For 27 years, Sammi Zhen has made a living knowing what to say. As a drag performer, comedian and host, she has spent much of her career in bars, at dinner-and-dance events, private functions and other spaces where audiences are rarely sitting quietly and waiting to hear a story. A typical performance might last 10 or 15 minutes, with people eating, drinking, talking, standing up and occasionally losing interest halfway through. Sammi knows how to work around that. She knows how to get a laugh, how to make herself the punchline and how to keep a room moving. But for all those years of performing, there is one thing she has rarely done publicly: talk at length about herself, and about what is actually going on inside her head.
That changes on 23 October, when Sammi takes the stage at Inspire Space for The Sammi Zhen Show: Love Cannot Wait 爱，不能等, her first public ticketed solo show. The 90-minute performance is a significant departure from the shorter appearances that have defined much of her career. This time, there is nowhere for the audience to drift off to and nowhere for Sammi to disappear behind a quick punchline. They will be seated, she will have their attention, and she will have the time to tell a story properly. There will be music, dancing and plenty of jokes, but the show is ultimately about something much more personal: love, mortality, family, self-worth and the things people keep telling themselves they will have time to do later.
The idea for Love Cannot Wait had been sitting with Sammi for several years, but it became much more urgent after a near-death experience three years ago. She had been admitted to hospital and spent six nights there, including time in the ICU. It was the first time she had ever been in hospital, and at 43, the experience forced her to confront something she had perhaps always known intellectually but had never had to face so directly: there is no guarantee that tomorrow will arrive. “Nowadays a lot of people sleep and don’t wake up, and drop dead,” she says. “And it’s very scary, because it’s even happening to young people.” For Sammi, that fear became less about death itself and more about what people might leave unfinished if they keep assuming there will always be another day.
That is also where the show’s title comes from. Love Cannot Wait is not simply about romantic love, and Sammi is careful not to frame it as a heavy lesson about mortality. Instead, she wants to talk about the people around us, the relationships we take for granted and the time we sometimes fail to give ourselves. “Love the people around you, love yourself and spend time with your loved ones,” she says. She has also come to understand that self-love does not necessarily have to be profound. Sometimes it can mean going for a massage, taking a trip to Johor Bahru just to pamper yourself or simply allowing yourself to enjoy something without feeling guilty. The point is to do it while you still can.
Sammi’s instinct, however, is not to turn any of this into a sombre lecture. Her way of processing difficult things has always been through humour, and that is exactly how she intends to approach the show. She wants to talk about what happens when a person suddenly realises they might not have as much time as they thought, but she wants audiences to laugh while thinking about it. Her own hospital experience, for example, becomes material. She remembers doctors asking whether she smoked, how often she drank and how much she drank, until she felt she might as well have been scanned rather than questioned. Doctors were convinced there was a family history behind what had happened to her, even though Sammi knew there was not. “How come you’re more sure than me?” she remembers thinking. The absurdity of the experience gives her something to laugh about now, but underneath the jokes remains the fact that she genuinely could have died.
That ability to hold humour and vulnerability in the same space is central to understanding Sammi. It is also what has allowed her to survive 27 years in drag. She started performing in 1999 after a club owner recognised her stage presence and invited her to make announcements at the venue. Having studied performing arts at NAFA, she eventually developed her own path through drag, building a career through nightlife venues, private events and hosting. Along the way, she learnt that one of the safest ways to make an audience laugh is to make yourself the target first. At dinner-and-dance shows, where some performers could be quite crude or direct with their jokes, Sammi found that audiences were more comfortable when she laughed at herself. She would call herself fat, for instance, rather than making someone else the target. “People can accept it more,” she says.
That self-deprecating instinct eventually became one of her strengths. One of her most successful routines involved Singaporeans and their behaviour at Thailand’s nightlife shows, turning the observations back on the very audience watching her. The routine became so popular that it opened doors she might not otherwise have expected. More than two decades ago, she was invited to perform for an audience in Potong Pasir after an opposition politician had watched her show. From there, word spread and other prominent guests became curious about the drag performer they had heard about. For Sammi, it was evidence that drag did not necessarily have to exist at the margins of Singapore’s entertainment landscape. It could be funny, topical and accessible enough to reach people who might never otherwise walk into a drag venue.
Her comedy has always been distinctly local, too. Sammi’s drag is not simply an imported idea of glamour layered onto a Singaporean performer. It is shaped by Singaporean language, social habits, cultural sensitivities and the particular way people here laugh at themselves and one another. She is comfortable moving between English, Singlish and observations about the region, and she knows that some jokes travel more easily than others. “You can talk the shit out of JB and Thailand,” she says, “but suddenly you talk about Singaporeans, you’ll go, ‘Wah, not like that.’” There are subjects that audiences are willing to laugh at when they involve someone else, but become much more sensitive when the joke is turned back on themselves. For Sammi, navigating those boundaries has been part of the craft.
