Diarist Feature: Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo in 'Kimberly Akimbo'

Haven't done a profile in quite a while--this latest one was propelled by the question, "Whatever happened to Stages' The Light in the Piazza in 2011?" Website version here.

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Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo remakes Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo

Inside the Victoria Theatre, Singapore, on gala night of Kimberly Akimbo.

In October 2022, with Broadway already a full year into its post-COVID reopening, Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo again found herself watching as many productions as she could in the famed New York City theater district. Among the shows she caught were A Strange Loop, the latest Tony Award winner for Best Musical; a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods starring Sara Bareilles; another revival—Funny Girl’s first, recently recast with Lea Michele in the lead; and a new musical that, only months earlier, had bagged top prizes at the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Lucille Lortel, and New York Drama Critics Circle awards.

That last show was Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire’s Kimberly Akimbo. Centered around the eponymous teenager whose genetic condition causes her to age four times faster than normal—thus making her look way older than her 16 years—the musical offers quite a meaty part for actresses in their 40s and beyond.

“I remember it being my favorite that season,” Lauchengco-Yulo says of the musical. “I thought to myself, ‘Hey, I can do this role! Sana someone produces it (in the Philippines)’.”

Three years after she saw that preview performance of Kimberly Akimbo on Broadway, Lauchengco-Yulo is finally taking on the titular character—for the musical’s Asian premiere, no less. This production is in Singapore, produced by Pangdemonium and running at the Victoria Theatre until November 2. Reviews of her performance have been uniformly glowing.

The call actually came two years ago in 2023, after Pangdemonium was offered the rights to stage the musical. According to Lauchengco-Yulo, company co-artistic directors (and real-life married couple) Adrian and Tracie Pang didn’t want to cement Kimberly Akimbo in their season lineup until they knew they had someone who could play the lead. “Adrian thought of me,” she says, “and I immediately said yes.”

Lauchengco-Yulo and Pang became friends after working together in Atlantis Theatrical’s God of Carnage, directed by the late Bobby Garcia. The production, co-starring Lea Salonga, first ran at Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium in RCBC Plaza, Makati City, in July 2012, before transferring to Singapore in November that year under the auspices of Singapore Repertory Theatre.

In October 2014, Lauchengco-Yulo made a brief return to the Singapore stage, when the Manila premiere of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert—produced by Full House Theater Company, for which she is co-artistic director—transferred for two weeks to Resorts World Sentosa.

‘Out of my comfort zone’

“Performing in Singapore excites me because I’m out of my comfort zone,” Lauchengco-Yulo says. “Nobody knows me here, so it’s like starting from scratch.”

According to the actress, Kimberly Akimbo is exactly the “different kind of challenge” she’s been yearning for at this point in her 47-year-long theater career. Unlike God of Carnage and Priscilla, which were “created” in the Philippines before they were brought to Singapore, Kimberly marks her first time to help build a production from the ground up in a foreign country.

“It’s a great exercise for me to work with a Singaporean team,” Lauchengco-Yulo says, even in terms of adapting to their work culture.

One significant difference she has noticed, between Singaporean and Filipino theater artists, is that the former can be “very opinionated, and they collaborate heavily with their director, whereas Filipino actors in general can be a bit shy with collaborating with their directors.”

In Singapore, “you can tell (the actors) have really thought about what they feel their character should do, whereas some Filipinos can even be scared of voicing out their opinion for fear of being wrong,” she says.

There are also differences in the logistical aspects of making a show itself. In Singapore, “you are expected to come to rehearsals already warmed up, or else you do the warm-up on your own. In Manila, we usually have body and vocal warm-ups together as a cast,” she says.

More significant are practices that Lauchengco-Yulo would also love to do in the Philippines—if it weren’t for budget concerns. For example, during adjustments for Kimberly Akimbo (or when the production finally moved out of the rehearsal hall and started rehearsing on the actual stage with the actual sets), “we had the full band even if we’re just doing the show scene by scene. If our director (Tracie Pang) wanted less or more transition music during a particular scene, the issue was fixed there and then. That’s never done in Manila because it’s expensive to have the whole band present all the time. It’s unheard of to keep the band from 11 am to 11 pm!”

Furthermore, Lauchengco-Yulo says the sound designer also watched all of their run-throughs, while the lighting designer even attended the sitzprobe—the first time the cast rehearsed with a full band or orchestra—in order to hear the musical shifts and tailor the lighting accordingly.

As for the role of Kimberly itself, Lauchengco-Yulo says the main challenge has been finding “the right balance of (portraying) a 16-year-old trapped inside the body of a 62-year-old.”

That includes, among other things, learning to skate, given that a major setting in the musical is a skating rink that serves as refuge of sorts for Kimberly and her equally lonely friends. Since Lauchengco-Yulo and most of her cast members had never skated, the rehearsal hall was specifically outfitted with skating flooring. Every day during their six-week rehearsal period that started in early September, the cast would have skating practice overseen by their choreographer. “In the beginning, we did 45 minutes a day. Now (during the show’s actual run), it’s a 15-minute warm-up,” she says.

