Cover Jacintha Abisheganaden reunites with Dick Lee in ‘Lush Life’ at the 2026 Singapore International Festival of Arts this month (Photo: Rui Liang)
Jacintha Abisheganaden reunites with Dick Lee in ‘Lush Life’ at the 2026 Singapore International Festival of Arts this month (Photo: Rui Liang)
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A new documentary performance traces Singaporean jazz chanteuse Jacintha Abisheganaden’s life in music—and an artistic bond that has endured across decades
It was, as Jacintha Abisheganaden tells it, the sort of beginning that only makes sense in retrospect: two teenagers meeting in the Singapore Youth Choir in the 1970s, one writing songs at speed, the other singing them almost as soon as they were written. “When he sat at the piano, it felt as though you were in the presence of someone like Elton John,” she says of pop icon Dick Lee. “The songs were perfectly written, perfectly crafted.”
Decades later, after collaboration, marriage, divorce and a friendship that has outlasted all of it, they meet again in Lush Life, the new work written and directed by T:>Works artistic director Ong Keng Sen, debuting at the 2026 Singapore International Festival of Arts (Sifa). The production, which will be staged at Victoria Theatre on May 29 and 30, is described as an intimate documentary performance built from personal narratives, archival traces and live music. In Abisheganaden’s telling, its subject is both simpler and more elusive: what a life looks like when music has run through every chapter of it. Chong Tze Chien, in his first year as festival director of Sifa 2026, first approached her. She, in turn, called Lee. What began as an invitation to sing deepened into something larger once Ong entered the picture. “This story unfolds across the decades of my life,” she says. “The music, in a way, is linked to each stage.”
That span is central to the piece. Abisheganaden is now in her late sixties; Lee turns 70 this year. “The story [spans the years from] 17 to 70,” she says. “And it has all gone by so fast.” With characteristic wit, she adds that bringing Lee into Sifa is “my birthday present to him”. Beneath the quip sits something more tender: an acknowledgement that longevity in art is rarely linear. It is made instead of returns, detours and renewed connection.
Above Abisheganaden (pictured right) and Lee (left) were married from 1992 to 1997 (Photo: Jacintha Abisheganaden)
Abisheganaden (pictured right) and Lee (left) were married from 1992 to 1997 (Photo: Jacintha Abisheganaden)
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Their history has often been flattened into the shorthand of muse and composer. There is some truth in that. Lee wrote many early songs with her voice in mind, and she remembers the period before he left to study in England as one of close artistic proximity. “He not only had my voice in mind, but found it inspiring enough to write many songs around it,” she says. Yet she speaks of that chemistry with less sentimentality than precision. What she recognised in him early was an unusual ability to turn impulse into form, idea into event. “Whatever he does translates very quickly into something real,” she says. “If it starts as five songs, it becomes a show.”
When asked who Lee is to her now, Abisheganaden reaches for a description that is at once affectionate and precise. In the early years, she says, “he was my guru”. He styled her, rehearsed with her, told her what to wear, drew her into his orbit and, later, called her back to Singapore from the US, where she had been living in the ’80s, for the Asean Pop Song Festival. “He’s been pivotal in my life,” she says. That does not erase the darker passages, but it does place them within a relationship whose deepest constant has been music. “We’ve never not stayed in touch,” she says. “It’s a good working relationship.”
Above Abisheganaden's career has spanned music, theatre, television and audiophile recording (Photo: Jacintha Abisheganaden)
Abisheganaden's career has spanned music, theatre, television and audiophile recording (Photo: Jacintha Abisheganaden)
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Even so, to stop at Lee would be to narrow her story too much. As Abisheganaden points out, people tend to remember that marriage and divorce, while overlooking the others. Her marriage to Lee, from 1992 to 1997, was also among the most publicly visible chapters of her life: his marked by the regional success of The Mad Chinaman album, hers by an already established career in jazz and theatre. But Lush Life restores the fuller picture. Before Lee, she was married to the American lawyer and diplomat David Scheffer; after him came the journalist Koh Boon Pin, with whom she had her son. Each belonged to a different chapter in a life shaped as much by work and reinvention as by romance.
That sense of identity being forged through work began early. Abisheganaden grew up in a household where music was both atmosphere and expectation. Her uncle, Paul Abisheganaden, led a major local orchestra and choir long before the Singapore Symphony Orchestra took its current form. Musicians rehearsed in the family's living room; her mother, also a singer and pianist, cooked for them; and her father, Alexander Abisheganaden, who played double bass in the orchestra, took her to Victoria Theatre even on school days. “It was a very creative household,” she says. “A very unusual upbringing in that sense. A lot of live music.”
Above The songbird with her father, Singaporean guitar maestro Alexander Abisheganaden
The songbird with her father, Singaporean guitar maestro Alexander Abisheganaden
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NOTES ON A LUSH LIFE
It was also a household of discipline. Music was the reward, not the escape. If she wanted to sing, she had to do well in school. That balance still shapes the way she speaks about craft. Her route into jazz was neither abrupt nor romantic. Pop came first, in part because Lee was already in her life. The turn came in 1976, when she won the local television talent contest Talentime after her group made a last-minute switch in repertoire, moving from Roberta Flack to retro jazz songs. “Those were jazz songs and I knew that was my groove,” she says. Even then, she understood the limits of the market. “You couldn’t do it as a young Asian girl. Who would buy these records?”
The answer, eventually, was a global audience reached by other means. After years moving through theatre, television, music and family life, she recorded a demo in Taiwan that found its way to producer Ying Tan at the US-based Groove Note audiophile label. From 1998, her music travelled far beyond Singapore through online distribution. Abisheganaden does not describe that period as an awakening to fame; she had already known visibility at home. “I still receive cheques to this day every two and a half months,” she says. In an industry full of vanity, royalties remain her preferred measure of reality.
Read more: Spin city: Vinyl bars and restaurants in Singapore to enjoy the art of analogue listening
Above Jacintha Abisheganaden pictured with Dick Lee
Jacintha Abisheganaden pictured with Dick Lee
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The deeper continuity lies in her musical ethic. She has little interest in abstraction for its own sake, and even less in showy reinvention. “I try to stay as close as possible to the original character of the song—where it came from, its genre and its composer,” she says. The point is not mimicry, but fidelity with intelligence. She honours the original form, then makes it her own. That principle helps explain the singular tension in her voice, which has long held clarity and warmth in the same breath.
Above Abisheganaden with theatre actress Frances Lee (pictured left), who portrays her younger self in 'Lush Life' (Photo: Rui Liang)
Abisheganaden with theatre actress Frances Lee (pictured left), who portrays her younger self in 'Lush Life' (Photo: Rui Liang)
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That may be why Lush Life feels so relevant now. Sifa 2026, under Chong’s first chapter of a three-year arc titled Legacy, asks what artistes inherit and what they choose to carry forward. Lush Life answers through biography, but also through form. Abisheganaden and Lee are two artistes whose public identities have long seemed settled—songbird and pop icon, jazz and bohemia, muse and maker—placed back inside lived experience. The production is described as “a conversation across styles and generations”. In Abisheganaden’s account, it sounds more intimate than that: a reckoning without rancour, a portrait painted from memory and timing.
She resists tidy conclusions. Asked whether she would choose between music, theatre and television, she replies, “Why would I have to choose? I’m a triple threat.” It is an offhand answer, but also a quiet flex. Abisheganaden has never been only one thing, and Lush Life feels strongest when it recognises that fact.
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As Senior Editor of Tatler Singapore, Hashirin champions and refines the storytelling across platforms—curating and crafting compelling profiles, cover stories and features that spotlight visionaries shaping culture, business and impact. Driven by curiosity, she draws inspiration from the artists, changemakers and trailblazers she encounters through her work. Beyond the pages of Tatler, she is an avid supporter of local theatre and delights in seeking out art in every city she visits.
