PDI Review: 'Next to Normal' by The Sandbox Collective

Saw this twice. Title says it all. Next, please. Website version here.

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'Next to Normal': Third time's not always the charm

Some shows seem set up for success, armed with text that’s structurally airtight, emotionally rigorous, unyielding in its pursuit to deliver nothing but the most truthful moments onstage. All the production needs to do is, pardon the cliché, “trust the material.”

“Next to Normal,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical about a family fractured by its matriarch’s mental illness, easily qualifies as such a show.

Four characters form the crux of the musical: Diana, who struggles with bipolar disorder amidst the lingering trauma of her infant son’s death (no longer a spoiler at this point!); her husband Dan, stretched to his limits; her teenage daughter Natalie, also stretched to her limits; and Gabe, Diana and Dan’s son who, in a stroke of narrative brilliance, exists throughout the show in adult form.

Reviewing its 2009 Broadway premiere, Ben Brantley of The New York Times rightfully described the show as a “feel-everything musical”: one that exhumes “with operatic force” the deep-seated, familial anguish of its characters to become a frequently moving, occasionally devastating portrait of intergenerational dysfunction. And it also comes with an all-timer pop-rock score (by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey) that captures the jaggedness of its protagonists’ individual and collective psyches.

All that was evident in the first two instances this musical was staged in Manila: in 2011, directed by the late Bobby Garcia for Atlantis Productions, an “electrifying, heart-shredding” iteration that evinced complete “mastery of the Broadway musical idiom,” as I wrote in my best-of-the-2010s roundup for this paper; then, in 2020, directed by Missy Maramara for Ateneo Blue Repertory, a spare, emotionally lacerating, visibly text-first treatment—the musical “with its insides fully exposed,” as I described it. (The latter unfortunately closed after its opening weekend—one of 27 theatrical events forcibly shuttered by the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic.)

Lack of trust

Now comes Manila’s third glimpse of this musical, directed by Toff de Venecia for The Sandbox Collective. In brief, it only proves that third time’s not always the charm. What may seem a guaranteed win on paper can end up, like this production, a frigid and antiseptic experience.

Mirroring Diana’s fragmented mind, Sandbox’s “Next to Normal” alternates between gratuitous resorts to metaphor and a grating literal-mindedness that, taken together, betray a seeming lack of trust in the material—an uncalled-for itch to do “more.”

The reach for metaphors is apparent quite early. For example, the opening number, which introduces the viewer to the protagonists as they mill about the house getting ready for the day, culminates in the first hint that something’s awry in this otherwise ordinary household: In a manic frenzy, Diana starts making as many sandwiches as she can, “to get ahead on [everyone’s] lunches”—to the point of preparing them on the floor. This is made perfectly clear in the dialogue, as well as the script directions.

But in this Sandbox production, there are no sandwiches; Diana only sits, then stands, on a chair, singing her mania away. And while departures from the script are quite fine and routine in the theater these days, this specific instance is a head-scratcher, especially considering everything else that follows.

It might have made more sense if this impulse to leave things to the imagination were consistently the only feature here. But balancing this strange penchant for minimalism is an urge—just as recurrent, and no less bothersome—to spell things out in ways this production probably deems “expressionistic.”

There is, for one, a drawn-out, five-minute pre-show of sorts involving a Pablo Neruda quote being erased gradually on the wall, until only “absence is a house” (from the poet’s Sonnet XCIV) is left. Does this elevate the viewer’s understanding of the musical? Not at all, one realizes by curtain call, though the whole charade does add five extra minutes to the production.

Throughout, chairs become the centerpiece of movement: The actors carry around their own chairs, (re-)arranging them, emoting “into” them. It’s been 60 years since Dionne Warwick first crooned that “a chair is not a house/and a house is not a home …” Here, one is reminded of that song, to be fair, but this “Groundhog Day”-esque “chair choreography” is always far too busy, intrusive, and obvious to ever be truly meaningful. (In fact, the intrusive choreography doesn’t let up even in the final song.)

