Diarist Review: 'Side Show' by The Sandbox Collective

Made my The Diarist debut last weekend with a review of a show that features what feels like the performance of a lifetime. The online link here. I miss writing long-form; will definitely start writing more for this pub. 

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Marvin Ong in Side Show: We may have already seen the performance of 2025

Curtain call at "Side Show," with Marvin Ong (5th from left).

More than halfway through 2025, it is quite possible we may have already seen the musical theater performance of the year.

  

That would be Marvin Ong’s in Side Show, the 1997 Broadway musical now summoned to life by director Toff de Venecia for The Sandbox Collective. This current production marks the musical’s return to Manila since it was last staged professionally in 2018 by Atlantis Theatrical. 

Side Show is loosely based on the lives of the Hilton sisters, a pair of conjoined twins who became celebrities during the twilight of vaudeville in America. In the musical, the sisters Daisy and Violet start out as two of the exploited attractions in the titular sideshow, before being “rescued” by talent scout Terry and his musician friend Buddy, and thrust into the limelight as vaudeville stars perpetually hounded by a rabid press.

For most of the musical, Ong spends his time in the sidelines as Jake, the sideshow “cannibal king” who is also loyal friend to the twins, a largely helpless spectator to the maddening unfolding of their lives. Except in two songs. 

In Act I, Jake leads the ensemble in singing The Devil You Know, a jazzy, gospel-inflected number that becomes a moment of reckoning for all the sideshow members, as they weigh Terry and Buddy’s offer of stardom to the sisters against the harsh uncertainties that life beyond the sideshow purportedly entails. 

Then, in Act II, Jake gets the traditional Broadway ballad You Should Be Loved, his late profession of romantic love to Violet—a doomed declaration that fits grotesquely into the sisters’ by-then already-spiraling personal lives. 

In these two numbers, Ong is a vision of superlative theatrical flair. Commanding in every aspect, his is a performance that not only underscores the surface ethos of the show—“come look at the freaks”—but so completely embodies what it means to live from the outside looking in: the freak long consumed by perverted love, a wretched of the earth, to appropriate Frantz Fanon.

As the supposed “cannibal king,” Ong is far from physically imposing, and his low notes may not be as full as the role demands. But this is silly nitpicking: The overall package Ong delivers is just undeniable. When he sings You Should Be Loved to Violet, Ong makes the musical make sense—and literally stops the show—giving reason to the swirling madness, permitting the viewer a sliver of understanding of how it is to be so unloved yet also, deep down, consumed by love.

In fact, one might argue that, without Ong, Sandbox’s Side Show would be a lesser, incomplete creature. 

Big swings that don’t always works

Never staid and always interesting, this Side Show—de Venecia’s final directorial work (for now) for the company he cofounded in 2014—is a carnival of myriad, big swings that don’t always work. 

Despite its bag of tricks—and it has many!—this production is never able to camouflage the arduous length of the material, made more pronounced by its sung-through nature. While containing some truly gorgeous music, the score by Henry Krieger and Bill Russell (of Dreamgirls fame) also has some brow-raising, pedestrian oddities (“Once in a while we would see a girl/ slowly walking up the hill” is an achievement in using so many words to say virtually nothing). 

In some sequences, choreographer JM Cabling is able to capture the organized chaos of a circus from the ensemble; in others, this emphasis on movement can be less clarifying in terms of propelling the narrative. That uneven ensemble also has comedian Jon Santos (as the sideshow boss) standing out fairly often, and distractingly so (Santos seems to be in his own, separate play).

There’s also a stab at political commentary at the beginning, an attempt to frame the musical’s story of exploitation within the context of past and present global violence, that goes nowhere and is easily forgotten once the musical gets rolling—an unnecessary, too on-the-nose touch.

Moreover—no longer a spoiler at this point—the production also deploys the use of live video to depict some scenes, the moving images projected on screens on opposite walls of the theater. Now synonymous to the European directors Ivo van Hove and Jamie Lloyd, the method here conjures some strikingly high-contrast images that evoke an archaic cinematic feel. But, both times I caught this show, it was sabotaged completely by basic technical issues, the live feed sputtering and lagging.

