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.