Emotionally static

Meanwhile, moments of intense emotion, as reflected in the music and lyrics, are often left emotionally static by the blocking and direction. When they’re not lugging chairs around, many times the actors are made to just stand there, or sit there, occupying their own spots, and sing to high heavens. The attempt to portray the characters in their closed-off, individual worlds is clear; the excess of unused space onstage is likewise painfully glaring.

Considering the amount of attention devoted to metaphors, to choreography (and nonmovement), to a lighting design that keeps calling attention to itself, it is a travesty that not much care has been given to the sound. While the venue—the Power Mac Blackbox Theater—is notorious for its appalling acoustics, this “Next to Normal” has to count as one of the worst-sounding productions ever staged there. The performances are thus wasted in this space; already made emotionally distant by De Venecia’s direction, they become literally incomprehensible because of the sound.

As Diana, Shiela Valderrama can be a vision of coherence in her best moments, while Nikki Valdez’s rawness occasionally works to her advantage (even if she’s frequently belabored by unsteady dramatic and vocal technique). Floyd Tena and OJ Mariano only manage to live up to the largeness of their characters in the second act.

Among the actors playing second-generation characters, Omar Uddin delivers the clearest performance by a mile; as Natalie’s boyfriend Henry, he not only lands what the character requires of him, but somehow enlarges the part through sheer will, his presence becoming the most compassionate and compelling in the show.

And if this production is about “making choices,” only Vino Mabalot succeeds in making an altogether interesting choice, his take on Gabe as a malevolent, teenage specter adding a much-welcome sprinkle of excitement to the proceedings.

Yet, Uddin and Mabalot (alternating with Davy Narciso and Benedix Ramos, respectively) are only pieces of the larger puzzle. The production they inhabit has neither the former’s flesh-and-blood accessibility nor the latter’s well-defined commitment to deviate from convention.

Like a number of Sandbox’s previous outings—last year’s “Tiny Beautiful Things,” the monologue “Every Brilliant Thing” and its Filipino translation “Bawat Bonggang Bagay”—this “Next to Normal” has been marketed heavily along the lines of mental health advocacy. And why not? The advocacy part is already crystal-clear in the powerful material. Rather than let the themes emerge naturally, however, this production ends up speaking over them—an exercise in muddying clarity.

PDI Review: '3 Upuan' by Scene Change and Areté

First review of the year is of a play that's the most I've cried in the theater in my 17 years of theatergoing. It's so great to have a working website again--the online version of this article here. 

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Time as great arbiter of grief in Guelan Luarca's '3 Upuan'

Here’s something you only ever learn when the time actually comes: Grieving a loved one’s death is a bizarre, alienating experience. It forces you into a different timeline, a kind of temporal suspension in which your grief is only ever your own, while life around you goes on as if nobody has died. The only way the rest of the world can know your grief is if you actually articulate it—if you ever manage to do so, that is.

This alienation-in-grief, this state of being adrift in time and space, is what preoccupies Guelan Luarca’s “3 Upuan,” a heart-wrencher of a play that’s easily best-of-the-decade material. As precise as it is profound in its rumination on what it’s like to lose someone, this play is perhaps the most persuasive exploration of the subject Philippine theater has seen of late. Put simply, it gets it all right.

It understands, for example, that grief is about perspective. Throughout this play, the characters of three siblings each alternate as narrators, guiding the audience through their individual experiences mourning the sickness and death of their father. Jers, the eldest, is an academic whose idea of processing loss hinges mainly on the vocabulary of the humanities that he deploys daily in the classroom. Jack, the middle son, is a visual artist who finds—and loses—himself, and his sorrows, in sculpture and poetry.

And Jai, the youngest, is a journalist based in America, whose grasp of grief is perhaps, understandably, the most vivid, evocative, grounded.

In a span of 90 minutes, “3 Upuan” takes the audience on a journey that begins at the siblings’ father’s deathbed—but then quickly unfurls backwards and forwards across time, and beyond this single family unit, into a remarkably complex exploration of the origins of human sadness.

