From indie music to theatre: How weish and Inch Chua reinvented themselves 

[SINGAPORE] For more than a decade, musicians weish and Inch Chua have helped shape Singapore’s underground music scene with their unique blend of experimental sounds and poetic lyricism. But for two restless creatives, even the expansive possibilities of music can sometimes feel limiting.

Both have since stepped onto the theatre stage, drawn by its scale, collaborative energy and the chance to tell longer stories. Along the way, they have discovered new audiences, fresh success and an unexpected surge of creative energy.

weish is now preparing for the return of Secondary: The Musical, the much-raved-about 2024 production for which she wrote both the script and music. The Checkpoint Theatre production was even named “Production of the Year” at the 2025 Straits Times Life Theatre Awards.

Meanwhile, Chua is currently starring as one of the sisters in Pangdemonium’s play Force Majeure, a modern reimagining of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. But in May, she will debut her own one-woman musical, Myles – Soulmate in a Box, staged by Singapore Repertory Theatre (SRT).

While both women thrived as musicians, their creative detours helped them rethink everything they thought they knew about music.

When songwriting becomes storytelling

Secondary: The Musical is drawn from weish’s own years as a literature teacher. Set in a fictional secondary school, it follows a teacher preparing to leave the classroom for a coveted posting at the teaching headquarters, torn between her ambitions and her attachment to her class.

weish wrote the book, composed the score and served as musical director, working with director and dramaturg Huzir Sulaiman over three years to shape the material into something stageable. Now, as it returns for a second run, weish finds herself challenged all over again.

“Theatre is a village enterprise with designers, stage managers, casts, coaches and coordinators,” she says – whereas underground music-making can sometimes be as simple and efficient as “I send you my file, you send me your file, we combine it”.

“It just takes so much more coordination to pull together a theatre show as opposed to a music album. But in terms of the actual complexity of the creative material, I think they’re comparable. Just different.”

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What changed most, she says, was the way she had to think about songwriting. Unlike an album where songs can exist as self-contained worlds, a musical demands that every number “carries the plot, or give different facets of a character or a relationship”.

The process was daunting for someone attempting long-form theatre writing for the first time – something she admits triggered “a lot of imposter syndrome”. Thankfully, her background in literature quietly prepared her for the task, helping her weave motifs, speech rhythms and code-switching into the script.

“Writing is blood sacrifice”

Just as Secondary grew out of weish’s years as a teacher, Chua’s one-woman musical also draws on her own life – specifically her experiments with coding and building herself an artificial intelligence “boyfriend” when she was lonely.

Her upcoming Myles – Soulmate In A Box centres on a woman who is tired of dating and turns to artificial intimacy instead. The AI partner she creates is attentive, patient and endlessly devoted. He learns her habits and emotions – but soon, unsettlingly, seems to understand her better than she understands herself.

For the past five years, Chua has been thinking about modern romance, loneliness, technology and what she describes as “the seduction of an entity that asks nothing of you and understands you completely”.

“It took me a long time to write it,” she says, “because I was at first unwilling to go as deep as I should. Eventually I realised that writing is a blood sacrifice that needs to come from some place real.

“And even after the work comes out, there is a second layer of sacrifice where you have to cull certain things so that the work becomes more accessible for an audience and drives a bigger question beyond your own pain.”

Chua is not a complete stranger to theatre-making. As a child, she performed in plays that needed a child actor to deliver short, simple lines. Then, music became her life as she spent years in Singapore’s underground music scene, fronting bands such as Allura.

Now she’s back treading the floorboards – bringing a clearer voice than ever before.

Secondary: The Musical runs from Apr 9 to 26. Myles – Soulmate In A Box runs from May 13 to 24.