NEWSFLASH 

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HK CRITIC RAVES OVER MONIQUE’S HK PERFORMANCE

Hong Kong, Feb. 15, 2000 - Monique Wilson made a big splash last month at the Star Alliance Hong Kong City Festival, an international gathering of some of the world's most prestigious theater groups. Monique staged ‘Classical Monique,’ a one-woman dramatic and musical collage which was a production of her own New Voice Company.

The South China Morning Post (Jan. 26, 2000 issue) applauded Monique in this raving review by David Phair:

Monique Wilson led her audience on an emotional roller-coaster. This was an evening of the tortuous ups and downs of falling in -- and ultimately out of -- love.

Her repertoire was both brave and diverse. It embraced music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Marvin Hamlisch, and verse by the likes of William Shakespeare and Christina Rossetti.

Given the eclectic nature of the material, it meshed together surprisingly well. That was, in large part, due to Wilson, one of the Philippines' foremost actresses.

She managed to move effortlessly from song to spoken word.

Props, which initially were fairly districting, helped to move the production through the stages of love. Wilson pulled off the wraps from various objects just as you might peel away the layers of a relationship.

Perhaps the most compelling section was near the start, when she performed Shakespeare's sonnet Shall I Compare Thee and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's How Do I Love Thee, written by the poet during her courtship with Robert Browning. Powerful, moving and provocative, they seemed to perfectly capture the mood of falling in love.

Romance moved to recrimination and George Bernard Shaw's St. Joan was the French heroine pleading to be heard yet driven by self doubt.

Tell Me On A Sunday, even for those with reservations about Lloyd Webber music, managed to convey that acceptance of fate when a relationship finally dies.

Wilson chose the popular Love Changes Everything from Lloyd Webber's Aspects Of Love to add to this new dawn.

Her music was bright, bouncy, filled with a sense of indomitable optimism.

There was an abrupt change of mood and it was time to start life afresh: the inclusion of Mrs. Allonby from Oscar Wilde's A Woman Of No Importance offered a needed, well-timed interlude.

Brazen and haughty, she raised a laugh with her assertion that "the ideal man should entertain us!"

The same could be said of the ideal woman and, rest assured, Wilson's audience came away with a smile on their faces. (end of review)

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