Pivotal event

Grief, this play asserts, never really goes away—it only grows or shrinks with time, stuck to our psyches and forever dictating the way we perceive the world after that pivotal, sorrowful event. It is why the world spins the way it does; why people behave the way they do.

In other words, time is the great arbiter. In the play, each sibling becomes ensconced in a world of their own grief, living out a timeline separate from the rest, even as they ostensibly experience the fact and aftermath of their father’s death together.

Jers and Jack pass the time talking hypotheticals in the hospital. Fast-forward after the funeral, Jack and Jai enjoy the most mundane drives around town. Much, much later, Jers and Jai become bonded by yet another tragedy in the family. In all this, we see each sibling existing in two presents: the one that everybody else in their fictive world can see, and the one only they can perceive, shaped by their individual grief. Each effectively becomes a cipher to the others.

The central mystery of this play, then: How does one stop being that cipher of grief?

Here, Luarca proffers the same answer: time. If grief is an experience that halts time, it is also one that can be understood and articulated fully only with time. In this sense, “3 Upuan” becomes a most articulate play about articulating the seemingly inarticulable.

Drawing partly from the French thinker Jacques Lacan, the play is a journey of making sense of the senseless. Articulating their grief becomes, for the characters, a project of piecing together memories, sharing moments of fleeting joy, learning to see the world from the others’ eyes, and finding the right words to capture that singular, incomprehensible feeling. It is a project that takes time, and can only ever be finished with enough time.

Intellectual rigor

Staged in a 60-seater repurposed classroom, Scene Change and Areté’s production of the play (directed by Luarca himself) forces you to confront the characters’ grief head on—and perhaps also reflect upon your own. This intimate setup also renders “3 Upuan’s” intellectual rigor crystal-clear: how this play is structurally unassailable, expansive in its imagining of incident, in how it puts into words the past, present, and future.

That the production somehow miraculously manages to make full sense of the script is a testament to Luarca as director, who has tamed and turned theatrically coherent the novelistic impulses of his own writing. The design here is simple yet utterly effective: mixed-and-matched ceiling fluorescents by lighting designer D Cortezano, pitch-perfect atmospheric sounds by Julia Vaila, and the smartest use of video and projections I’ve seen of late by Teia Contreras.

The cast Luarca has assembled, all returning from last year’s premiere, are impeccable in the way they plumb the emotional recesses of their characters: Jojit Lorenzo as Jers, JC Santos as Jack, and—in what has been rightfully labeled a career-best performance—Martha Comia as Jai, a beacon of actorly precision, down to her trying-to-belong-but-could-never-belong American accent as the US-based sibling.

Between this play and “The Impossible Dream,” which recently enjoyed a one-weekend revival at the Philippine Educational Theater Association’s Control + Shift Festival, Luarca has clearly distinguished himself as the preeminent Filipino playwright of his generation. If writing for the theater is an act of radical imagination—of conjuring infinite possibilities, redefining the real, and stretching the limits of our emotive capacities—then Luarca’s body of work is, for lack of a subtler term, peerless.

Cathartic gift

In “The Impossible Dream,” Luarca uses the straightforward premise of a fictitious encounter between Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and Ninoy Aquino as a launchpad for meditating on ideas of revolution and heroism in the post-truth age (and all done in such piquant language!). Likewise, in past plays such as “Nekropolis,” “Desaparesidos,” and even the imperfect “Ardor,” he has consistently pushed for dissections of the Filipino consciousness—in its immediate and imagined forms—that none of his peers could, at present, ever claim to equal.

In “3 Upuan,” Luarca has visibly taken a more inward-looking turn—yet one that is no less meticulous in its explication of a very Filipino human-ness. Those who’ve never grieved for a loved one will nonetheless find in this play a work of astounding sophistication and emotional maturity.

But if you’ve ever gone through the roller coaster of watching a loved one die, anticipating their death, pregrieving the loss to come, then actually grappling with that loss and trying to make sense of the all-consuming aftermath, this play is a cathartic gift.