Then, there’s the business of getting her voice back in shape.

In March 2020, right after the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, Lauchengco-Yulo found herself in an exceptional, undesirable situation: She had to close a production that hadn’t even opened. That production was The Band’s Visit, the 2018 Tony Award winner for Best Musical that was supposed to have its Asian premiere in Manila, with Lauchengco-Yulo playing the female lead. (It would turn out to be Bobby Garcia’s final directorial work for Atlantis—and the last musical he directed in Manila. Garcia passed away in 2024, at 55 years old.)

‘To be honest, after The Band’s Visit, I was devastated...’

“To be honest, after The Band’s Visit, I was devastated. It meant my last full production was Company (the Sondheim musical staged in 2019 by Upstart Productions). The pandemic went on for two years, and I didn’t perform anymore. I really thought I was done (as an actress),” she says.

Six years since Company, Lauchengco-Yulo has appeared in two full productions, in what can only be described as her comeback year in acting. Kimberly Akimbo is the second; the first was Come From Away, the Tony-nominated musical based on the historical events that happened in the remote Canadian town of Gander following the September 11 attacks in the United States. With US airspace closed, 38 planes were diverted to Gander, and some 7,000 passengers housed and fed by local residents in the succeeding days.

Come From Away marked Asia-Pacific producing giant GMG Productions’ first foray into staging a show with an all-Filipino cast, running throughout June this year at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater. In the musical, Lauchengco-Yulo played a fictional version of Captain Beverley Bass, who piloted one of the diverted planes—a role that earned Jenn Colella an acting nomination at the 2017 Tony Awards, and which comes with the solo Me and the Sky that’s laden with a stream of punishing high notes.

“By the time Come From Away and Kimberly were offered to me, I had not sung onstage for quite some time, and of course I was much older, with less stamina,” Lauchengco-Yulo says. “But, doing these shows—particularly Kimberly—I realized I still have the stamina to take on difficult roles, though now I get exhausted more easily afterwards.”

The actress continues: “Come From Away was more of an ensemble piece, but I needed to work on my voice. (On the other hand), Kimberly is a tough show because of the vocal and emotional demands of the role. I have to have the energy of a 16-year-old—and I’m already 62. I think (the exhaustion) also comes with age because in my mind I really thought I was done performing. Rebuilding my stamina really took time.”

Doing that included studying the music with her vocal coach Mia Bolaños long before rehearsals for Kimberly Akimbo were scheduled to begin in Singapore. Moreover, Lauchengco-Yulo sought the help of her friend, musical director Rony Fortich, who taught her the notes of her character’s harmonies, so that “when I got to Singapore, alam ko na.”

“To not be able to perform for an extended five years, in my case, really makes you treasure the opportunity to go back onstage. It makes you realize the important things in life,” Lauchengco-Yulo says.

Dream roles

As an actress, she still has some dream roles: Mama Rose, the brassy, domineering protagonist of the musical Gypsy; Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, which recently enjoyed a splashy Broadway revival led by Nicole Scherzinger (of the now-defunct girl group The Pussycat Dolls); Desiree Armfeldt, who sings the iconic Send In the Clowns in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music.

“Bobby (Garcia) also wanted to do (Sondheim’s) Follies! He talked to me about it. Sayang,” Lauchengco-Yulo adds.

Another role she hopes will happen for her soon: Margaret Johnson in the Adam Guettel-Craig Lucas musical The Light in the Piazza. She was supposed to star in the Philippine premiere of that musical, set to run at Meralco Theater in July 2011, with Jaime del Mundo directing and theater company Stages producing. However, the production was postponed indefinitely after her co-star (and would-have-been stage daughter) Karylle got cast in the Singaporean musical television series The Kitchen Musical.

Had The Light in the Piazza pushed through, Lauchengco-Yulo would have now played both of the roles for which Broadway actress Victoria Clark won her Tonys—the other being Kimberly.

“I have also never done Shakespeare!,” says Lauchengco-Yulo, who lists Lady Macbeth among the roles she’d like to tackle.

Arguably, Lauchengco-Yulo is more famous for her career in musicals. Not for nothing has she been called the “First Lady of Philippine Musical Theater”—a title that, she admits, still gets her quite shy and which she takes as a constant exhortation against complacency.

Yet, with straight plays, she’s just as formidable. At the Philstage Gawad Buhay Awards—often described as the Philippine equivalent of the Tonys—she has been nominated twice for her non-musical performances: for her starring turns in Repertory Philippines’ (Rep) Agnes of God (2017) and Red Turnip Theater’s A Doll’s House, Part 2 (2018).

Another dream play: Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes from 1939. In particular, she’d love to take a stab at its ambitious, greedy protagonist Regina Giddens. (In Rep’s 1981 production helmed by the late Zenaida “Bibot” Amador, she played Regina’s daughter Alexandra opposite company cofounder Baby Barredo as her stage mother.)

