What Is LIAMST!?

Simply put, Love Is A Many-Splendoured Thing!(LIAMST!) is a musical consisting of young people performing old time songs and dances. It is a two-and-a-half hour musical celebration of Western popular love songs and dances from 1900 to 1980. 


Budding young talents recreate the timeless moments and even add their own flair to recapture the magical times of the past. Songs and dance forms that have themes of romance, thrills and friendship will be revisited. The musical brings you  back in time to relive the richest periods of the past.


With old time favourites ranging from 'Catch A Falling Star' to the 'End Of The World' and popular dances such as Charleston, Jive and Quickstep, this production is bound to create a nostalgic experience of extravagant proportions.

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Sponsorship and Support

LIAMST! began as a private undertaking of a group of Sunway College students and their lecturer under the auspices of Montfort Boys Town. From Day One, the temptation to “take the easy way out” and lean on the College as a benefactor was keenly resisted. Instead, there was a strong resolve to face the challenge of securing full funding from the corporate sector. 

To date, “taking the bull by the horns” has paid off in terms of significant funding flowing in from China Shipping (Malaysia) Agency Sdn Bhd, MJ Department Stores Sdn Bhd, Glenmarie Estates Sdn Bhd, Tonik Asia Group Sdn Bhd and Bandar Raya Developments Bhd. 

Despite the generosity of these corporate entities to which we express our heartfelt gratitude, we have hitherto raised less than half of our production cost. So if you believe in young people and are feeling generous as you read this, you know what to do! 

The Sunway College Management, for its part, has been particularly generous in extending to us the use of all existing facilities in the Bandar Sunway campus. Hence LIAMST! can be considered to be a Sunway-supported event.

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Our Beneficiary

Montfort Boys Town is the biggest charitable welfare and vocational training centre in Malaysia. Established in 1959 with a vision to care for and empower underprivileged youth, Montfort has a rich half-century history of helping young people stay away from social ills through its character-building philosophy. By providing “youth at risk” with marketable skills, the institution has transformed disadvantaged teenagers into “contributing members of society”. To date, the lives of some 5,000 young men and 80 young women have been turned around in this way. This marvelous work continues to thrive today through the generosity of faithful contributors and benefactors.


More information about Montfort’s operations can be found in their brochure: https://docs.google.com/open?id=1ErP_XN4vKSaSC0RYh6K8ZCo7qZa3s7qsTSFgYJM0mMDfdaghl5r8BUuHiRQ6

Testimonials from their very own students can be found in their CNY 2012 Newsletter:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=1l57w5IUs8T9g2gzhb0JME7MD5JXXyefjXwBZO8jFbLZ1y8G01v21lY7Qhqs_

For more information, visit their website at www.montfort.org.my.

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Appeal

We believe that the general public will be drawn to the nostalgic nature of our presentation since we will be celebrating the work of many of the last century’s greatest performers. We have carefully chosen popular mainstream music, the kind that most people would have grown up listening to. With 1980 as our cut-off date, the most recent of our selections will be more than thirty years old. Hence our target audience is people in their thirties, forties, fifties and sixties. To put it candidly, LIAMST! is not your typical family show. You would not want to sit through two and a half hours of ‘oldies’ unless you really fancy that kind of stuff.

In making our selection, we paid special attention to five big names that loomed gigantically over the popular music scene – Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Cliff Richard, ABBA and The Bee Gees. To be sure, there have been a number of other great performers but we could not consider them all. So we included something from Frank, Bing, Pat, Connie, Neil, Doris, and the like. Our song selections will include delightful classics such as “By The Light Of The Silvery Moon”, “O Danny Boy”, “Somewhere, My Love”, “Vaya Con Dios”, “Catch A Falling Star”, “Where The Boys Are”, “The End Of The World”, “Love Me For A Reason” and “Tie A Yellow Ribbon ‘Round The Ole Oak Tree”. The dance offerings, beginning with rag and ending with disco, will showcase some standard Latin and Ballroom fare with a generous sprinkling of the rarely-witnessed Charleston as a special feature.

Critics have warned that we will face great difficulty filling a total of some 4000 seats because we have “no name” in the local entertainment scene. However, we believe that the very idea of young persons performing songs and dances from a bygone era will be something of a novelty amongst older people. While we expect the audience to be critical, we also believe that they would be quite ready to give due credit to a group of teenagers who are supposed to know nothing about the songs and dances that were popular when their parents and grandparents were growing up!

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Concept

Our presentation, unlike most musicals, has no script. Instead, we have created a musical tapestry by weaving together some of the most popular love songs that appeared during the period 1900 to 1980. Hence the title, “Love Is A Many-Splendoured Thing!”

Interspersed with these songs will be 13 dance forms that caught the fancy of the public, some fleetingly, others more abidingly. Our tapestry comprises 23 segments variously categorized as “chronological”, “thematic” or “legendary”, each segment containing a medley of 5 or 6 songs tied together by a common ‘thread’. 

The train logo depicts our intention to take the audience on a tapestry-unfolding ride down memory lane. All music will be live, re-created and improvised from the originals by a ten-piece ensemble.

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Inspiration

The inspiration for our presentation has been drawn from The Black and White Minstrel Show, a song-and-dance programme that was popular during the late 1970s. In studying the production aspects of that show, we became convinced that it would be possible for non-professionals to stage something almost as entertaining.

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Who We Are

WHO WE ARE

We are a group of college students, led by one of our lecturers, preparing assiduously for a musical presentation that will feature some 130 Western popular songs and 13 dances covering an 80-year period. We strongly feel that what we have created is worthy of a public audience and have already booked a large auditorium for four performances in July 2012.


It is our intent to meet our projected costs entirely through individual and corporate sponsorship so that all proceeds from the musical can go to our sole beneficiary, Montfort Boys Town, an institution that has a 52-year history of working with “youth at risk”.


Our final team would consist of 16 singer-performers, 8 off-stage singers, 24 dancers, 10 musicians, 20 management team members and 15 production support team members. We are currently at about 80% full strength and urgently need to ‘beef up’ the team. While most of our members happen to be pre-university students of Sunway College, we will welcome anyone who is prepared to be committed to what we are doing.

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