The Year in Film and TV (2024)

In January, I biked some 31 kilometers of the Angkor archeological grounds in Siem Reap. Two days earlier, I was at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, silently cursing the Filipino boomers and Gen X-ers on the "right side of history" for failing to properly hold the Marcoses to account. Outside of Ho Chi Minh City a few days later, I found myself wearing one of those hats from 'Miss Saigon' as part of the tourist-trap Mekong River Delta boat ride I'd cluelessly signed up for. 

In April, I ate those heavenly Bakehouse cinnamon rolls in Hong Kong, hanami-ed the shit out of Osaka and Kanazawa, wore a kimono for a couple of hours in Kyoto, went onsen-hopping in Kinosaki, biked the pine-laden Amanohashidate causeway. Then, turned 32. In July, ticked off some items from my bucket list for Europe: the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb altarpiece in Ghent, the Bruges belfry, the Eiffel Tower and Montmarte, Da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks and Palma Vecchio's Adoration of the Shepherds with a Donor in The Louvre. Strolled the banks of the Seine, spent a golden sunset in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, saw Seurat's Sunday in the Park croquetons in the Orsay. Listened to a touring youth choir in the Chartres cathedral. Got properly stoned in Amsterdam. Beheld Fabritius' The Goldfinch in The Hague's Mauritshuis and marveled at the fascinating architectural landscape of Rotterdam. Also finished my MA and started my PhD. Then the blur that was the year's last quarter: koyo peeping and my first solo hike in Nikko. 'Sunday' at the Sydney Opera House and 'Jesus Christ Superstar' at the Capitol. My maternal grandmother's funeral. More-than-friend-ing one of my oldest friends. Such is life.

All of that to say, I saw only 146 films in 2024, according to my Letterboxd--the downward trend continues--and not counting TV series. For accountability: I hereby declare this post to be the end of my brief life as an awards season completist. Thanks for reading! Now go live.

1. 'Somebody Somewhere' Season 3 (HBO; created by Hannah Bos & Paul Thureen) 

I'm not sure this is the best thing I watched in 2024. What I'm sure of is that it's the one thing I want to remember the year for, if I could pick only one. In its final season, this miracle of a show became a much-needed appeal to choose love, always, and kindness, always. To love someone, this show asserts, is to completely come to terms with one's self--and to share that healed self wholly with another. In the end, we have only our family, our friends, the friends who become family, the small connections we make and sustain, our town, our neighborhood, our small place in the world--all the things that bring us joy and ease our sadnesses little by little.

2. 'Baby Reindeer' (Netflix; created by Richard Gadd)

Nothing but admiration and respect for Gadd and Jessica Gunning. Would make for a terrific, necessary triptych with 'I May Destroy You' (2020) and 'Procession' (2021).

3. 'The Zone of Interest' (dir. Jonathan Glazer)

Free Palestine!

4. 'Interview with the Vampire' Season 2 (AMC; Rolin Jones, showrunner)

The gayest show of 2024 also happened to be its most romantic. So unserious, so theatrical (a compliment), so histrionic (an even bigger compliment), and chock-full of hot, beautiful people. "Siri, pause."

5. 'Conclave' (dir. Edward Berger)

Someone wrote on Letterboxd that this film has the best third-act use of a photocopier since 'Mean Girls', and honestly, I can't argue against that. When John Lithgow said he will pretend the conversation never took place, and Ralph Fiennes replied, "But it has taken place!," I felt the quiver in Fiennes' voice in my bones. Fiennes here is literally me during Gawad Buhay deliberations.

6. 'Pachinko' Season 2 (Apple TV+; created by Soo Hugh) 

To appropriate Roxana Hadadi, a show that fully grasps how the only way one can endure amidst the cumulative largeness of "family, history, war, culture, capitalism, nationalism, debt, love, [and] faith" is "to understand how small [one] might be in the face of all that." Season 1 made me cry over rice; this season made me cry over tofu. 

7. 'The Substance' (dir. Coralie Fargeat)

Movies should be fun! And I must say, Margaret Qualley has excellent suturing skills.