Yet, when this production is good, it is brilliant. It is that rare creature that has somehow succeeded in making the second act—usually a musical’s trickier half—the notably more compelling one. 

In particular, The Tunnel of Love, a late Act-II number where the sisters go on the eponymous carnival ride with Terry and Buddy, becomes, in de Venecia’s hands, one of the most thrillingly inventive musical moments of the year. Lit only with handheld flashlights (the lighting design is by Gabo Tolentino), it’s the closest approximation of this production’s constant urge to aim for the brightest creative stars. (With the right combination of performers—the production has two actors alternating in each key part—the number also becomes a lucid portrait of romantic corruption.)  

In such instances, this Side Show becomes a cohesive artistic spectacle: the disparate material implements of Mark Dalacat’s set design and Carlos Siongco’s costumes enhancing the musical’s inherent, contradicting impulses of go-for-broke pizzazz, on the one hand, and heartrending interiority, on the other.

The four actresses playing the sisters are terrific in their own right. Krystal Kane and Molly Langley, as Daisy and Violet, respectively, have a more classical musical theater feel to their pairing: enthrallingly sung, with a crystalline sheen that makes the story come across as a tragic fairytale. Meanwhile, Tanya Manalang and Marynor Madamesila’s Daisy and Violet feel earthier, their individual heartbreaks more immediate and soul-crushing. 

Reb Atadero stands out simply for his impeccable presence

Among the supporting players, Reb Atadero stands out simply for his impeccable presence and sheer mastery of musical theater grammar as Terry (his rendition of Private Conversation, in which the character grapples with his inner demons, is breathtaking). In Atadero, Tim Pavino’s Buddy finds a grounding, sparring partner; together, their pairing helps illustrate how Side Show is also a story of opportunism and stunted romance.  

And then, of course, there is Ong. Once a Gawad Buhay-winning Tobias in Repertory Philippines’ Sweeney Todd in 2009, Ong made a triumphant return to the stage after a prolonged absence, for that company’s I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change last year. 

One can only hope that Ong stays for good. In my 17 years of theatergoing in Manila, I can name certain performances that easily qualify as pinnacle moments of local musical theater—Audie Gemora as Albin, tackling the LGBTQ+ anthem I Am What I Am for 9 Works Theatrical’s La Cage aux Folles in 2015; the late Cherie Gil performing Folies Bergère as Liliane La Fleur for Atlantis’ Nine in 2012; Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo’s Diana Goodman in Next to Normal; Poppert Bernadas as Artemio Ricarte in Ang Huling Lagda ni Apolinario Mabini; Joanna Ampil as Francesca in The Bridges of Madison County; Mikkie Bradshaw-Volante’s breakout turn as the titular character in Carrie, to name just six.

Without question, Ong’s performance of You Should Be Loved—and his overall turn as Jake—belongs on that list. It’s a performance that makes you eternally grateful to be able to go to the theater.

PDI Review: 'Via Dolorosa' by The Necessary Theatre; 'We Aren't Kids Anymore' by Barefoot Theatre Collaborative

How often does it happen that one gets to watch two shows plagued by technical difficulties in succession--only for these shows to end up being two of the year's best thus far (it's kind of a grim assessment)? Well, that's what happened to me last weekend. The website version of this article here.

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Soaring through technical difficulties

Barefoot's John Mark Yap, Ronna Gutierrez, and Pat Valera addressing the May 4 evening audience before the show started.

Let me start with a disclosure: The performance I caught of The Necessary Theatre’s “Via Dolorosa” was, in a way, a private audience with actor-director Bart Guingona.

Plagued by unforeseen technical difficulties, the May 3 matinee I was supposed to watch instead became a closed-door, start-to-finish run-through, with only me and TheaterFansManila founder and managing editor Frida Tan in attendance. It gives me great pleasure to say, then, that what we saw was essentially unimprovable.

The production is, first of all, testament to the idea that having a solid text is already half the job done.

Written in the late 1990s by the British playwright David Hare, the play might as well have been made today, its urgency deafening as it tackles in monologue form that singular, lopsided conflict in the Middle East that has led to “the most documented genocide” of our lifetime.

