PDI Review: 'Miong' by Repertory Philippines

Okay. Officially one of the worst things I have ever seen. Website version here.

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'Miong': Looking for the Rep we know and love

Curtain call at "Miong."

There was a time when the musicals of Repertory Philippines were actually highlights of their seasons--for instance, Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo's refreshingly scaled-back "Jekyll and Hyde" in 2012; or Jaime del Mundo's romp of a production that was "The Producers" in 2013; or even 2009's "Sweeney Todd," which, while too "safe and bloodless," as Inquirer's former theater editor Gibbs Cadiz wrote, was nevertheless "expertly sung, technically polished [and] thrilling in moments."

What happened?

"Miong," the latest song-and-dance specimen Rep has put together, thunderously begs that question.

When this sung-through, English-language retelling of the life of Emilio Aguinaldo--but only until the declaration of independence in Kawit, Cavite--first made a splash in the late '90s, it was "a three-hour marathon with a cast of 50," director Joy Virata writes in her program notes.

Now the musical has been pared down to two hours, with a much smaller cast. So why does it feel like a drawn-out relic?

We don't even have to dissect in detail the musical's clumsy, borderline-revisionist handling of history--how it reduces Aguinaldo's complicated hero-traitor persona to something straight out of a childish fairy tale; how it deals with the Aguinaldo-sanctioned execution of Andres Bonifacio in a way that makes the whole grisly affair seem almost like an aside, with the Aguinaldo character even taking to the stage to sing about his eventual remorse and regret.

The happiest of news is that "Miong's" (understandably) one-sided take on facts is now the least of its problems. This revival makes you wonder why, with the wealth of available material, Rep chose this piece to open its 82nd season.

It could be that age hasn't been kind to "Miong." For one, the score (with Virata's lyrics and Ian Monsod's music) is a curiously repetitive creature that sounds like the love child of the Boublil-Schönberg "Les Miserables" and a good number of Disney movies.

The story as written is also problematic: It comes off as a protracted Buwan ng Wika presentation, the myriad of scenes--some straight out of the "Les Mis" playbook--hardly bearing dramatic tension.

But then, we also have a set that looks like it wasn't part of the budget; lights that manically alternate among shades of red, yellow and blue (if this is a play on the Philippine flag, it is not helping advance the story at all); and a sound design that seems to have forgotten the audience and have taken into account only the stage (the show literally sounds like it's being played from a ramshackle cassette player). Meanwhile, the costumes are so pristine, they may as well have come straight out of the factory.

Worst is that for a two-hour show, the musical feels unending: It's just a succession of mechanical scenes limply directed and choreographed the same way, so that at some point, it feels like you've been watching the same thing again and again. Everything here is either a showstopper or a smaller showstopper.

The pivotal part of "Miong" belongs to Timothy Pavino (Team Lea of "The Voice of the Philippines" Season 2). And credit where it is due: His glorious singing really helps get you through the whole ordeal. On the other hand, his portrayal of Aguinaldo lacks gravitas, or even just some concrete, detailed idea of a character that would set him apart from a man playing dress-up.

That problem extends to the entire musical, actually: For a period-specific show about the first Filipino president, it has a frail grasp of being Filipino (save for that climactic flag-raising sequence). There's no firm sense of time and place, and more importantly, of personhood and nationhood here.

Maybe "Miong" was a far different animal back in the '90s. Now, it's simply an exhausting show that isn't at all representative of the Rep we know and have all come to love. 

PDI Feature: Guelan Luarca on 'Coriolanus' and Rody Vera on 'Nana Rosa'

My advancer/interview feature on "Coriolano" and "Nana Rosa" is also in today's paper. The website version here.

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When Filipino politics takes center stage

Scene in "Coriolano."

When two of the country's most prolific playwrights premiere new work within days of each other, one simply must pay attention, especially in this age of fake news and rampant historical revisionism.

Last night, Guelan Luarca's Filipino-language adaptation of Shakespeare's "Coriolanus"--now "Coriolano"--opened at the Cultural Center of the Philippines under Tanghalang Pilipino. On Feb. 27, Rody Vera's latest original piece, "Nana Rosa," will begin performances at the University of the Philippines-Diliman as the final season offering of UP Playwrights' Theatre (UPPT).

"It's the perfect antidote to the oversimplifications in terms of politics," says Luarca of "Coriolano," whose titular character makes the jump from war general to Roman statesman--and unwittingly sets himself up for a fatal downfall.

"All the characters [in 'Coriolano'] are problematic, with individual agenda. And that's politics: not black and white, but always about agenda and patronage. Everything is a compromise. That's the saddening and absurd political despair we must learn to live with."

Only choices

Luarca cites the upcoming midterm elections as a prime illustration: "As much as I vow not to vote for any candidate from Duterte's camp, there are also those super 'Dilawan' candidates [strongly identified with the opposing Liberal Party] that made me go, 'Are these the only choices we have?'

"The world is not divided between 'DDS' [rabid Duterte supporters] and 'Dilawan' [opposition fanatics]. That's the false dichotomy and egoism and unnuanced political imagination that Shakespeare critiques in this play. Imagine if he wrote this in 2019!"

Vera' piece, on the other hand, seeks to fight a much older battle--one that dates all the way back to the last World War.

"Nana Rosa" dramatizes the life of Rosa Henson, the first Filipino woman to publicly come out as a comfort woman during World War II. Henson "inspired other former comfort women to come out as well and tell their stories, which up to now are being denied by the Japanese government," Vera says.

In April of last year, the Duterte administration removed a memorial--one that commemorated the struggles and heroism of the Filipino comfort woman--on Roxas Boulevard in Manila, "in response to Japanese Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Seiko Noda's 'displeasure' over the established statue." The government later stated that the removal was executed to give way to some drainage improvement project in the area.

"The struggle of the Filipino comfort woman needed closure and affirmation. And this taking down of the statue was obviously a terrible way to leave the issue open," says Vera, whose play actually started out as a screenplay commissioned by Star Cinema.

"The main point is to consistently remind us that [the abuse of comfort women] happened, even as the Japanese government keeps erasing it from its history books. Our collective memories are too malleable. We not only easily forget, but are also easily swayed by distorted versions of our past--be it about the Marcos dictatorship or a more distant era."

Despite its historical content, "'Nana Rosa' is inevitably a political play," says Vera. "It tackles almost all the issues related to war, colonial invasion and oppression."

Then again, Vera affirms: "Theater and politics are inseparable, not only in content but also in form. When I do write for theater and film, the first thing that sparks my interest are stories that are naturally political; that is what I mostly look for in any play I attend."

"All the greatest plays are political. I cannot imagine any theater piece that does not tackle anything political."   

PDI Review: 'Every Brilliant Thing' by The Sandbox Collective

You who's reading this: Please watch Kakki Teodoro's second and final performance on Feb. 23 at 2:30 p.m. The website version of my review here.

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How the manic-depressive becomes truly brilliant

Teresa Herrera (center) during an interactive segment in "Every Brilliant Thing." The volunteer in plaid long sleeves on the left is the genius radiologist Scott Ong, who used to be my former colleague at the Philippine General Hospital.

One: ice cream. Two: water fights. Three: staying up past your bedtime and being allowed to watch TV.

So goes the list of brilliant things at the heart of Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe's one-person play, "Every Brilliant Thing," now being given two vastly different lives by The Sandbox Collective under Jenny Jamora's sprightly, frequently playful direction.

In this 90-minute monologue, a girl journeys from childhood to early adulthood accompanied by the specter of her mother's mental illness and repeated suicide attempts. Bereft of more sophisticated coping mechanisms as a child, the protagonist crafts a litany of the things she deems wonderful in her universe, a sort of shield against, and antidote to, heartaches and hardships she can barely fathom.

Tricks up their sleeves

But the playwrights have tricks up their sleeves. The conceit of this play is that it is a journey the audience, too, must embark on. Many scenes involve volunteer viewers assuming some role or other opposite the narrator, who also requires the help of most audience members to shout out the items on that pivotal list she repeatedly invokes throughout the show.

Which is to say, what if the selected participants aren't--for lack of better words--good and game enough? It's a rattling thought, but thankfully, both times we caught this show, the volunteers were swell.

As with any monologue, the performer becomes the show, and the show becomes the performance. In Sandbox's production, two actresses alternate: Teresa Herrera and Kakki Teodoro.

Herrera, whose face has been on every promotional material, provides a capable, charismatic performance. She is grace personified, and in her hands, the show becomes a distanced narrator surveying and making sense of the past alongside the audience.

But the greater performance inarguably belongs to Teodoro. In a word, she's fearless--exhilaratingly fearless. She leads the audience by the arm, then pushes them deep into the character's turbulent past. This way, the story becomes so much more alive; one actually endures the narrator's wellspring of feelings, her happiness and sadness, all her ups and downs.

Teodoro's show more precisely captures the play's essence, which is the fleshing out of a manic-depressive personality. She evokes with breathtaking emotional range what the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical "Next to Normal," whose central character has bipolar disorder, puts into words as "the manic, magic days, and the dark, depressing nights."

