PDI Review: 'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street' by Atlantis Theatrical Entertainment Group

For a while there, I was torn between "Spring Awakening" and "Passion" as my pick for Best Musical-Non-Filipino Material. Happy to say this "Sweeney Todd" solves that problem. The website version of my review here. Trivia: The 2009 Repertory Philippines production was only my second trip to the theater at the time.

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'Sweeney Todd': Bobby Garcia's reinvention of the musical a triumph of vision and staging

Program centerfold.

God, that's good!

That's the title of the tongue-twisting Act II opener of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," but it may as well be a blurb for director Bobby Garcia's dimension-defying reinvention of the musical for Atlantis Theatrical Entertainment Group.

A mark of a true masterpiece is its malleability to interpretation without losing its genius. And across four decades, "Sweeney Todd"--which Michael Billington called "Sondheim's dark masterpiece" in The Guardian--has been dissected every which way, from John Doyle's 2005 Broadway revival that transplanted the story to a lunatic asylum, its actors doubling as musicians; to the latest Off-Broadway incarnation that repurposed its venue into an actual pie shop.

Garcia's "Sweeney Todd" arrives 10 years after the last Manila production--Repertory Philippines' "agreeably staged" version, to quote former Inquirer Theater editor Gibbs Cadiz's appraisal, with an "incandescent Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo as [Sweeney's sidekick] Mrs. Lovett."

But Garcia focuses neither on the Grand Guignol theatrics that this tale of a barber who bakes his customers into pies has become identified with, nor on fulfilling orthodox expectations of a "Sweeney Todd" set in what the lyrics call the vermin-infested "great black pit" of Victorian London.

Sliver of sanity

Instead, he has set his sights on finding that elusive sliver of sanity amid the deafening madness.

His "Sweeney" is no primal scream, but a prolonged, muffled psychotic breakdown, unraveling on the derelict, multi-story car depot designed by David Gallo and lit with masterly exactitude by Aaron Porter, this industrial decay a magnified stand-in for the state of mind of its leading characters.

Eschewing spectacle, Garcia has zoomed in on the human-sized psychodrama at "Sweeney's" core, allowing his production to throb with muted rage.

This rage finds its center in Jett Pangan's Sweeney, around whom Garcia has wisely spun and scaled down his production.

The whole conceit makes sense: While Pangan doesn't quite achieve the level of monstrous terror that's become synonymous with the character's monumental Act I breakdown, "Epiphany," his interpretation is of a piece with the show's vision.

Pangan's Sweeney pulses with a cracked man's soul, his madness just beneath the skin, surfacing every now and then.

It makes sense that he, as with the whole cast, should be dressed by Rajo Laurel in clothes that look pretty normal at first, until you start noticing the tiny jarring details and intentional mismatches.

Clarity

Pangan also delivers Sondheim's wickedly tricky score with remarkable clarity--a skill he shares with Lea Salonga, whose Mrs. Lovett, a delirious hurricane of deviousness and devilry, sprinkled with lust, is one of the most accomplished stage creations we've seen this year and surely qualifies as a career high for the actress.

Pangan simmers; Salonga is the explosive fire underneath.

Clarity can very well be this production's calling card. You hear it in Gerard Salonga's musical direction of the ABS-CBN Philharmonic Orchestra, in Justin Stasiw's sound design, and in the seven-person ensemble's deft handling of their characters and harmonies. Sondheim has probably never sounded this good nor precise hereabouts.

As well, clarity marks four notable featured turns: Mikkie Bradshaw-Volante's Johanna, Arman Ferrer's Beadle Bamford, Andrew Fernando's Judge Turpin and especially Nyoy Volante's come-from-behind, rollicking slam dunk as the charlatan Adolfo Pirelli--all of them straight out of some fever dream.

You wonder, in fact, how Gerald Santos' lost-boy attack on the sailor Anthony, or the too-aseptic Toby and Beggar Woman of Luigi Quesada and Ima Castro, respectively, could have found their way into this production.

This "Sweeney" is, in the end, a triumph of vision and staging. See, for instance, how Garcia stages "Johanna"--considered one of Broadway's finest love songs--with stark, revealing intimacy; how he plots Act I's knotty quartet scene ("Kiss Me"/"Ladies in Their Sensitivities"), working with his designers to let Anthony and Johanna's blossoming romance to float with urgency just above the Beadle and Turpin's pairing; how the macabre humor of this most macabre of musicals actually--in more surprising ways than one--translates as humor.

We could go on, which is to say, this "Sweeney's" gifts and virtues run aplenty, it leaves you hungry for more.

PDI Review: 'Katsuri' by Tanghalang Pilipino

This is one of those instances when I hate the word count, because there is just so much to say about and unpack in this play. Still, rare is that production that manages to rise above the shortcomings of its source material. The website version of my review here.

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'Katsuri': The triumph of acting

Curtain call at "Katsuri."

Tanghalang Pilipino's "Katsuri," directed by Carlitos Siguion-Reyna, transplants the farmhands of John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" from the American Great Depression to the "howling wilderness" of present-day Negros Island, where, in the last three years, over a hundred individuals--including farmers, lawyers and left-wing advocates--have met their violent ends, often in the hands of unidentified assailants.

This daring change in milieu is praiseworthy: Theater can and should be instrumental in scrutinizing the moral deficiencies that have become emblematic of the Duterte administration.

But it is this very milieu in which "Katsuri" flounders. What Bibeth Orteza's Filipino-Hiligaynon adaptation fails to establish adequately is the climate of fear that must pervade this "howling wilderness," now downscaled to the plantation where George and Toto (Steinbeck's Lenny) seek employment.

