School musical lacks spunk

WHAT is Detention Katong about? On the surface, it's a musical comedy set in fictional Geylang Girls Secondary School where the girls are divided into cliques and the teachers have strange quirks.

But beyond this, the musical splinters into several subplots with no satisfactory conclusion for most of them. There's a mother-daughter melodrama involving the school's top student Amanda Chin (Valerie Choo) and her apparently licentious mother (Serene Chen). There's a series of sketches centred on the staff. There is a cautionary tale about the young and its use and abuse of social media. And there are a couple of budding romances that go nowhere.

Written by Selena Tan and co-directed by her and George Chan, Detention Katong is the first full musical by Tan's company Dream Academy since 2009's Sing Dollar. By now, the company has established a terrific reputation for its stand-up shows and musical revues featuring iconic characters such as The Dim Sum Dollies and Broadway Beng. But its ability to create a musical with a full dramatic arc comes into question here.