Asked to choose between acting and directing, Lauchengco-Yulo says she finds the latter “slightly more difficult”—a challenge she really enjoys. Her four Gawad Buhay nominations, for Little Women (2010), Peter Pan (2011), Jekyll and Hyde (2012), and last year’s I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change—all produced by Rep—attest to her flair for this aspect of making theater. In fact, before the offers came for Come From Away and Kimberly Akimbo, she had resigned herself to a career of just directing for the stage.

Given the chance, Lauchengco-Yulo says she’d love to rethink three musicals she’s done in Manila: The Secret Garden, Passion, and Evita.

That last one, she did in 1995, when Rep staged it for the second time (since then, it hasn’t been done professionally in the capital region). At 32—and a mother of two young kids—she essayed the titular role of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s sung-through musical about Argentinian politician Eva Perón—notoriously one of the most vocally taxing parts in the Broadway canon.

For that Rep production at Meralco Theater, Amador was director, Michael Williams and Jaime Blanch alternated in the role of Che (the everyman cum narrator), and the late Miguel Faustmann played Eva’s husband Juan Perón. Following the usual practice since the musical first made a splash on London’s West End and then Broadway, another actress—Carla Martinez—alternated as Eva with Lauchengco-Yulo.

“It’s crazy to sing that score twice in one day!” says Lauchengco-Yulo. “I love the music, and (the musical) has a strong female character, so (I’d love to try) adapting it into something that could be relatable now.

“The biggest challenge (with staging Evita) is finding an Eva. Grabe ang range required—I spent six months training for that show! I ended up knowing the entire score on the first day of rehearsals. My kids even had cameo bits in one scene. Now they’re all grown up and successful.”

TheaterFansManila Review: 'Kimberly Akimbo' by Pangdemonium

 Made my TFM debut today with the show we spent 40 hours in Singapore for. The website version here.

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A sublime Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo in an askew 'Kimberly Akimbo'

Curtain call at the Oct. 18 gala night of 'Kimberly Akimbo'.

First off, the big question Filipino theatergoers must be asking: How is Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo in the currently running Asian premiere of Kimberly Akimbo in Singapore?

In a word—sublime. Playing the titular character of a teenager burdened with a prematurely aging body, Lauchengco-Yulo is a portrait of actorly intelligence. Onstage at the Victoria Theatre, where the Tony-winning musical runs until Nov. 2 under production company Pangdemonium, she is far and away the clearest presence—not only in terms of basic intelligibility, but, more crucially, in terms of articulating her character’s emotional details and mapping out its psychological trajectory.

In Kimberly Akimbo, the protagonist is affected by a genetic disorder that gives her the physical appearance of an elderly woman even though she’s only about to turn 16. This clinical affliction supplies a convenient metaphor for the larger world she inhabits: one where people never really act, or at least feel, their age; where the adults are constantly unreliable and the kids are mostly left on their own to navigate the project of growing up. In Kimberly’s case, she has to deal with parents who have never come to terms with their daughter’s condition, and an aunt who is a receptacle of trouble, in addition to being the odd-looking new kid in town at the story’s start.

Lauchengco-Yulo captures all that in a performance that’s so grounded and well thought out, the music (by Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire) seems to emanate straight out of her thoughts. One all but forgets she’s a grown woman in makeup; you completely buy her Kimberly’s adolescent worries, her fleeting moments of joy, her sense of isolation stemming partly from living a timeline separate from her peers.

Well-designed show

Unfortunately, the same can’t exactly be said for the rest of the production helmed by Pangdemonium cofounder and co-artistic director Tracie Pang. To be clear, it is a well-designed show: Taken together, Eucien Chia’s set, James Tan’s lights, Leonard Augustine Choo’s costumes, and Jing Ng’s soundscape succeed not only in evoking the musical’s suburban American settings, but also in establishing a distinct, presiding mood for these settings. You get that it’s supposed to be a story about a small town filled with people who, on any given minute, are never truly happy—but try their best to mask their sadnesses.

Evidently, Kimberly Akimbo is a tragicomedy, though it frequently keeps its true feelings close to its chest. And Pang’s production aces the comedy. Frances Lee, as the protagonist’s Aunt Debra, for instance, is a hoot in her two big numbers, in which she ropes Kimberly and her classmates into a check fraud scheme (the actress’ lack of vocal heft for the role is an altogether different matter).

Short on tragedy

It’s in doing tragedy that this production conspicuously comes up short. Consider the musical’s elementary premise: The life expectancy of people with Kimberly ’s condition is supposedly 16—which is the age she hits in the show. Much as the musical tries to act cheery, it also doesn’t hide the implication that Kimberly will die sooner or later. It’s the sword of Damocles hovering ominously above an ostensibly low-stakes affair.

Yet, in Pang’s Kimberly Akimbo, the actors orbiting the protagonist don’t seem to have fully grasped the aforementioned implication, even though their individual songs—their characters’ internal monologues made legible to the audience—are brimming with such complicated feelings on matters like self-worth, parenthood, and mortality. These are songs laden with the characters’ traumas and doubts, set against the broader tapestry of a generation constantly failing its children—the breakdown of the family unit, if you will. Pang’s production doesn’t really mine the richness of all that text and subtext, resulting in a panoply of capable turns that lack satisfying, emotional liftoffs.

Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai, for example, is amusing as Kimberly’s emotionally blundering mother, but doesn’t entirely do dramatic justice to her big solo (and arguably the musical’s most gorgeous song) “Father Time.” Similar fates befall Benjamin Chow, otherwise convincing as Kimberly’s alcoholic, always-disappointing dad, in his songs “Happy for Her” and “Hello Baby”; and Zachary Pang, Kimberly’s geeky love interest, especially when he laments how he’s always been the “good kid.”

Inadequately articulated emotions

One could argue that the musical thrives on subtlety and small emotions, but in this production, the emotions aren’t so much small and subtle as they are inadequately articulated. The show lands plenty of laughs—but doesn’t deliver a solid enough dramatic punch to make it truly succeed as tragicomedy. To borrow a lyric, it all seems “a little bit askew.”

Unless, of course, Lauchengco-Yulo is centerstage, in which case the production promptly recenters its dramatic axis, and the viewer easily attains a full appreciation of the musical’s elegant, psychological contours. One could say she’s the glue that keeps the ensemble theatrically cohesive; in scene after scene, she helps heighten the stakes while keeping the story firmly planted in a believable make-believe world. Whatever weaknesses in the material—for example, the hazily sketched characters of Kimberly’s classmates—are swiftly forgiven. With time, perhaps the production will grow more profound and hit that sweet balance of funny and sad—a balance its lead actress has already achieved.

Diarist Review: 'Pingkian' by Tanghalang Pilipino - 2025 run

New piece in The Diarist today: a postscript, if you will, on my favorite show of 2024. The website version here.

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Pingkian's post-curtain roar: 'Ikulong ang magnanakaw!'

Post-curtain of the Oct. 12 closing performance of Pingkian. 

In the October 12 closing performance of Tanghalang Pilipino’s (TP) Pingkian: Isang Musikal, a simple, post-curtain send-off in the theater lobby became a stirring call to action urging the audience to always resist.

After the cast sang an acoustic snippet from the show, one member shouted: “Hashtag ikulong ang magnanakaw!” The crowd broke into an instant roar, the hashtag morphing into a resounding chant.

Every performance of the production’s five-weekend rerun apparently ended with this galvanizing moment, effectively turning the musical into the defining theatrical piece of the Marcos-Duterte fallout. Jail the thieves, indeed.

In the last decade, Manila has witnessed no shortage of plays grappling with the contemporary Filipino’s blighted political destinies—think Guelan Luarca’s adaptation of the Lualhati Bautista novel Desaparesidos at Areté Ateneo, or Bautista’s Dekada ’70 set to music by Pat Valera and Matthew Chang (its run in the same venue shuttered prematurely by COVID-19). The climactic scene in the late Floy Quintos’ The Kundiman Party saw an activist son rebuking his corrupt politician father, while the playwright’s The Reconciliation Dinner tried to process the outcome of the 2022 presidential elections alongside a still-grieving, largely pro-Leni Robredo audience. 

This 2025 version of Pingkian felt a tad different from those plays: One half-expected the cast, still in full costume and makeup, to actually take it to the streets with their viewers. Only a month before the production opened, revelations surrounding anomalous flood control projects across the Philippines had consumed national headlines. A week after opening, the nationwide demonstrations collectively dubbed the Trillion Peso March, and organized precisely in response to the controversy, unfolded on the 53rd anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s 1972 proclamation of Martial Law. 

Perfect show at the perfect moment

It’s a case of the perfect show finding itself at the perfect moment, the musical unexpectedly speaking to the zeitgeist and capturing the full sweep of public sentiment toward current events.

Pingkian isn’t even TP’s most overt portrayal of the Filipino statesman’s shamelessness and the long-festering state of Philippine politics. In this regard, one can’t help thinking of another TP warhorse—Mabining Mandirigma, Nicanor Tiongson and Joed Balsamo’s steampunk musical centered on Apolinario Mabini, considered the brain of the 19th-century revolutionary movement against the Spanish and subsequent American colonizers. (Winner of 12 trophies in the 8th Gawad Buhay Awards, the 2015 musical will return in March next year under the same company.)

As the title suggests, Mabining Mandirigma recasts the eponymous hero as a literal warrior, seemingly caught in a one-person uphill battle during the nation’s turn-of-the-century political inception. Its exhortation to patriotism is best captured by its concluding refrain: “Mahalin mo ang Pilipinas/ nang higit sa’yong sarili.”

That refrain sprouts from the musical’s depiction of the very Machiavellian egomania that, it argues, defined the birth of what we now call the Philippine government. Some of the most striking sequences in the TP production directed by Chris Millado underscored the origins of corruption within the project of nation-building; how the first Filipino politicians schemed against and betrayed their own people. In a production high point, the formation of Congress was even satirized via a minstrel number.

  

Pingkian, on the other hand, is concerned less with the muck of government and more with the ways people fight back in the face of brazen misgovernment. 

Written and composed by Juan Ekis and Ejay Yatco, the musical imagines the revolutionary Emilio Jacinto in a state of delirium, following the 1898 Battle of Maimpis in Laguna, where he was wounded and captured by enemy forces. 

Placing its protagonist in a sort of dreamscape—a familiar trope in fiction—is key to Pingkian’s success as a work of theater. Traveling back and forth across time, towards incidents historical and imagined, the musical is driven not by traditional plot, but by the progression of ideas. Specifically, in scene after scene, it becomes an expansive rumination on the nature and forms of heroism and revolution, daring to ask which ones can work and which are bound to fail in the struggle against an inutile ruling class.

One scene conjures a debate between Jacinto and a still-imprisoned Jose Rizal, paragon of nonviolence, on those very ideas. In another, Jacinto’s mother tells him, “Hindi sayang ang buhay/ at iyong kabataan/ kung ito’y inilaan/ sa dakilang adhika,” and one can’t help wondering just how many mothers and fathers now would even laud their children for joining progressive movements, when it’s so much more convenient to stay quiet.

In yet another imagined moment, Jacinto and his wife Catalina sing, “Kalayaan ay pagsapit ng pag-ibig” and “Ako ay malaya ‘pag ika’y katabi”—love as revolution, love as freedom. In this number, Jacinto glimpses a vision of a possible future—his community at last bereft of war, harmonious, the product of a successful revolution.

Further, in the recent TP production directed by Jenny Jamora, the musical’s most thrilling parts were in fact scenes depicting the messy particulars of mounting a movement: the intellectual rigor of forming a guiding document (the Kartilya ng Katipunan transformed into a barnstorming rap-sung number), the seismic turmoil that comes with identifying genuine comrades and rooting out enemy collaborators.

An assault on all fronts by unseen forces

Save for one representative military-man character, Jacinto’s enemies in the musical are barely named and seen; what’s clear is that he’s being hunted down by the government. Within the Katipunan, there are traitors as well. The fight Jacinto wages is basically an “assault on all fronts by unseen forces” situation, the hero pushed to the proverbial corner. 

It’s not difficult to see the real-life parallels, and the reasons Pingkian rang with greater resonance during its rerun. When one lives in a country plagued by increasingly catastrophic climate disasters—and governed by politicians who somehow have the gall to pilfer from infrastructure projects intended to mitigate the effects of those disasters—it’s hard not to feel like the enemy is insurmountable, invisible, everywhere. The notion of choice, and of progress, grows more alien by the hour.

 

Hashtag ikulong ang magnanakaw thus becomes a declaration of war, no matter how small or futile, and even if confined only within the four walls of the theater: A demand to hold accountable every single thieving politician, and a flat-out rejection of the fallacy that one supposedly needs to choose between Marcos and Duterte.

Conversely, perhaps the musical also became an invitation to dream of possibilities, despite the odds, much like Jacinto visiting a future he never lived to see. My cynicism, however, tells me this lifetime won’t be the one to bear witness to the kind of radical change the likes of Jacinto aspired for. Perhaps, for now, we’re limited to living that change in our own states of delirium—to dream of the biggest Filipino crooks in jail for good, of justice served and the wheels of large-scale progress set in motion. To keep dreaming the dream, and in dreaming, make it real.

Diarist Review: 'Dear Evan Hansen' - The 1st UK National Tour in Manila

The Tony winner finally lands in Manila, thanks to GMG Productions! Website version here (published September 12). 

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Dear Evan Hansen: Why it's a musical worth your time in these times

Listening to Dear Evan Hansen eight years ago, around the time the musical took Broadway and the rest of the English-language theater world by storm, one wouldn’t have been able to ignore its commentary on the perils and pitfalls of social media. In fact, that was its most prominent theme, in a way capturing the zeitgeist of the mid-2010s, when Facebook and Twitter (now X) were arguably at their peak and the most explosive segments of the Cambridge Analytica scandal were just about to hit.

For the unfamiliar, the Tony and Olivier Award-winning musical is about a high school kid, Evan Hansen, who inadvertently becomes the poster boy for the grassroots movement surrounding the death of his classmate Connor. Interrogated by Connor’s grieving parents, Evan ends up fanning the flames of their assumption that he and Connor were besties, his small lie distending to proportions both hilarious and disturbing with the help of lots of fake, backdated emails. Soon, the self-proclaimed memorial project put up in Connor’s name swiftly goes viral—the “feathers to the wind” metaphor made manifest. 

Suffice to say, social media is the axis upon which the ridiculous goings-on in Evan Hansen spin. Evan’s lies expand, morph, and take off because of social media, like pieces of gossip left to assume lives of their own in the virtual ecosystem, transforming the smallness of Connor’s death into something everyone in the story feeds off of. Viewed this way, Evan Hansen becomes the ultimate post-elder millennial cautionary tale of our hyperconnected times.

All that is still evident in the version of the musical now playing at The Theatre at Solaire—a terrific UK touring production brought to our shores by GMG Productions, marking the show’s professional premiere in the Philippines.