8. 'Civil War' (dir. Alex Garland)/ 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' (dir. George Miller)

The two most "movie" movies I saw in 2024: the former a delicious vision of America (and the myth of liberal Western benevolence) shitting itself and finally breaking apart, the latter just kind of insane for how confident it is with its visual language.

9. 'Hacks' Season 3 (Max; created by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs & Jen Statsky) 

A perfect season of television. Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder flawless.

10. 'Ghosts of Kalantiaw' (dir. Chuck Escasa)/ 'Gitling' (dir. Jopy Arnaldo)

Hiligaynon supremacy! (Okay, that's not entirely accurate, but you get what I mean.) 

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The rest of my 5-star titles, in alphabetical order:

'Didi' (dir. Sean Wang)

Izaac Wang delivers one of the season's best--and most underrated--performances in this exquisite study of all-consuming sadness masquerading as a run-of-the-mill Asian-diaspora-in-America story. So painfully honest, and real, and beautifully unembellished.

'Flow' (dir. Gints Zilbalodis)

Never thought I'd give a capybara entrance applause, but here we are.

'Four Daughters' (dir. Kaouther Ben Hania)

Life becomes a lot less stressful--and makes a lot more sense--I think, when one starts thinking of one's mother as just another 20-something stuck in a middle-aged person's body. Of course, cycles need breaking at some point.

'Godzilla Minus One' (dir. Takashi Yamazaki)

Now this is an action/superhero movie. Ryunosuke Kamiki a star.

'Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show' Season 1 (HBO; dir. Ari Katcher)

This is so good, but also so sick and disturbing, like masturbation done on the world's biggest stage, under the world's brightest lights, with the world's largest audience. For real, though: We all need to learn to care less about what other people think; to give less fucks; to seek approval less.

'Juror #2' (dir. Clint Eastwood)

Just all-around solid filmmaking, like one of those ancient texts done exceedingly well. What a way to go for Eastwood.

'When This Is All Over' (dir. Kevin Mayuga)

The most accurate depiction of Filipino (upper-)middle class apathy I've seen of late, with a scene-stealing turn from Chaye Mogg (giving Poveda/Woodrose realness), and Juan Karlos continuing to prove himself a reliable screen performer.

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PLUS--23 other titles worth checking out:

'Abbott Elementary' Season 3 (ABC; created by Quinta Brunson); 'American Fiction' (dir. Cord Jefferson); 'Anora' (dir. Sean Baker); 'Ate Bunso' (dir. Angelica Llanera); 'The Boy and the Heron' (dir. Hayao Miyazaki); 'Challengers' (dir. Luca Guadagnino); 'The Curse' Season 1 (Showtime; created by Nathan Fielder & Benny Safdie); 'Drag Race Philippines' Season 3 (HBO Go/ WOW Presents Plus; dirs. Arnel Natividad & Ice Seguerra); 'English Teacher' Season 1 (FX; created by Brian Jordan Alvarez); 'Fargo' Season 5 (FX; created by Noah Hawley); 'Ghostlight' (dir. Kelly O'Sullivan & Alex Thompson); 'His Three Daughters' (dir. Azazel Jacobs); 'Hito' (dir. Stephen Lopez); 'The Idea of You' (dir. Michael Showalter); 'Io Capitano' (dir. Matteo Garrone); 'Mr. & Mrs. Smith' Season 1 (Amazon Prime Video; Francesca Sloane, showrunner); 'The Old Man and the Pool' (dir. Seth Barrish); 'Nowhere Near' (dir. Miko Revereza); 'The Seed of the Sacred Fig' (dir. Mohammad Rasoulof); 'Thelma' (dir. Josh Margolin); 'Third World Romance' (dir. Dwein Baltazar); 'Tumandok' (dirs. Richard Jeroui Salvadico & Arlie Sweet Sumagaysay); 'Tumatawa Umiiyak' (dir. Che Tagyamon)

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Here are 30 of my favorite performances of the year, apart from the ones already mentioned earlier:

1. Tim Bagley ('Somebody Somewhere' Season 3)

2. Penélope Cruz ('Ferrari')

3. Ben Daniels ('Interview with the Vampire' Season 2)

4. Enchong Dee ('Here Comes the Groom')

5. Kirsten Dunst ('Civil War')

6. Mark Eidelstein ('Anora')

7. Maya Erskine ('Mr. & Mrs. Smith' Season 1)

8. Dakota Fanning ('Ripley')

9. Nathan Fielder ('The Curse' Season 1)

10. Ralph Fiennes ('Conclave')

11. Mary Catherine Garrison ('Somebody Somewhere' Season 3)

12. Anne Hathaway ('The Idea of You')

13. Jeff Hiller ('Somebody Somewhere' Season 3)

14. Jung Eun-chae ('Pachinko' Season 2)

15. Karren Karagulian ('Anora')

16. Keith Kupferer ('Ghostlight')

17. Justine Lupe ('Nobody Wants This' Season 1)

18. Patti LuPone ('Agatha All Along')

19. Mikey Madison ('Anora')

20. Lesley Manville ('Disclaimer')

21. Paul Mescal ('All of Us Strangers')

22. Demi Moore ('The Substance')

23. Lupita Nyong'o ('A Quiet Place: Day One')

24. Gabby Padilla ('Gitling')

25. Glen Powell ('Hit Man')

26. Florence Pugh ('We Live in Time')

27. Sebastian Stan ('A Different Man')

28. Kakki Teodoro ('Isang Himala')

29. Zoe Saldaña ('Emilia Pérez')

30. Zendaya ('Challengers')

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I have 10 more things to say:

1. The year in musical numbers: 'El Mal' in 'Emilia Pérez' (Saldaña pop-rapping in that red pantsuit? Hot.), and 'Dancing Through Life', the only number that actually improves upon the original in 'Wicked' (Jonathan Bailey and that rotating library!). 

2. The music work of 'Io Capitano', alternating between subdued and loud in all the right places, conveying joy or hope or muted terror with simple precision.

3. The sound design of 'The Zone of Interest' is the thing.

4. Kudos to the cinematography, editing, and sound design of 'The Taste of Things' for making me actually hungry while watching this. Two other noteworthy cinematographic works of 2024: the stunning black-and-white photography of 'Ripley' and the sand-covered wastelands of 'Dune: Part Two' (those floating mercenaries!).

5. Best opening title sequence ever: 'Pachinko' Season 2! Never skipped this every episode.

6. Best animation I saw in 2024 was from 'The Wild Robot'--those flying geese turning into specks of autumn leaves? Gorgeous. 

7. At the start of 'The Substance', an entire career--and Hollywood's habit of discarding its women--told through a single time-lapse of a (fake) Walk of Fame star.

8. Opposite examples of evoking horror: The opening sequence in 'A Quiet Place: Day One', plunging us into Lupita's disoriented POV amid the smoke-filled chaos of the initial NYC attacks; and episode 3 of 'Pachinko' Season 2--airplanes in the provincial sky, fires erupting in the distance.

 

9. Speaking of perspective, 'When This Is All Over' really nailed the privileged druggie's perspective, thanks to incisive editing and cinematography.

10. The Patti LuPone-centric episode in 'Agatha All Along' was an all-timer in the Marvel canon. And 'Drag Race Philippines' Season 3 gave us the best snatch game in global 'Drag Race' history.

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Finally, my favorite non-2023/24 titles that I saw for the first time in 2024:

'All About My Mother' (1999, dir. Pedro Almodóvar)

'BPM (Beats per Minute)' (2017, dir. Robin Campillo)

'Election' (1999, dir. Alexander Payne)

'E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial' (1982, dir. Steven Spielberg)

'My Best Friend's Wedding' (1997, dir. P. J. Hogan)

'A Prophet' (2009, dir. Jacques Audiard)

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Links to my past lists, which are best read as time capsules documenting what I'd seen and where I was at the time I wrote them:

The Year in Film and TV 2023/ 2022/ 2021/ 2020/ 2019

The Decade in Film 2010-19

The Year in Film 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014