In the interactive segments (especially with those very enthusiastic volunteers during the show we caught), you almost think Teodoro wouldn't be able to gracefully handle the dips and curves thrown at her. But the way she takes the wheel, sometimes even pushing the play into the realm of meta with her hilarious ad-libs, is astonishing and flat-out delightful.

If it isn't clear enough, that, right there, is a star performance. And it's an injustice that Teodoro, bafflingly labeled an "alternate," is set to appear for only one more date--the 2:30 p.m. matinee on Feb. 23.

One more thing, regardless of the actress, this "Every Brilliant Thing" owes much of its success to Arvy Dimaculangan's sound design. It's always easier to notice the soundscape when it is bad, but here, it is topnotch. Listen to how he modulates and times the sound effects; how and when he favors quiet over noise and vice versa; even just his actual choice of sound as prop. The story not only advances, but also becomes more immersive, because of Dimaculangan's work, which is a truly brilliant thing.

PDI Review: 'Eto Na! Musikal nAPO!' by 9 Works Theatrical/ Globe Live

Another rerun--in fact, the second of 10 lined up for the year so far. When Rachel Weisz tells Olivia Colman in "The Favourite" that love has limits, she may as well have been talking about APO, because to love this musical is to forgive its atrocious acoustics. The website version of my review here.

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'APO!' musical even better now--the very definition of a good time

Curtain call at "Eto Na! Musikal nAPO" with APO Hiking Society co-founder Jim Paredes.

A mark of an excellent piece of theater is its capability to sell you its seemingly unreasonable running time. 9 Works Theatrical and Globe Live's "Eto Na! Musikal nAPO!" is one such piece.

Running at close to three hours, this jukebox musical can definitely use some trimming (Mark Bautista's almost-back-to-back numbers! That double ending!). But it has returned virtually untouched--no major changes, as director-librettist Robbie Guevara said in an interview with Inquirer Lifestyle. That includes the same shoddy sound, largely thanks to a venue whose interiors were built like a cement cave.

And yet, this production is even better than last year's version. The APO musical, as it is popularly referred to, has become the very definition of a good time.

More than gracefully carrying itself through its shortcomings, "Eto Na!" knows how to sell its goods with aplomb. The musical now has a more cohesive feel to it, performed by a cast that's visibly more at ease with the show's and each other's rhythms.

On the night we watched, for example, a snafu with a prop bench was straightaway turned into a running gag by the male ensemble, the joke centered on Alfritz Blanche (utterly endearing in his first major theater role).

Main selling point

And this production still delivers the musical's main selling point--Daniel Bartolome and Orly dela Cruz's reworking of the APO Hiking Society discography.

It's easy to overlook the odd, redundant inclusion of a song number or two, when you get moments like "Batang Bata Ka Pa," an early musical high point of the show, rendered as a stirring mother-and-son duet by Neomi Gonzales and Jon Philippe Go; or "Panalangin," where Jobim Javier, all swagger and sex appeal like a James Dean-Danny Zuko hybrid, reaffirms his distinction as last year's breakout leading man for musical theater.

Best of all is how the musical pulls off the telling of its deceptively simple story with a large ensemble.

For Boomers and Gen Xers who lived through the Marcos years that "Eto Na!" depicts, the show can be an enjoyable nostalgia trip. But for millennials such as this author, what's most remarkable is how the musical somehow transports us right in the midst of converging love stories--and really, there are a lot, be it for parent, child, music or country--as they collectively render a world with frightening parallels to the present.

There's a moment toward the end when this musical stops feeling like a period romcom--a quintessential good time. It involves a grieving family, a stage suddenly awash in red, and APO's "Pag-ibig."

That scene, and everything else that follows, transforms "Eto Na!" from being just a magnifying glass on the martial law years into a battle cry against the fascist evils that persist to this day. You emerge from this show not just musically satisfied, but also with a renewed sense of justice, if not hope, for this nation, and an emboldened will to keep fighting the good fight.  

PDI Review: 'Silent Sky' by Reine Productions/ Repertory Philippines

I have two reviews out today in the Inquirer. This one is about a rerun of a great 2018 show. The website version here.

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'Silent Sky' worth your second glimpse

My blurry photo of the last(?) scene in "Silent Sky." This was taken during press night, where photos were allowed.

In Manila, it's easy to tell the people behind a show to have a rerun when the show turns out to be excellent. But that's easier said than done: One considers not only a production's financial success and viability, but also the artists' schedules and the limited availability of venues.

What, then, does one make of those brilliant shows that do return--but fail to equal the pleasures of their original forms?