But, at the same time, a different theme seems to preoccupy this Evan Hansen beyond the notion of toxic virality. As much as this show is about the insanity that social media can engender, it is also, quite clearly, about mental health—and the kind of world built by society’s predisposition to neglect its importance. 

That Evan has mental health problems is not simply a given here; the production has somehow managed to turn that fact into obvious kindling for the half-comedic, half-tragic unfolding of the story. Evan has social anxiety debilitating enough to turn him into a fumbling wreck in front of other people (the musical’s title stems from the letters he’s supposed to write to himself, as an assignment from his psychiatrist). By giving this aspect of the character the importance it warrants, this Evan Hansen allows for compassion to flood into its narrative: The viewer acquires a lucid understanding of Evan’s actions, and watching this story transpire becomes a not-difficult exercise in empathy.

It bears mentioning that that’s something the 2021 film adaptation (directed by Stephen Chbosky) mishandled. Somehow the movie almost turned Evan into a villain—a serial liar who struggled with mental health problems. There couldn’t have been a more unlikeable protagonist.

The chief virtue of GMG’s production is that now, Evan is unambiguously a person struggling with mental health problems who ends up spewing lies as a result of those unresolved problems. Moreover, it also shines a light on the larger structural inadequacies in Evan’s—and by equivalence, our—world that either prevent such problems from being resolved or indirectly provide fertile ground for their germination in the household. One sees the world quite plainly through Evan’s eyes: a world where single parents have to juggle multiple jobs to sustain their family while being unable to devote enough time to their children precisely—and paradoxically—because of that basic need to sustain them; a world where parents, far from perfect creatures themselves, end up inflicting their own traumas upon their children, slowly shaping their households into places where children are more prone to feeling isolated, misunderstood, unloved. 

Directed by Adam Penford, this staging of Dear Evan Hansen finds the perfect avatar for explicating its themes in Ellis Kirk, whose portrayal of the titular character is a near-miraculous balance of sympathy and illogicality, just one hurt kid among this story’s many hurt people. Rebecca McKinnis, as Evan’s mom, and Rhys Hopkins, as Connor, supply two more standout performances that thrive in understatement; when either of them is with Kirk onstage, the musical is at its most potent. 

Meanwhile, the production itself—a non-replica, or one that veers away from the original designs on Broadway or the West End, as opposed to most GMG imports—nonetheless makes intelligent, occasionally quite stunning use of theater technology to hyper-realize the musical’s story and thematic concerns. (Curiously, the sound of this production could get disturbingly thin—a rarity in the acoustics heaven of Solaire’s theater.)

 

All things considered, this Dear Evan Hansen is time—and money—worth spending at Solaire. It’s a production that completely understands the proverbial assignment and, more crucially, makes a more insightful experience out of the material.

Diarist Review: 'Walang Aray' by PETA - 2025 run

This was published on September 11 in The Diarist--here--but I'm reposting this in lovely, lovely Prague.

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Walang Aray: I'm happy to report that this staging is unequivocally its best yet

When I saw the Philippine Educational Theater Association’s (PETA)’s Walang Aray during its two-performance laboratory weekend in October 2019, I thought the show was already a hoot. Understandably, it was still quite rough, both in terms of the material (by Rody Vera and Vince Lim) and the production itself (directed by Ian Segarra). Even then, however, its charisma was irresistible, its intelligence as parody and modernization of the zarzuela Walang Sugat marking it as a show to watch out for in the near future.

In 2023, when the musical (still directed by Segarra) finally premiered to paying audiences, I thought it was much more polished—but felt it had sacrificed some of the improvised, wink-wink quality that had made the 2019 version such a pleasant surprise. Sure, this was already the complete deal, a finished work of art that deserved its packed houses and the adulation of fans. Yet, I couldn’t resist the feeling that the show was also trying to balance formalist polish and unstructured irreverence with a bit of unease. (Perhaps my reactions were also a product of memory, of course—I already knew some of the jokes to expect, for one thing, and was admittedly disappointed when this premiere failed to replicate the uproarious, pre-COVID insanity of watching J-mee Katanyag, as the female protagonist’s mother, choking on a morsel of food in slow motion.)  

Now, after the unprecedented success of One More Chance, The Musical last year, PETA has brought back Segarra’s Walang Aray for what can be officially considered its third incarnation. I’m happy to report, then, that this staging of the musical is unequivocally its best yet—the definitive version, if I may. 

To borrow the parlance of self-love, this Walang Aray clearly feels comfortable in its own skin. Much of the improv quality has been lost; in its place, a veteran sketch comedian’s unassailable confidence. As a result, the humor—peerless in the way it mines and makes gold out of present-day Philippine realities—never feels forced, or uncertain, or less than airtight. It’s a production that works with clockwork precision to make you laugh, yet never once breaks a sweat doing so.

Something more, though: The musical’s ethos of love and acceptance as forms of revolution ring quite differently now with the casting of Lance Reblando as the female protagonist Julia, rewriting history as the first trans woman to lead a musical hereabouts, if memory serves me right. Suddenly, the musical’s animating principles of freedom and liberation are no longer just in the mold of Romeo and Juliet’s doomed-lovers’ romance (with a healthy dose of anti-colonial sentiment); it’s now about the bigger, more real world; about the world we know, its inequalities, its injustices; its slow, frequently impeded march towards genuine progress. 

Reblando’s turn as Julia is also a rebuke against transphobic and/or purist naysayers who adhere to closing off the world of stage performance, rather than expanding its possibilities (believe it or not, they exist even in the relatively more liberal world of theater). On that stage, Reblando is magnetic, a worthy leading lady for a show with a killer role for one.

New to the production as well is Jolina Magdangal as Julia’s mother—yes, that Jolina. And hers is a more-than-capable turn; Magdangal does the role justice and clearly needs to do more comedic plays.

Almost everyone else orbiting these two actresses deliver solid work—in particular, Gio Gahol (still note-perfect as the male lead Tenyong since I first saw him in 2019), Roi Calilong (a histrionic delight as a lecherous priest), and Bene Manaois (sharper than ever as a closeted, gym-buff man-child).  

I must confess, though, it’s Reblando and Magdangal who were really my main reasons for catching this rerun. And to that end, they did not disappoint. In fact, someone should write a two-person comedy for them. Add in the Gawad Buhay-winning Shaira Opsimar—the original Julia, also appearing in this run, and a comedic genius herself—and there’s a play I’d run to get a ticket for.

Diarist Review: 'Into the Woods' by Theater Group Asia; 'Quomodo Desolata Es? Isang Dalamhati' by Areté Ateneo; 'Nobody Is Home' by PETA

Omnibus review time--my second piece for The Diarist! Website version of this article here.

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What does 'Filipino-ness' look like on stage today?

What makes theater "Filipino"?

This was the accidental question unifying three shows I saw in Manila in August—incidentally, the long-appointed month for celebrating the national language. Collectively, the three productions—Into the Woods, Quomodo Desolata Es? Isang Dalamhati, and Nobody Is Home—invited audiences to ponder exactly how the very notion of ‘Filipino-ness’ could look and sound like onstage these days.

For Theater Group Asia’s (TGA) Into the Woods, the answer was all about its shining, shimmering surface.

In media interviews, Tony-winning designer and TGA cofounder Clint Ramos—who served as this production’s overall creative director—stated that their goal was to stage a show that “actually considers the Filipino condition.” Director Chari Arespacochaga separately said that a central preoccupation of this Into the Woods was refracting the musical “through the lens of… our histories, our resilience, and our storytelling [as Filipinos].” These statements aligned with TGA’s proclaimed mission to flesh out the figure of the so-called “global Filipino” on the Manila stage.

But statements are one thing; execution—and, more importantly, essence—is another.

In this Tony Award-winning musical, the writers James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim have borrowed popular fairy-tale characters from the Brothers Grimm and placed them inside a multiverse of sorts: Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Little Red Riding Hood existing alongside the new characters of a childless baker and his wife, in a story that imagines what happens when happily-ever-afters go awry.

TGA’s Filipinized Into the Woods confined the story to a stage designed like a báhay na bató, the traditional Spanish-era stone house. Draped in fabrics and weaves drawn from different Philippine cultures, the characters were made to work with “local” accoutrements: Cinderella wore a gown with the distinct, butterfly sleeves of the terno; Little Red Riding Hood fought the big, bad wolf with a balisong, the folding knife from Batangas; the singing harp stolen by Jack (of the beanstalk fame) from the giant was now a Mindanaoan sárimanók. And the giant was now evidently an American speaking with a Southern drawl. 

Honestly, these ornamental touches were a feast for the senses. But situated within Sondheim, they rang hollow, false, unnecessary. This itch to Filipinize the musical only demonstrated the production’s lack of trust in the already-airtight material. (Consider, for instance, the giant as an American “colonizer” who terrorized the “Filipino” characters after Jack stole from her? What a way to bungle the musical’s subtexts.)  

In Ramos and Arespacochaga’s Into the Woods, the global Filipino was one whose idea of nation circulated around rudimentary images of mangoes and coconut trees, rice fields and carabaos—while refusing any deeper engagement with the homeland it constantly waxed poetic over. Sondheim was almost an afterthought.

No wonder the cast—arguably the starriest assembled by any production in Manila in recent memory—felt unmoored, acting in different registers, as if appearing in different plays. Even Lea Salonga (playing the witch) was disappointingly reduced to just her crystalline voice: peerless singing, inchoate characterization. 

In fact, the only truthful performances came from Nyoy Volante (as the baker), Teetin Villanueva (as Little Red Riding Hood), and especially Mikkie Bradshaw-Volante, who, as the baker’s wife, perfectly epitomized Sondheim’s wit and theatrical genius, further proving that nothing can compare to the warmth and honesty of homegrown Filipino talent.

Watching this show, I was reminded of what the poet Conchitina Cruz wrote about the local literary and publishing sphere in the seminal essay The Filipino Author as Producer: “What’s worse than a Filipino poet in English who does not in her poetry speak on behalf of fellow Filipinos is a Filipino poet in English who does.” So it goes, apparently, with Filipino theater makers in English. 