“Via Dolorosa” is Hare’s attempt at making sense of his trip to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories during that decade. His approach is very much ethnographic: Working in travelogue-adjacent first person, Hare locates his self-aware, British fish-out-of-water point of view within the lived experiences of the people he encountered then—in Israel, in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, in Gaza itself.

The result is, thank heavens, a play that understands the impossibility—and sheer absurdity—of taking a centrist position in any discussion of Israel, Palestine, and the ongoing occupation. While also touching on the internal politics of Palestine, “Via Dolorosa” is strongest when it is underscoring the vile illogic of the settler colonial Israeli state.

Despicable worldview

Even more admirable, Hare fleshes out this illogic by letting the settlers illustrate it themselves. Hare is only the vessel here, dramatizing and transmitting to the page what he heard or was told during that trip; the dialogue of his multiple characters is evidence enough of settler colonialism’s despicable worldview.

All that comes through quite clearly in The Necessary Theatre’s production. Directing himself, Guingona handles the play like a possessed man with the occasionally lucid moment, shifting constantly from bewildered Brit and gradually enlightened outsider to disillusioned politician, seething and morally uncompromised Jew, and deranged settler. It is a performance that is as hilarious as it is dramatically compelling, especially when Guingona is demonstrating just how crazy the settlers can be.

The production makes do with the venue’s limited technical capabilities, but it is quite effective in evoking the shifts in setting and mood. (I was informed there were some missing light cues, but the lighting during the run-through was terrific as it was, and, in its spareness, should count as among the year’s smartest designs.)

And the original score is an accomplishment in itself: Gabby Ramos on Oud, Nigerian Udu, guitar, kalimba, and sampler; Dexter Lansang on cello. More than being a peripheral element, the music is both a treat and a rarity: a narrative-driven, three-act performance that doesn’t at all detract from the actual play, but even enhances it.

All things considered—and judging by the run-through alone—this “Via Dolorosa” is so far one of the few instances this year for which the phrase “essential viewing” feels nothing if not apt.

The day after watching “Via Dolorosa,” I was at Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s production of Drew Gasparini’s “We Aren’t Kids Anymore.” This time, a malfunctioning soundboard threatened to send everybody home prematurely.

With the audience finally seated an hour later than the scheduled 8 p.m. curtain, Barefoot’s Pat Valera took to the stage to address the delay and, on behalf of the company, offered a free rescheduling or second viewing for anyone who wanted it. The evening’s performance would not be the intended, complete aural experience, Valera basically said.

Exiting the theater 90 minutes later, I couldn’t help wondering what it was exactly that we’d missed: The show was first-rate as it was and did not have me wishing for one bit I’d caught it at a different time.

In assessing the musical, it’s crucial to bear in mind that it is, in reality, a song cycle. In layman’s terms, it has no plot—only songs. To fully appreciate the material, then, one has to grapple with what it is.

Quarter-life crisis

And what it is, on the surface, is a millennial American artist’s quarter-life crisis told through song. A closer reading—or closer hearing—of the text, however, reveals poetry that is rather complicated and not entirely accessible, the songs somehow always being in the middle of things narratively, their lyrics never quite straightforward. Taken together, it’s a pretty sophisticated score masquerading as the collected rants, outbursts, and verbalized feelings of an artist on his (artistic) life.

So it is to this production’s credit that the musical actually sounds very cohesive, like a single train of thought, an artist’s stream of consciousness broadcast to the world. One easily forgets that it’s just some songs strung together, unlike, say, Jason Robert Brown’s “Songs for a New World” and its very distinct numbers.

Under Rem Zamora’s direction, every theatrical element in this production moves, breathes, and exists with a purpose, from lighting designer D Cortezano’s calculated deployment of spotlights to the organized chaos of Jomelle Era’s choreography. The five-person cast of Myke Salomon, Gio Gahol, Luigi Quesada, Gab Pangilinan, and Maronne Cruz likewise appear to exist in the musical with an umbilical bond, each of them inhabiting multiple embodiments of the central persona of Drew yet strung together in thought, feeling, and experience.

Pangilinan and Cruz, in particular, are never better. To appropriate a lyric from the musical “Gypsy,” give these women a song, and they’ll hand you the whole world on a plate. We’d be lucky to see another musical number this year that’s as emotionally precise and breathtaking as Cruz’s rendition of “Turn the Page”; Pangilinan, for her part, not only nails “Faking Cool”—a solo that, through intelligent ensemble work, also becomes a group number—but, toward the show’s end, hits a note so stunning, it should be illegal.

In fact, together, the five actors are delivering the best singing in theater Manila has witnessed thus far this year—a contest that is, in all honesty, without a close second. For lack of a subtler term, they sound incredible.

Even better: This Barefoot production has managed to tame the notoriously tricky acoustics of its venue (the Power Mac Blackbox in Circuit Makati). Notwithstanding some negligible glitches—the sound team apparently mixed the show manually that night, given the wrecked soundboard—this was still a production that sounded really good, and one that made you wonder why other shows that have played this venue couldn’t have sounded as good.

A serious technical glitch, or anything that threatens to cancel a scheduled performance, is obviously never on anybody’s wish list. But when a production pulls through despite it—well, that right there is pure stage magic. It’s why we go to the theater.

PDI Review: 'Kisapmata' by Tanghalang Pilipino

Last review for a while--I'm in Sydney until end of July-ish! Anyway, this play will go down as one of the highlights of my theatergoing life. Website version here.

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TP's 'Kisapmata' delivers chilling, powerful adaptation

Watching Tanghalang Pilipino’s (TP) “Kisapmata,” one easily forgets the film on which it is based. In a way, this is the ultimate compliment.

“Kisapmata” the film, directed and cowritten by Mike de Leon, is widely considered one of the greatest contemporary Filipino works of art. It is about a household under the suffocating spell of its patriarch—a horror film about the systematic erosion of a person’s ability to say no, to the point that constant obedience becomes their only idea of dealing with reality. At the time of its premiere at the 1981 Metro Manila Film Festival, the film became the perfect allegory for the preceding, diabolical decade of martial rule under Marcos Sr.

In “Kisapmata,” retired policeman Dadong dominates his wife Dely, daughter Mila, and son-in-law Noel with an iron fist (sometimes literally). His word is law; going against him is wishing for death.

De Leon depicts the terror permeating Dadong’s household in a straightforward manner, the man’s quiet evil—and his family’s inability to escape him—laid out in plain sight. The result is a kind of cinematic claustrophobia. The doom that befalls the characters feels obvious and inevitable, and one leaves the film shaken yet also seething with frustration at their choices.

“Kisapmata” the TP play retains the film’s story, but somehow takes it all a notch higher. To say it improves upon the film is downright inaccurate (not to mention heretical); instead, the play is its own creature.

Evil transcending time

As written and directed by Guelan Luarca, TP’s “Kisapmata” seems to reach for another kind of horror: something atavistic, an affliction embedded in the deepest recesses of the human psyche. The evil the play portrays is one that seemingly cannot be named—naming it might as well incur the most devastating fate. It is evil that, as in the film, exists in the present in broad daylight, but it also appears to transcend time: reaching heavily into the past and carrying with it the trauma of generations, while also portending an unspeakable future.

No wonder the characters often speak in whispers, as if scared they might be heard by the devil himself. Dely, in particular, has become a kind of Cassandra; she is the audience’s eyes and way into the world of the play, her murmured pronouncements—interjecting the action every so often—becoming omens of the characters’ unchangeable ends. “Whisper and cast your troubles to the grass, to the wind, to the night,” she advises Mila, and so the daughter does.

As simple as it seems, this acting motif of whispering is essential to the atmosphere Luarca has built for the play—one that thrives in abstraction, but is no less fatal. This “Kisapmata” means to throttle the viewer and take the breath out of them bit by bit. And it is unrelenting in this pursuit, the whispered moments becoming intermittent reminders that the characters already exist in a diseased household but have yet to face the worst. Nothing is more frightening than the unseen.

Combined, the design elements fulfill Luarca’s vision for the play: the bareness of Joey Mendoza’s set (mainly a raised platform surrounded by some talahib), like space for an ancient ritual; D Cortezano’s deployment of light not just to illuminate the action, but envelop the stage in shadows; Arvy Dimaculangan’s intelligent use of silence as soundscape; the way JM Cabling lets the actors navigate the spaces of the stage, stalking its “passages” and inhabiting its “corners,” such that moving in and around this imagined house becomes an evocation of the slowness of terror itself, a sort of prowling in the dark.

Story stripped bare

With the actors performing barefoot and in the same costume throughout, the production feels not just like a back-to-basics, but something akin to classical myth, a story stripped bare to expose the evil at its narrative core, poisoning its very bones.

In more than one occasion, in its scenes of violence, this “Kisapmata” unironically becomes “peak theater,” so to speak: as when one character “falls down” a flight of stairs, or when another gradually realizes he’s been deliberately locked inside the house.

Exhuming its characters’ fundamental fears alongside the patriarch’s deep-seated depravities, this “Kisapmata” also renders its political analogies crystal-clear. (In fact, a moment toward the end when overhead projections flash images of certain historical moments in Philippine history feel unnecessary.) In its portrayal of Dely, Mila, and Noel’s inabilities to escape Dadong, and especially in the women’s rationalizations of their choice to stay with him, the play becomes a piercing depiction of the Filipino people’s Stockholm syndrome with their strongmen.

Collab of a lifetime

How apt that the production should be running right now, when Duterte loyalists are making fools of themselves before the International Criminal Court and the rest of the world in the wake of the former president’s arrest and extradition.

And how lucky Manila audiences are not just to be living in the same timeline as Luarca, but also to be able to witness the TP Actors Company senior members in what feels like the collaboration of a lifetime.

Jonathan Tadioan (Dadong), Lhorvie Nuevo-Tadioan (Dely), Toni Go-Yadao (Mila), and Marco Viaña (Noel) have appeared together in TP productions for at least a decade now. The variety is staggering: to name a few, “Ang Pag-uusig” (Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”), “Pangarap sa Isang Gabi ng Gitnang Tag-araw” (Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), “Katsuri” (John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”), and last year’s “Balete” (based partly on F. Sionil José’s novel “Tree”).

In “Kisapmata,” the four actors are each never better, but their work also collectively feels like a culmination of sorts. Each is giving a performance that evinces total mastery of craft, from physicality to emotion, from groundedness in the present to evocation of a character’s past. Yet, they also feel like a single organism, the years somehow having honed their discrete abilities to “feel” each other, such that now they breathe and move and live as one with ease.

In a year that has so far witnessed many new, big-name productions come up short, Luarca’s “Kisapmata” is a force to be reckoned with—truly best-of-the-decade material—and its four actors, epitomes of generous theatrical performances.

PDI Review: 'Anino sa Likod ng Buwan' by IdeaFirst Live

 This was bad. Inquirer website version here.

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'Anino sa Likod ng Buwan': Tonal whiplash

In theater, tone is paramount. It sells the piece to the viewer and makes whatever the play is going for believable, regardless of genre. So what happens when a production bungles this most crucial of artistic elements?

You get something like “Anino sa Likod ng Buwan.” Thirty-two years ago, in 1993, Jun Robles Lana wrote “Anino’s” original iteration, a play that won first prize at the Bulwagang Gantimpala competition. In 2015, his screen adaptation of that play hit the cinemas. Now, Lana has written “Anino’s” third incarnation, adapted from his film script and brought to life at the Peta Theater Center by IdeaFirst Live (its maiden theatrical offering).

The story has remained unchanged, apparently. Emma and Nardo are introduced to the audience as a couple living a life of minimal means in 1990s Marag Valley in the northern reaches of Luzon. They are friends with Joel, though they shouldn’t be—he’s a soldier, part of the military forces patrolling and terrorizing the Philippine countryside in their mission to quash the communist insurgency.

Within an intermission-less 100 minutes, this friendship between the soldier and the couple is revealed to be a con played from both sides. Emma and Nardo are no ordinary couple; they are actually (semi-spoiler alert) part of the resistance. And while all the characters believe they are fighting for what’s best for the country, the larger, moral picture is never less than certain: One side is fighting on behalf of elite capture and the oligarchy; the other, for the displaced, the landless, the land itself.