The rerun of Repertory Philippines' (Rep) "Silent Sky," now staged in cooperation with Reine Productions, is far from a disappointment. It may even merit a thoroughly considered standing ovation.

"Silent Sky" by Lauren Gunderson dramatizes the struggles of the pioneering astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt, as she tried to break through the male-dominated, 20th-century scientific community. There's workplace drama ("Women don't touch the telescopes," Henrietta's superior basically tells her), domestic drama, a nerdy romance, and some hardcore astronomy that isn't at all difficult to follow.

At Greenbelt 1's Onstage Theater last year, Rep's "Silent Sky" was incandescent: thoughtfully mounted, ingeniously designed, near-perfectly acted.

But the production's move to the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium has ruined, to our frustration, the magic once evoked by Joey Mendoza's scenery and John Batalla's lights--the way they conjured with astonishing verisimilitude the night skies and distant constellations that figured so prominently in the story. Is the new stage not deep enough? Is the lighting equipment lacking? And what's with the two new swirling projections that grant the whole thing shades of a pool party?

There's also the matter of Bibeth Orteza, who replaces the terrific Sheila Francisco in the role of Annie Cannon, the dominating life force in the story's Harvard workroom. Orteza is the epitome of sternness, whereas what all the characters actually require from their actors is an element of subversive fun.

Despite its missteps, however, "Silent Sky," directed by Joy Virata, is still worth a second glimpse. Cathy Azanza-Dy, as Henrietta, remains the production's mesmerizing center. Caisa Borromeo, as Henrietta's sister, and Naths Everett, as another female astronomer, are even better than their already accomplished turns last year. (The underrated Borromeo is the scene stealer here, a master juggler of comedy and tragedy. And we issue this call once more--when will we see her in another meaty leading role?) Even Topper Fabregas, once too 21st-century as Henrietta's love interest, has comfortably adapted to the old-fashioned milieu.

The production remains what Inquirer Lifestyle reviewer Cora Llamas called "an eloquent ode to feminine freedom." One simply can't help rooting for its female characters as they literally reach for the stars. Too bad the stars don't shine as bright this time.  

PDI Review: 'This Is War: Staged Readings' ('A Great War'; 'The Lion in Winter') by CAST

This is my second piece in today's Inquirer (it's actually the page headline). The fourth and final reading takes place tomorrow! See the website version of this review here.

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'This Is War'--the year's first great performance

The second and third installments of "This Is War," a four-part series of dramatic readings by the Company of Actors in Streamlined Theatre, were a study in contrasts--contrasting Jameses, that is.

James Christy's "A Great War" is set in the Great War itself. That's World War I. The play follows three plot lines: that of the German-Jewish soldier who acquires a reputation for being indestructible; that of the soldier's family and loved ones back home; and that of a pair of brains in the control rooms (bunkers?).

Fully staged, it probably would have been spectacular: the horrors of war enacted in detail, the poignant, oftentimes dangerous quiet pervading the more cerebral moments made deafening in the vastness of the theater.

But reduced into a reading in a space as tight as Pineapple Lab, the play meandered and felt hollow. Suddenly there were too many maudlin spots in the writing; suddenly one could almost see the playwright's brain at work, maneuvering his narrative with such obviousness that almost nothing was a surprise anymore.

One wishes directors Nelsito Gomez and Sarah Facuri could revisit this play, this time as full production, and find a more commanding actor for the central role of soldier (read by Luis Marcelo, who must have felt too light and too small for it).

James Goldman's "The Lion in Winter" was an unqualified, rip-roaring triumph. Directed by Mako Alonso and Jill Peña, it stood its ground even before the classic 1968 film adaptation starring Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn.

The last hundred years in English-language nonmusical theater have produced many nasty families--Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County," where a daughter commands her mother to "eat the fish, bitch"; or Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night," with its inebriated men and morphine-addicted leading lady.

The family at the heart of Goldman's play, however, can give "King Lear" a run for its money: attempted parricide, attempted filicide, a father whoring around with his son's betrothed, a mother with a venomous tongue--all delivered in modern language.

The great joy of this dramatic reading was in witnessing a sharply written script being feasted upon by an all-around dazzling cast, which included Roselyn Perez, delectably acerbic in the Hepburn role of the matriarch Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Franco Ramos, in an uproarious breakout performance as the family's bratty, sullen, spineless youngest son.

Then there was Jaime del Mundo. When was the last time he essayed a major part onstage? As the patriarch Henry II, his was a titanic turn--god and monster, passion and pathos all rolled into one. By December, we'll no doubt look back and say, yes, this was the year's first great performance.