Overall, TGA’s Into the Woods shed no new insight on the musical, only squeezing Sondheim into an ill-fitting conceptual shoe: a show that was generally well-sung, but sorely lacked passion and emotional depth. In this sense, it was rather anti-Filipino.

Over at the Ateneo de Manila University, a far more sincere and theatrically innovative explication of Pinoy selfhood unfolded: Quomodo Desolata Es? Isang Dalamhati, Guelan Luarca’s adaptation of the Nick Joaquin classic A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, using Jerry Respeto’s Filipino translation.

The new play (also helmed by Luarca) retained Joaquin’s original narrative structure. This was still about the sisters Candida and Paula Marasigan, their ailing artist father, their crumbling house in pre-World War II Intramuros, and the unseen titular painting that could make or break the sisters’ fortunes. 

But watching this play, one easily forgot about Joaquin. Luarca's Portrait magnified the madness swirling within and beyond the Marasigan household, its Intramuros in a state of heightened decay, the better to reflect the looming horrors of both the Second World War and the sisters' possible impoverishment. In so doing, it gave life—and voice—to all that was ostensibly unseen, and left unspoken, in the sisters’ stories: the follies of the past, the ghosts of the present, the omens of the future.

The result was a play with a confident grasp of time and place, identity and history. So assured was its hand that one’s mind frequently wandered beyond the action unfolding onstage, taking the play up on its invitation to ponder the kind of nation the story intimated; how similar those narrative trajectories might be to the 21st-century Filipino reality. Joaquin was now both chronicler and prophet. 

More noteworthy was the production’s interest in dissecting our “Filipino-ness,” which was nothing if not genuine. Rather than conforming to staid, colonial visions of what a “Filipino” play should look like, it instead challenged the norm, seeking to rethink form and the possibilities of storytelling. To be a Filipino theater artist, this production asserted, was to be capable of radical imagination.

Thus, its use of a Greek chorus, for example: an intelligent, effective reinterpretation of the device, the chorus as both literal and figurative ghosts in the story. Or consider how the design elements all worked in total harmony: a set (by D Cortezano) that made sensible use of native elements, lights (by Jethro Nibaten) that evoked the plot’s changing moods with precision, costumes (by Ali Figueroa) that betrayed a cohesive artistic direction. Even during the final technical rehearsal that I caught, the show’s vision was already crystal-clear.    

During that rehearsal, Delphine Buencamino was already unimprovable as Candida, her bravura portrayal of a woman slowly crumbling from within and desperately clinging to her sanity certain to go down as one of the year’s most unforgettable. Vino Mabalot was an explosive Tony Javier, the wannabe-musician living with the Marasigans, while Maita Ponce was an utterly commanding presence as the siblings’ more affluent sister Pepang.

Meanwhile, at the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) Theater Center, the premiere of Liza Magtoto’s Nobody Is Home heralded a return to form for the 58-year-old company best known for its brand of socially conscious theater. 

Collaborating with the Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater, this new play focused on the plight of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs)—in particular, those working in the health care sector and in the context of Western society’s rapidly aging population. Co-directed by Nina Gühlstorff and PETA Artistic Director J-mee Katanyag, it was billed as documentary theater, the play deploying various strategies like interactive segments and lots of fourth-wall breaking to engage the audience more directly and move beyond the usual tropes seen on our stages.

By no means was this play flawless. It could be quite earnest to a fault, the parts that were overwritten did feel overwritten, and the production was far from polished. In the larger scheme of things, however, this was all silly nitpicking: Nobody Is Home was the kind of play that knew exactly what it wanted to say, how to say it, and whom it wanted to listen.

While plays like Care Divas (also by PETA) have shed light on the realities faced by OFWs, Nobody Is Home felt like a welcome breath of fresh air: It found comfort in ambiguity. The Filipino carers in the play, and the German patients and family members they worked with, never once seemed less than real, nor were they made to face situations that offered an easy exit. At the same time, in acknowledging that these were real people with real problems and ambitions—and being comfortable with the limitations set by that acknowledgment—the play was able to imbue its theatrics with a softening touch, thereby enhancing its dramatic plausibility.

My one hope for this play is that PETA tours it around the country. The production itself was quite uncomplicated, and one can imagine it being staged in all sorts of community and educational venues. One main challenge would be filling the vacuum left by the actresses playing the German characters (assuming they won’t return): Susi Wirth and Ute Baggeröhr, as the ailing mother–exhausted daughter tandem, were just wonderful to witness, turning in performances that were never less than truthful; it would be a shame if more people didn’t get to see them, and the delightful chemistry they had with the Filipino ensemble led by the reliable Meann Espinosa.

When I saw Nobody Is Home during its invitational one-weekend run, the theater was filled with young people, presumably students. Watching them engage with and respond to the work was a timely reminder of why exactly theater should never cease to exist. Here was an unpretentious play about real, global Filipinos—about stories many among the viewers no doubt resonated with, told without a shred of hubris by theater makers who clearly understood their Filipino audience.