Lana—inarguably more famous nowadays for his films—writes all that in language that betrays a fondness for poetry and an eye for gritty realism. His technique occasionally heightens the imaginative qualities of the play, but more often results in abrupt shifts in tone. Nevertheless, it’s also language that evinces the writer’s flair for the theatrical, as in some of his recent work: that bravura, 14-minute, one-take scene in the Vice Ganda vehicle “And the Breadwinner Is…”; the doppelgänger device in “About Us But Not About Us,” for example.

Love and desire

Moreover, it’s not difficult to appreciate the dramatic heights to which Lana’s writing for “Anino” aspires. As much as the play is about the politics of state-sponsored conflict in the countryside, it is also about the politics of love and desire, its three characters weaponizing their bodies and urges to wage a war much bigger than themselves.

When the characters talk about bloodshed in the community, then suddenly wax lyrical about love—for a partner, for the nation—it kind of makes weird, imperfect sense.

It’s an entirely different story when Lana’s script is situated within this production directed by Tuxqs Rutaquio. Unable to tame the playwright’s random shifts between metaphor and the literal, such moments simply register as whiplash by way of language. For lack of a subtler phrase, this “Anino” is a tonal mess.

Nowhere is this theatrical schizophrenia more conspicuous than in the fact that the three actors spearheading this production each appear to be inhabiting a different play on their own.

As Joel, Martin del Rosario (in his stage debut) has the complexion of one who has never spent enough hours outdoors and the build of an urban gym rat. When he speaks—whether he’s justifying the army’s actions or defending the government’s atrocities—he frequently does so in an oratorical manner that would make him a promising period-drama star (think Vicomte de Valmont in “Dangerous Liaisons”). He’s a could-be Shakespearean in a play that wants nothing to do with the classics.

As Emma, Elora Españo has such a pinched presence that her crucial big moments later in the play feel disjointed, like the work of another. Lately, Españo has been a darling of the screen, churning out excellent turns in at least three films that premiered locally last year (Lana’s “Your Mother’s Son,” Sigrid Andrea Bernardo’s “Pushcart Tales,” Dominic Bekaert’s “An Errand”). But in “Anino,” Españo is just… small, and also ungrounded. In fact, sometimes she almost floats into the background.

Firm grasp

Only Ross Pesigan, as Nardo, shows a firm grasp of the grammar of theatrical performance. Unsurprising, given Pesigan is a native of the stage (his excellent turns in Dulaang UP’s “Fake” and “Ang Nawalang Kapatid” paving the way, nine years later in 2023, for a Gawad Buhay-nominated performance in Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s “Laro”).

Yet, his Nardo is not entirely convincing, either; there’s not enough gravity, cunning, or weariness in his portrayal of a secret agent of the revolution.

Let loose onstage by Rutaquio like clay figures in a creation myth, the three actors brave scene after scene—and mood after mood—the best they can. One moment they’re approximating Samuel Beckett’s existential poetry; 10 minutes later, they are starring in an afternoon soap; another 10 minutes and they’re doing realism by way of Lino Brocka.

No wonder the audience is equally unmoored. Consider the play’s second “act”: With Nardo momentarily gone, Joel and Emma reveal the sick game of lust and power they have been playing behind his back; they have rabid sex repeatedly, then make professions of love to each other, all while trying to get the other to submit.

On opening night, this whole portion of the play turned the theater into a comedy bar; people kept laughing because the action became unreadable, and therefore unbelievable and downright silly.

Misogyny

Sadly, the tonal contradictions are not the last of this production’s problems; they only make two other things more glaring. One is the perverse misogyny of the play. In “Anino,” the female body (Emma’s, to be exact) is both object of worship and weapon of war. Consequently, there is a lot of nudity here. What’s troubling is how all this is handled: in perhaps the most male gaze-y way possible, the naked body and the sexual act spectacularized and intended only to shock, their necessity to the story chucked to the sidelines. Has Rutaquio’s production heard of an intimacy coordinator?

Relatedly, this misogyny also shapes the play’s imagination of the revolutionary movement, and women’s roles in it. Here it all goes back, yet again, to the female body, and how Lana imagines its purpose—its uses, in the most utilitarian sense of the word—in realizing ideology. Without spoiling anything, I will say that somehow the play appears to be so enamored with the spectacle of melodrama that, in the end, it comes off as hollow histrionics — quite a disservice to the movement and all its women martyrs.

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.