Either that, or the point seems to be the normalization of murder in this landscape of perpetual poverty, in which case the play similarly stumbles.

Specter of death

The figure of an armed, masked man hounds the opening scenes (and some others) like a specter of death. An orating counselor is felled by a gunshot. Yet life goes on, the characters seemingly unflustered, if not unaffected, by the carnage.

Further along, another shot rings, and one character (whose dog is supposedly the bullet's recipient) says, in obvious denial: "Magsasaka naman 'yun, hindi aso, 'di ba?"

None of that adds up to a coherent make-believe world. Blood-soaked Negros is merely convenient setting--placeholder for the urgent "now," but inconsequential to this supposed adaptation.

And convenience should never be the end point: In the struggle for social justice, even art must be held accountable to its own form of moral responsibility.

The problem is that Steinbeck never had to deal with the added burden of portraying the vastly different plight of the sakada. His farmhands roamed the country because that was the era of migrant work.

Orteza, meanwhile, drags the sakada into the picture, even the "nanlaban" phenomenon of extrajudicial killings, but disappointingly defers to Steinbeck in the end.

The more you think about "Katsuri's" ambition, the more the writing's faults come to light.

For instance, George and Toto--burly, blundering, incapable of blending with any crowd--supposedly escape from Hacienda Luisita because of rape allegations, and manage to reach Negros completely unhampered--under this government of heavy policing?

Unable to trust the viewer to get the moralizing points, Orteza busies her script with motherhood statements, foreshadowing set up to a shine, glaring violations of the cardinal rule of "Show; don't tell."

We can also do without the Hiligaynon interjections since they never feel organic in the way that the language is vital to Glenn Sevilla Mas' "Games People Play," or Bisaya is to Alexandra May Cardoso's "Ang Sugilanon ng Kabiguan ni Epefania."

Still, that "Katsuri" ends up a gripping two-and-a-half hours is only testament to the superb ensemble playing--never mind that individually, some performances are stained with showy artifice. If only for the deeply entwined turns of Jonathan Tadioan as Toto and Marco Viaña as George, a ticket should be warranted.

Tadioan gets the showier part, what film parlance would call Oscar bait--a role, in this context, imbued with an obvious defect, it would be hard not to notice when done really well.

And Tadioan does Toto's mental disability really, really well; the unwavering consistency of his technique is astounding. (That the role is written in monotone is a different story altogether.)

But Viaña--upon his mighty shoulders rest the weight of this story, its moral fulcrum, and the gravity of George and Toto's actions (both intended and accidental). His journey, from loyal friend in search of safe pasture to tired farmhand eager to blend in and ultimately to hand-of-God who decides who gets to be men and who gets to be mice, is a peerless triumph of acting.

PDI Review: 'Himala: Isang Musikal' by 9 Works Theatrical and The Sandbox Collective

We had a collective theater yearender for 2018, but if it were only me, I'd have ranked this production first. Second would be "Desaparesidos"; third, "Waitress"; fourth, "Manila Notes"; fifth, "The Kundiman Party"; sixth, "Dekada '70"; seventh, "Silent Sky." The website version of this review here.

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'Himala': A Filipino vision of the apocalypse

Curtain call at the 2019 rerun of "Himala: Isang Musikal."

You want to know how the end of days might look, and feel, and sound like in this part of the world?

9 Works Theatrical and The Sandbox Collective's "Himala: Isang Musikal" offers an answer at once frightening and enthralling. And like a true miracle, this returning production directed by Ed Lacson Jr. has somehow improved upon its already perfect form.

All the elements in Ricky Lee and Vincent de Jesus' adaptation of Ishmael Bernal's classic film about a young woman, Elsa, who claims to have seen the Virgin Mary--and the subsequent cycle of fanaticism and hysteria that descends upon her desolate town--were already in tip-top shape in last year's run--the first fully staged production since the musical's 2003 premiere at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

What's most striking this time around is how seamless everything feels--no more grand distinctions, if there were any, between the big song numbers and the small book (or dialogue) scenes, the story flowing from start to end like a single, continuous breath.

Space and motion

Worth mentioning as well--something many seem to take for granted--is how rigorous of a movement piece this production is. There's no obvious choreography to speak of here. Instead, what Lacson and assistant director JM Cabling have built this production upon is a precise and deliberate awareness of space and motion working in conjunction, so that the viewer somehow always knows exactly where to look or which character to follow at every given scene and moment.

It is this unstylized movement design that transforms many scenes in this production into exercises of gripping--and often breathtaking--crowd control, its cast of some 40 actors leading the audience by hand into an ocean of order and disorder, "immersive theater" at its finest.

The triumvirate of actresses leading this production remain in spectacular shape: Aicelle Santos (now alternating with Celine Fabie) as Elsa, Neomi Gonzales as Elsa's chaste companion Chayong, and, as Nymia (Chayong's polar opposite), Kakki Teodoro--this writer's personal pick for the best featured performance by an actress in a musical last year.

Sheila Francisco (alternating with May Bayot-de Castro, who was Elsa in 2003) is now Nanay Saling, frail and painfully helpless in the uncontrollable spiral of things; while Victor Robinson III gives a performance that is completely devoid of ego and unnecessary ornamentation as Chayong's suitor Pilo.

There are, in fact, no small roles or performances in this "Himala." Everyone and everything in it is perfectly calibrated and timed to create a world of desperate people hungry for a savior--and willing to bend and stretch the limits of the truth to attain salvation in whatever form.

The ravishing theatrics will thrill you to the bones. After that, it is the taste of fear that remains in you: Here is where we may well be headed--a Filipino vision of the apocalypse.