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Nam, a procrastination-prone Vietnamese Canadian university student, sets out with the vague ambition to write a musical about his diaspora as embodied by food, particularly the world-famous noodle soup pho. What follows is pure meta musical, genre-bending through thousands of years of history, featuring rapping ancient kings, communist spies, dancing sharks and refugees, and awkward first dates in suburbia. However, Nam eventually finds himself caught between his different characters as each argues what pho (the food and the show) truly represents, and he struggles to find an answer that will satisfy everyone—in the end, isn’t this just a bunch of silly soup songs?
“A fresh new musical that pulses with life, anarchic energy and invention.” —Glenn Sumi, NOW Magazine
Nam Nguyen is a Toronto-based playwright and lyricist of Vietnamese descent. His publisher forced him to write this bio less than a month after he graduated from the University of Toronto, at a time when his only work of note was this one. Nam was named one of NOW Magazine’s Breakthrough Stage Artists of 2019 following the premiere presentation of A Perfect Bowl of Pho by fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company. His plays have been performed in theatres all across the TTC streetcar network.