Concert reviewer era incoming jk. This article was published yesterday in The Diarist--here.
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Everybody loves Raymond Lauchengco--even if I was 'too young' to be watching his show!
Is Raymond Lauchengco a TOTGA of Philippine theater?
To go by “Everybody Loves Raymond,” his 60th birthday concert at The Theater at Solaire last Nov. 28, the answer is an emphatic yes.
For those unfamiliar with internet slang, TOTGA stands for “the one that got away,” a uniquely Filipino acronym referencing ex-loves and former partners who nonetheless occupy a special place in one’s heart. But the term can also signify a what-if, a missed opportunity, an alternative version of reality now unattainable.
Throughout the three-hour concert, Lauchengco revisited many of the OPM (or original Pilipino music) songs that catapulted his career to stratospheric heights in the 1980s—for instance, I Need You Back from 1982, a Side-B filler that unexpectedly gave him his first hit at 17 years old; and Saan Darating ang Umaga from 1983, composed for the same-titled movie he starred in alongside Maricel Soriano and the late Nida Blanca.
Despite the genre, however, it was clear that Lauchengco belonged onstage, by which I mean the theater. His voice—unembellished, rich and warm, with a firmly controlled vibrato—was a musical theater leading man’s voice, if there ever was one.
In a parallel universe, Lauchengco would probably be one of our stage luminaries already, joining the likes of his sister Menchu, who directed the concert. The theater’s where he got his start, after all—albeit by accident.
“The most ingenious prank my sister ever played on me,” Lauchengco shared during the concert, “was getting me to audition for The King and I.” He’s referring to Repertory Philippines’ (Rep) 1978 production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, which opened in March that year at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, with a seven-year-old Lea Salonga making her professional stage debut as one of the royal children.
At the auditions in 1977, Lauchengco was supposed to be just his sister’s chaperone. However, “she forged my name and signature on a second audition form without telling me; next thing I knew, Bibot (Amador, the late director and cofounder of Rep) was screaming my name. I was so shy, I knew there was no chance I could get a part. So I mustered all my courage to get the whole ordeal over with, and sang the first song that popped into my head—the one my sister would play over and over in the bedroom we shared.”
That song was Evergreen, the theme from the Barbra Streisand vehicle A Star Is Born, and whose first verse (“Love, soft as an easy chair/ love, fresh as the morning air…”) would acquire a different sort of popularity in the Philippines in 2001, as interpolated in the rap group Salbakuta’s S2pid Luv. Evergreen was exactly the kind of ballad Lauchengco’s voice was made for, his dreamy rendition effortlessly summoning images of the lyrics’ “morning glory and midnight sun” in the mind’s eye.
In the end, Lauchengco—all of 12 years old—landed the featured role of Louis, the female protagonist Anna Leonowens’ son in The King and I; his sister missed out on a part.
From there it was a few years of juggling high school and the theater—in 1980, for instance, he was cast as the second-oldest Von Trapp child in Rep’s The Sound of Music, playing onstage siblings with his sister Menchu, Salonga, Monique Wilson, and current Philippine Senator Risa Hontiveros.
However, it wasn’t long before show business came calling, his departure “from the world of theater to the world of movies and recording,” as he described it, facilitated by none other than the Megastar herself, Sharon Cuneta. “It was Sharon who introduced me to show business,” Lauchengco said.
Cuneta was more than just a career catalyst, though; she was, as Lauchengco confessed that night, also his “first serious celebrity crush.”
Get the ball rolling
He recalled attending a soirée—that customary mixer that all-boys and all-girls schools would hold for their students—when he was in third year high school at Colegio de San Juan de Letran, with a class from St. Paul’s College. “I certainly wasn’t the type to go on the dance floor,” Lauchengco said, “but that afternoon at the soirée, I said yes to get the ball rolling—because in that room was Sharon herself.”
Cuneta was the last of the concert’s four guest artists. Onstage with her, Lauchengco declared: “I had it so bad for Sharon back in the day,” to which Cuneta responded, “You only told me I was your crush last year!”
For the concert, Cuneta sang Hagkan, from her self-titled 1979 album; plus a duet with Lauchengco of one of her most recognizable tunes, Pangarap na Bituin—the theme song composed by the late Willy Cruz for the film Bukas Luluhod ang Mga Tala (in which Lauchengco played a supporting part); and finally, after cries of “More!” from the audience, another duet—the Rey Valera classic Kapag Maputi na ang Buhok Ko.
That last song was preceded by one of the night’s most memorable anecdotes: “One day,” Lauchengco said, “I asked Sharon, ‘Would you like to watch a movie?’” Cuneta, clueless, distracted and grieving a fresh breakup, replied blankly, “With whom?”
Ah, but the theater—it wouldn’t have been a milestone birthday concert without a segment dedicated to this biggest of what-ifs. And what a segment it was.
Coming before Cuneta was the night’s third guest, Martin Nievera, who sang some of his biggest hits mostly in medley form: Be My Lady, which he tackled with the audience in fill-in-the-blanks fashion, the audience gamely singing the missing lines back—trust a Pinoy crowd to collectively sing a ballad in tune!—followed by portions of Say That You Love Me and You Are My Song.
