Nam Nguyen is a Toronto-based playwright, composer, lyricist and performer of Vietnamese descent. He graduated from the University of Toronto.
Drama
A Perfect Bowl of Pho
Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2021.
Forthcoming September 2021.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
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?
Links
Publisher Playwrights Canada Press
Nam Nguyen entry in The Toronto Theatre Database
Aidan Currie’s conversation with Nguyen in The Varsity, the University of Toronto student’s paper 19 March 2017