On vulnerability, discomfort and the creative puzzles of writing my first musical
If you told the twenty-year-old med student version of me that her thirties would be spent guzzling hot sauce in drag at a theatre festival, she would demand that you stop writing horror fanfiction about her life. I have since become my younger self’s literal nightmare.
Over the past year, I’ve found myself in a strange and joyous loop: playing Santosh, a self-help-obsessed tech bro on the brink of an identity crisis, and then stepping offstage to try to untangle my own identity crisis as a doctor-turned-artist. I never expected to build a show around a character who’s part Silicon Valley failure, part South Indian uncle, and part LinkedIn cringe king. But 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go keeps evolving. And this month, Santosh is making his way to Vancouver for the rEvolver Festival.
It’s an unusual trajectory. Fast, weird, and deeply gratifying. And it’s only now that I’m beginning to unpack what this journey has meant, both emotionally and artistically. What better way to process that than by making another show?
Baby’s First Musical
After Santosh, I joined the Paprika Theatre Festival’s Creative Producers Unit to develop new work: a musical. Yes, it’s baby’s first musical. It’s called Neptune’s With a Fish.
Weirdly enough, writing the music wasn’t the hard part. I had already written a concept album. It was a collection of pop and experimental songs that lived somewhere in the world of confessional art. What was hard was figuring out what I actually wanted to say. How do you take six years of emotional wreckage, self-discovery, and cultural detangling, and compress it into a 60-minute show?
The Maximalist Draft
I did what many playwrights do when they’re avoiding their feelings: I wrote a three-hour vomit draft full of vibes. There was a talking egg, a sparkly dress, a Greek chorus, six characters, and several scenes inspired by Severance, Kiki’s Delivery
Service, and Revolutionary Girl Utena. I called it a semi-autobiographical absurdist musical about a failed doctor in exile, but it was really a scrapbook of metaphors barely holding itself together by the spine.
After torturing my collaborators with a long table read, they gently asked, “But what is this actually about?”
Most of them had heard me process this journey in conversation and podcast-style voice notes. But seeing it staged revealed I was still talking around something rather than through it. We did a timed pitch exercise where I would come out from the curtain and talk about what the show was about in one minute, then thirty seconds, then ten. My ten-second answer was simple but provided incredible clarity. That’s when the real story began to emerge. This clarity shaped every creative decision that followed.
Curation Is Grief
Creativity has two phases: generation and curation. I had generated so much over the last six years (scripts, poems, songs, journal entries, illustrations, comics) but for a long time, I didn’t know what the final container would be. A theatre show was the perfect answer.
When the source material is your own life, editing is not just dramaturgy. It becomes an audit of your grief. You’re deciding which versions of yourself to cut, which truths to soften, which metaphors still serve the story.
And while Santosh gave me distance and safety, Neptune’s With a Fish asked me to perform something much closer to my own skin. No black liquid lipstick moustache and a blazer. It’s now just me, in a dress I bought on discount, telling the truth through pop songs, jokes and rants.
I thought magical realism would make it easier, that a talking egg would buffer the pain. But even metaphor has limits. When my collaborators asked me to explain a creative decision for clarity, it is really illuminating to discover that you haven’t gone deep enough. Their feedback guided me to connect with my intuition to make stronger and bolder creative decisions.
Finding Play
What made Neptune different from earlier projects about this personal story is that I brought joy into the room. Not hope or resolution, but play. In 2019, when I had just graduated med school, I wrote a script about this chapter of my life, but I never finished it. The material was too raw.
This time, I had distance, clown training, and collaborators who helped me survive telling the story. Clown was vital. It’s a performance philosophy rooted in presence, play, and risk. We had work-in-progress showings where we tested what felt fun or
powerful and rewrote based on what landed. It wasn’t always polished, but it felt organic.
Vulnerability Is a Superpower
Curating a personal story is an artistic challenge, but also an emotional one. The hardest part wasn’t generating material, it was admitting the work would be seen and possibly misunderstood. At one point, while walking, my co-star through the story, she asked, “If you hated med school so much, why didn’t you just leave earlier?” It was a simple question, and a brutal one. I thought I had already answered it in the work. But it exposed a fear I hadn’t fully named: the fear that people would think I was being dramatic, or self-indulgent. The story I want to share in Neptune is about the dissonance between the life I was expected to live and the person I was becoming. This moment forced me to curate with more precision, and that precision brought more discomfort. Because when you share something real and curated, you accept that not everyone will understand. That is the cost of vulnerability. But it is also its power.
Every project teaches me something about who I am and how I work. I often say that with each piece, I become a different human. While my younger self would have been horrified to know me, my present self is excited to meet the human I become after each creative project.
Neptune’s With a Fish premieres May 14 and 17, 2025, at Native Earth’s Aki Studio as part of the Paprika Festival, timed to coincide with Asian Heritage Month. In this semi-autobiographical musical comedy, Sabu delves into the generational mental health toll of Canada’s points-based immigration system and the enduring pressures of the model minority myth. Directed by Gordon Neil and starring Sabu alongside fellow Malayali-Canadian performer Amrutha Krishnan, the show combines clowning, surreal humour, and musical storytelling to confront the burdens of South Asian exceptionalism and the anxieties of approaching adulthood. Supported by facilitator Fatuma Adar and mentors Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava (Quote Unquote Collective), Neptune’s With a Fish draws on influences as wide-ranging as Severance, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Revolutionary Girl Utena. It marks another bold step in Sabu’s growing body of work as a doctor-turned-clown creating space for absurdity, identity, and cultural memory on Canadian stages. She will bring her hit show 1 SANTOSH SANTOSH 2 GO: Tosh Finds His Groove to Upintheair Theatre’s rEvolver Festival from May 30-31 in Vancouver. Read an interview with Sabu on Sesaya Arts here. Reserve tickets for Neptune’s With a Fish on paprikafestival.com.
© Srutika Sabu, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
