Asian Pirate Musical: six years of queer time-travelling pirates

Zhui Ning Chang and Jade Leamcharaskul on writing pirates who refuse to be romanticised

Asian Pirate Musical has been a long time in the building. What started as a sold-out work-in-progress at the Vaults in 2020 became a concert showcase at the Pleasance in 2024, then a studio cast album, and now, six years on, its first full production, opening at Upstairs at the Gatehouse on 28 July.

The premise sits somewhere between legend and speculative fiction: a storm in 2049 throws a lone pirate together with seafarers pulled from across time, among them the 14th century Muslim navigator Zheng He and the 19th century pirate queen Sek Yeong, alongside imagined 21st century climate survivors and 23rd century space revolutionaries. The book, music and lyrics are credited to a collective of six writers: Zhui Ning Chang, Frey Kwa Hawking, Jade Leamcharaskul, Sarita Lewis, Nemo Martin and XANA.

Zhui Ning Chang (director and co-writer) and Jade Leamcharaskul (lead composer) spoke to Red Bus Londinium ahead of opening night.

Red Bus: The show has been six years in development, from the sold-out Vaults work-in-progress in 2020 to this first full production. What has changed most significantly about the show over that time, and what has stayed constant?

Zhui Ning Chang: The core concept has remained the same: Asian Pirate Musical has always been a story about queer time-travelling pirates who meet in the 21st century and have to figure out how to become a crew together. What changed most was the scale of that story, from three acts to one act and now back to a traditional two-act musical. We experimented a lot in the early years and generated a sprawling story with an excess of material, but that helped us whittle it down to the core of the story and what we wanted to convey to audiences.

Jade Leamcharaskul: From a music perspective, the production process changed the most. Sarita (Lewis, co-composer) and I were performing instrumentals live on stage in the original Vaults version, while the most current iteration relies on pre-recorded backing tracks. At the Vaults, since we were limited to two people and personal skillsets, we had to compose to our own playing abilities. But now with backing tracks, we could really explore a vast palette of sounds and instruments. One day we’ll perform everything live!

Red Bus: The creative team is a collective of six writers sharing book, music and lyrics. How did that collaboration work in practice? Were different areas of the story or score led by different people, or was it genuinely a shared process throughout?

Zhui Ning Chang: The story was a fully shared process. We wanted everyone to feel an equal sense of ownership with the narrative arc and the characters. We held so many online Zooms where the six of us storyboarded scene by scene, character arc by character arc, and then we broke the entire thing apart and put it back together again. We assigned different people to lead on certain scenes or songs, but the process is open and everyone is welcome to weigh in with feedback and suggestions. Whenever I was stuck on a difficult section, I always found it reassuring that I could bounce off five other people to solve it collaboratively.

Jade Leamcharaskul: It took a while to figure out a working process that worked for everyone, as we had to consider six different ways of creative working. Part of the process was pinging songs back and forth between the writers and composers, figuring out where and how a song lands. For example, ‘Pass the Bok Choy’ had a back-and-forth between Frey (Kwa Hawking) and Sarita for a while to figure out the lyrics and first draft of music, before I took over with orchestration and arranging to flesh it out. Then it was another process of preparing music scores and vocal references for the music directors and actors to study once the song and lyrics were locked.

Another collaborative process that had to be defined was figuring out a common language for how we talked and described music. We all describe and feel about music differently: how I interpret a song as ‘a bit sad’ may be ‘very sad’ to another. To address this, we did word cloud associations while listening to the same piece of music and circled common words that popped up. Through that it was much easier to interpret music feedback and direction.

Pleasance run 2024, photo credit: Mike Skelton

Red Bus: The show draws on the real histories of Zheng He and Sek Yeong, but sets them alongside climate survivors and space revolutionaries from the 21st and 23rd centuries. How did you navigate the responsibility of working with real historical figures, particularly ones whose stories might not be widely known in British culture?

Jade Leamcharaskul: From a composer’s perspective, I took a lot of creative liberty in establishing the musical voices of Zheng He and Sek Yeong and building very specific instrumental palettes for different characters. I knew that British audiences would enter the space with a pre-defined, romanticised vision of what a pirate was and how it would sound as a soundtrack. Our opening number, ‘Hai Onward’, was written to sound similar to the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack, but with more Asian instruments and chiptune synths peppered in for the different character sections, to help onboard the audience’s ear and expectations and anchor them to the same starting point. Then as the show goes on, the soundtrack starts to break those rules. Sek Yeong’s big solo number, ‘Swallow The Sea’, is a great example, as I wrote it with gamelan music theory at the forefront and Western music theory supporting it. It misses compositional techniques like key changes to lift a song, because gamelan instruments are made with one single scale, so to compensate I used increasingly complex polyrhythms to heighten it instead.