She is also conscious that drag itself has changed. She is not sure what audiences expect from drag shows today. Years ago, she jokes, there seemed to be an expectation that performers had to perform increasingly elaborate physical tricks: splitting, dropping from ceilings and doing things that would make a production feel more like Cirque du Soleil. But for Sammi, spectacle has never been the whole point. Drag gives performers an opportunity to talk about things that people might not otherwise talk about, and to push against certain boundaries through humour. “Otherwise, listen to the National Day Rally,” she jokes. The line captures something essential about her approach: drag, at its best, gives people permission to have conversations that might otherwise feel too uncomfortable, provided you know how to make them laugh at the same time.
Yet there is another side to Sammi’s relationship with humour. She knows that being a public performer means knowing when to stop. “People need to know when and where to shut up,” she says. After years of watching words get repeated, distorted and taken out of context, she has become cautious about what she chooses to say publicly. In drag, she feels she can get away with more because the makeup acts as a kind of mask. Out of drag, she believes there is a different level of responsibility. “People are quite woke, so you’re treading on very thin ice,” she says. Her solution has often been simple: if something is not her concern, she keeps quiet. In an industry where personalities, egos and misunderstandings can quickly create drama, she would rather avoid putting herself in situations where people can compare, speculate or twist what she says.
That does not mean she is lonely. Sammi has friends, including the people involved in this new show, and she describes Singapore as a place where there is always something happening if you know where to look. There may be a perception that the city is boring, she says, but “time is never enough.” She has also deliberately avoided attending every other drag or ballroom show unless she happens to be there naturally. It is not about a lack of support; it is about avoiding the unnecessary comparisons and politics that can come with being part of a small scene. In a world where people can talk whether they mean to or not, she has learnt that sometimes protecting your peace is more valuable than being everywhere.
That restraint makes her decision to speak so openly in Love Cannot Wait more significant. Sammi says she has rarely talked publicly about herself or her feelings. She might talk to friends over dinner, but speaking directly to an audience about what happens inside her head is different. Even A Good Child, the 2025 Singaporean feature film inspired by her life and her experience caring for an ageing parent with dementia, only offered audiences a version of that story. A film has its own language and its own limitations; life is rarely as neatly divided into heroes, villains and clear answers. “A lot of things in movies, they won’t specifically do it black and white,” she says. “Maybe greyish. It can be black, it can be white.” For Sammi, that ambiguity matters because real people rarely fit neatly into one interpretation.
The film also changed the number of people who knew her story, but Love Cannot Wait allows her to tell it differently. Rather than asking an audience to watch her life from a distance, she can speak directly to them about the things she has experienced and what they have taught her. The show gives her the opportunity to get “up close and personal” in a way that is difficult to achieve in a noisy bar, where audiences are often there with groups of friends and the atmosphere itself competes for their attention. This time, the audience is there specifically to listen to her. She can take a story that might have been a few minutes long and give it 45 minutes, then another 45 minutes, allowing the jokes to emerge from the experiences rather than simply stacking punchlines one after another.
There is something fitting about that structure because Sammi’s life does not seem to have been built around grand declarations. It has been built around accumulated moments: a club owner noticing her presence, a joke that unexpectedly becomes a hit, an audience member taking a chance on a drag performer, six nights in hospital, caring for family, friendships, travelling, performing and learning which battles are worth entering. Her show is a way of putting those moments together and asking what they add up to.
And if there is one lesson she seems to have taken from them, it is that waiting is not always as harmless as it sounds. Sammi wants to travel while she still can. She does not want to wait until she is 60 to see the world, only to discover that climbing the Great Wall is no longer realistic or that her body cannot manage what it once could. She wants to go to Switzerland, Malaysia and other places while she still has the energy to enjoy them. She knows that money makes these decisions complicated. In Singapore, there is always another bill, another instalment and another question about where the next payment is coming from. “We’re always worrying about money,” she says. The challenge, then, is finding the balance between being responsible about the future and remembering that the present is also a life that has to be lived.
Her travels have also reminded her that the audience for a story like hers may be much wider than Singapore. When she travelled to Hong Kong to promote A Good Child, she was surprised by the warmth she received from older audiences. Elderly couples in their 60s and 70s came up to her after the premiere and hugged her. Taiwan, she says, has generally been welcoming to drag, but Hong Kong surprised her in a different way. Those encounters reinforced something she already understood through performing: beneath the language, culture and geography, certain emotions are remarkably universal.
That is ultimately what Sammi hopes to do with Love Cannot Wait. It is a Singaporean show, filled with the language and humour of the place she has spent her life performing in, but the things underneath it belong to everyone. Love your family. Make time for your friends. Take care of yourself. Don’t assume that there will always be another opportunity to say what needs to be said. And most of all, don’t wait forever to live.
After 27 years of making audiences laugh, she is finally giving them something else: a chance to meet the person behind the makeup, not as a character or a punchline, but as someone who has learnt that time is the one thing none of us can negotiate for. “If money isn’t an issue at the moment,” Sammi says, “do something (legal) that makes you happy.. After all, life cannot wait.”
The Sammi Zhen Show: Love Cannot Wait plays on 23rd October 2026 at The Inspire Space, Sam Leong Rd, #04-01 11 TRIO, Singapore 207903 Tickets available from Peatix