It’s no secret that Nievera’s also a theater kid at heart, of course—just look at his many covers of show tunes on YouTube. A Broadway medley with Lauchengco couldn’t have been more unsurprising.
Lauchengco lamented that the reason he gave up pursuing his dream roles from the Broadway canon—Tony in West Side Story, Anthony in Sweeney Todd, Raoul in The Phantom of the Opera—was because his sister kept getting cast as the romantic lead of most of these shows in Manila back then (Menchu played Maria, Tony’s love interest, in the 1981 Rep production of West Side Story; Johanna, Anthony’s love interest, in 1982’s Sweeney Todd). “Singing opposite my sister would have been fine, but what would we do when it came to the kissing scenes?!” he asked Nievera.
Ergo, the Broadway medley between these two balladeers in their 60s, performed with the energy of a pair of 16-year-old theater geeks.
From West Side Story terrain—Something’s Coming and Maria—they traveled to Andrew Lloyd Webber territory—Music of the Night and All I Ask of You, both from The Phantom of the Opera; Memory, the chart-topping sensation from Cats; then back to West Side Story with Somewhere—another crossover success—before concluding with the granddaddy of karaoke sessions, This Is the Moment (from Jekyll and Hyde). It was a succession of Broadway anthems performed as big and brassy as possible, like Solaire were the world’s largest stadium. The standing ovation that capped this segment, effectively stopping the show, was nothing if not well-deserved. There, right there, was Lauchengco the could-have-been musical theater star.
The night had numerous other high points. Ice Seguerra, the first guest, duetted with Lauchengco on the song that launched their career in 2001, Pagdating ng Panahon, before going solo with a stripped-down rendition of Ryan Cayabyab’s Araw-Gabi—both numbers attesting to Seguerra’s peerless skills as an acoustic crooner.
Mitch Valdez, the night’s second guest, and ever the consummate comedian, opened her segment with a protracted pretend-lecture meant to enlighten Lauchengco on the life changes that supposedly come with senior citizenship.
“You have to be nice!” Valdez said. “Everybody else who’s younger is looking at us with envy and buwisit and resentment. You have to be magnanimous when someone at the grocery checkout lane asks to make singit before you because they have ‘two items lang’—but if someone who wants to make singit asks, ‘Puwede ba itong basket?,’ you say, ‘Ulol!’
“Do you know how to use GCash?” Valdez teased Lauchengco. And, “before you make sabak in the traffic, you have to empty your bladder!”
Closer to the finale, Lauchengco delivered a fitting 11 o’clock number (the term for a show-stopping song traditionally sung near the end of a musical): Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides, Now, that heartrending rumination on the uncertainties of life and surrendering to reality, as Mitchell once put it. Lauchengco’s version fully captured the emotional sweep of the song, almost as if its evocations of “ice cream castles in the air and feathered canyons everywhere,” its repeated declarations of not knowing love—and life—at all, were written especially for him.
Most touching moment
For me, though, the most touching moment unfolded quite early in the concert. It was when Lauchengco shared the stage with his daughter Natalie for a duet of Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love for You, the song somehow transposed to a more intimate arrangement, seemingly scrubbed clean of its celebrity status in the world of ballads.
That number made me think about the way Lauchengco managed to bridge generations that night—the way his voice and his presence harked back to the glory days of ‘70s and ‘80s OPM, full decades before Sarah Geronimo and Moira Dela Torre, Ben&Ben and Cup of Joe, while somehow still coming across as a contemporary of those present-day household names. Listening to Lauchengco and his daughter—“Dalaga na siya,” quipped the man next to me—you’d think they were singing the latest sleeper hit on Spotify.
I’m not actually even sure when it was exactly that I became concretely aware of Lauchengco as a figure of the Philippine music industry—though I do remember that his iconic Farewell, which first made a splash through his movie Bagets in 1984, was something my high school in Iloilo City made its outgoing seniors sing during the graduation ball every year.
That night at Solaire, probably 90 percent of the audience belonged to the generation that came of age or who were in their youth just as Lauchengco was at the peak of his career. A whole contingent even traveled all the way from Ilocos, their appointed leader—someone named Candy—holding up a self-illuminating sign that said, “I love Raymond,” when Lauchengco asked them to join him upfront for I Need You Back.
I guess it also spoke volumes about the audience demographic that Seguerra’s entrance was met partly with a rumble of surprise from the crowd, who were no doubt confused by Lauchengco’s use of the pronouns he and him to introduce the singer—and were probably deadnaming Seguerra in their heads.
Idling at the lobby before the concert started, I happened to sit next to a guy with salt-and-pepper hair who took one look at me and jokingly said, “You’re too young to be watching this.”
Fair point. It was my first time to see Lauchengco perform live, after all, while most everyone around me had long had his songs ingrained in their heads. But it was also as perfect a night as any to affirm the truth behind the concert’s title: Everybody loves Raymond, indeed.