Zhui Ning Chang: Our historical characters come from something of an alternate history timeline, so they are the same yet different to their real-life counterparts. We hope that our creative interpretation will spark the audience’s curiosity to find out more about these characters after the show. We do some deft exposition in the first couple of musical numbers to set up the character histories, but also to complicate them. For instance, Zheng He’s voyages are very well known in Southeast Asia, where I grew up, and we wanted to touch on how his faith (as a Muslim), sexuality (as a eunuch, and in our alternate history interpretation as an explicitly queer man), and position (as a representative of the Ming imperial court) are entangled with each other. For Sek Yeong, she’s had a number of English-language retellings of her story, most often showing her journey to power over the Red Flag Fleet. Many of these are romanticised and not evidenced in any community accounts or historical scholarship. We were more interested in her later years, which are scarcely documented, and wanted to see what an older woman, retired, successful, with her particular life experience, would be like on one last adventure on the high seas.

Red Bus: The press release describes the aim as moving away from “the orientalist past of British musicals.” How conscious was the team of existing representations, and were there specific moments in the writing process where you found yourselves pushing back against inherited theatrical conventions?

Zhui Ning Chang: We’re deeply familiar with the racism of shows like Miss Saigon and The King and I, and the lack of colour-conscious casting and production processes in musicals more broadly. Asian Pirate Musical is our response to these systemic failures. We are writing these larger-than-life characters so that Asian performers have fun, epic, alternative roles to play outside of the stereotypes; we have stacked the team with queer and trans Asian creatives who care about creating more of these intersectional spaces and futures, allowing their ideas and voices to shape the production.

Jade Leamcharaskul: It’s a constant balancing act, as I had to flip between two different music theory lenses and audience expectations. The general British audience is well-versed in the language of musical theatre but not in East and Southeast Asian folk music, and will unfortunately interpret it as out-of-tune noise if not framed correctly, since there are lots of microtonal elements. Music and theatre in that tradition is engaged with differently too: it’s more of a communal activity and less formal in parts. So with that in mind, I composed with Asian instruments and specific music theory and intentionally wrote moments for those elements to shine through and take centre stage.

It’s also gone the other way, where we’ve had to revise to make clearer button endings in a few songs. In gamelan music theory, the big gong sound is the most important instrument that signals the end of a song, but it doesn’t always work in a musical setting, so some work was done to manoeuvre it to maintain the ring of the gong but also stay on the audience’s wavelength about how a musical number should end.

Red Bus: The soundtrack is described as bringing together traditional instruments, 21st century Asian pop, and diasporic musical influences. For audiences who may not be familiar with those traditions, what might surprise them most about the sound of the show?

Jade Leamcharaskul: How unique and different Asian Pirate Musical sounds compared to other musicals.

Zhui Ning Chang: We are sonically unlike most musicals, but this show also emerged out of our love for the genre, and especially the grand spectacle musicals of the 1980s and 1990s. I hope audiences see and enjoy how our underlying structure pays homage to that sense of scale and ambition.

Red Bus: Queerness is clearly central to the show’s identity, not incidental to it. How did that shape the storytelling, in terms of which historical and imagined figures you chose to centre, and how their journeys are framed?

Zhui Ning Chang: We think of the story as both queer representation, through characterisation, casting and creative team contribution, and also as queering theatrical and heteronormative expectations. The futuristic space pirates Keliling and Riang are written as a queer couple, and we have taken care that they should not be visually gendered in a heteronormative manner. The 21st century climate survivor is non-binary, and Zheng He undergoes a narrative arc of separating his queerness from his toxic relationship to empire. Our casting also reflects this queer ethos: we wanted to show off the talents of trans and non-binary, Southeast Asian and mixed-race actors, all identities that find it challenging to fit into traditional casting calls.

Asian Pirate Musical plays Upstairs at the Gatehouse from 28 July to 2 August 2026 (7.30pm, with a 2pm matinee on 2 August). Tickets are £16, running time is two hours including an interval, and the show carries an age guidance of 12+.

Tickets: Book via Upstairs at the Gatehouse

Upstairs at the Gatehouse does not have step-free access. There are 17 steps, including a landing, with handrails on both sides up to the Box Office level, and a further three steps up to the auditorium.

Like this article? Please stay around to read my reviews: