singapore’s first Campus Superstar and Princess Grace Award winner, performing an evening of songs from their various musicals-in-development, including Eastbound with Khiyon Hursey (Hamilton), Māyā with Eric Sorrels (Kennedy Center), The Phoenix with Desdemona Chiang (AFI DWW+) and Eric Sorrels. Additionally, their will be a sneak peek at their solo show, Legendary, and their viral TikTok originals inspired by Heartstopper.

Read a conversation with Ng about the show and their journey to champion underrepresented voices.

[This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity]

What are you most looking forward to about your upcoming show at Joe’s Pub?

I'm very excited to come back to Joe's Pub. I haven’t done a solo show in a really long time, a couple of years, actually. And I’m excited to share some of the new stuff I’m writing across multiple projects and to work with some of the talent that I’ve worked with over the past couple of years. It’s an all Asian cast so I'm really excited to share a lot of these Asian stories with the audience. A lot of them will be hearing it for the first time. A lot of the songs will be performed for the first time.

Are there any particular songs that you're looking forward to sharing at this concert?

Yeah. I mean, I'm excited for all my projects, but the two shows that are furthest along that I'm really excited to share... One of them’s a solo show called Legendary. It's something that I've been working on with Musical Theater Factory in the past year. We just did a closed-door private reading of it in August. And so, I'm excited to share some of that material. We have a string quartet on stage that's playing one of the songs from the show, which will be the first time I get to hear it with a string quartet. And the other show I'm really excited about is Māyā  the Musical. We are working on a whole bunch of things this year, going into next year.

Māyā  the Musical is a show that set in 1930s British India, and we've been working on it for about five years now, and we're having our first public concert presentation of it later, in November Prospect Theater and National Asian Artist Project at Symphony Space. So this will be highlights from those shows and more, but those are the two that I'm the most excited about. Oh, and Māyā  is going to London in 2025.

What is your musical writing process like?

I usually have a collaborator. A lot of the songs that I've written for my shows are written with my collaborator Eric Sorrels. And my solo show is something that I'm writing by myself for the first time, both music and lyrics. I'm usually story, book and music.

In terms of my process, I think I'm a very story-driven person and all the songs from the show that I'm sharing are often really like big, epic, Asian musicals.

I wouldn't say that all of them are huge Asian musicals, but they're all centering queer, Asian, immigrant stories and some kind of like intersection between that. So the audiences who are coming to the Joe’s Pub show can get a good sense of who I am as a writer, the stories that I'm excited to tell, the range of stories that I'm excited to tell.

And a lot of these stories are not really presented on the American stage. So I'm just really excited to have the platform to introduce these songs to the world.

Who do you think the audience for your show is?

Anyone excited about new musicals. Anyone who is interested in discovering the next generation of writers. I feel like, [Benj] Pasek and [Justin] Paul, for example, started pretty humbly at the Johnny Mercer Songwriters Project, for example, which I was also part of a couple years ago. And I think the show is for people who are interested in hearing things that are not really available on the Broadway stage right now and center stories that are unconventional.

I think my strength is in melding traditional Eastern music with contemporary Broadway pop. And so, that's kind of what you get a sense of when you come to the show, when you hear something that's fresh but also familiar. And so, it's like an amalgamation of the two.

Is there anything else that you like to add?

We're actually bringing this show to London in November. So, this will be like, the New York version of the show. And then in November, we're doing a London, UK version of the show with London Asian actors. I think that the show itself will feel like a reintroduction of my growth as a writer, as a person, but at the same time, for people who are not familiar with my work, it will be a really nice introduction to the land and the stories and perspectives that I champion. And I am definitely the first Singaporean musical theater writer to have performed at Joe’s Pub. The very first one that I did [there] was in 2018. And so, audiences can get to see an evolution since then, and also if they’re interested in hearing perspectives from an international lens, it will be very exciting to come to the show.

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Tickets to Fat, Femme and Asian are available on Joe’s Pub’s website.

Learn more about Cheeyang Ng at www.cheeyang.com.

Header photo credit: The Apex Project

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