If it’s taken me a month to write down my thoughts on Bagets The Musical, it’s mainly because I’ve been struggling to wrap my head around the audacity of this show trying to nepo-baby its way to success.
For the uninitiated, “nepo baby”—short for “nepotism baby”—has become a buzzword of late, frequently deployed in the derogatory sense as a modifier for famous or successful people who have equally famous or successful parents, the implication being that the child succeeded primarily because of their parents’ influence. For example, Jamie Lee Curtis’ triumph as Best Supporting Actress for Everything Everywhere All at Once at the 95th Academy Awards was ascribed by her detractors to the enduring popularity of her parents—Hollywood mainstays Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh—among Oscars voters, especially since her victory came at the expense of her younger, lesser-known co-star of color, Stephanie Hsu, whose performance in the film critics deemed more complex and therefore more deserving of the award.
In Bagets The Musical, the nepo baby is front and center of the show: Andres Muhlach, son of actor Aga Muhlach. In what may seem like a stroke of genius casting, the former is playing the role the latter originated in the film on which this musical is based—the hugely successful, Filipino-language coming-of-age ensemble piece from 1984, about a high school barkada dealing with problems in school and at home, with their families and their romantic partners.
The disturbing fact is that Muhlach (the son) is still painfully ill-equipped to do theater, much less headline a brand-new show. Watching him sing—or attempt to do so, anyway—is an exercise in suppressing one’s disappointment at the fact that the brains behind this production greenlit his casting despite his obvious shortcomings. It’s grossly unfair to the actor, and even more so to the paying audience.
Muhlach is but one of ten actors playing the five-man barkada at the story’s center (each role has two alternating performers). At the January 23 opening night performance, the four other roles were played by Milo Cruz, Ethan David, Jeff Moses, and Noel Comia Jr. All of them, except Comia, are theater newbies—and it was evident. Cruz was the most promising—assured in both voice and presence, at least—but Comia, whom I’ve seen hold his own against veterans in musicals like Buruguduystunstugudunstuy and The Secret Garden, performed circles around everyone, to nobody’s surprise.
The bigger problem is that these actors are saddled with middling material. The gist of the musical, as in the film, is that “it’s a boy’s world,” and so the viewer is made to follow the teenage protagonists as they bicker with their families, pursue love, express their resentments and disappointments in life, and carve out their space in 1980s Philippines.
In media interviews, the artistic team of Bagets have spoken about their conscious effort to give the women in this musical more agency. This is a welcome move, and one that’s hard to ignore as the show unfolds. Indeed, it’s quite visible how the mothers and girlfriends in the story have been given relatively more to do than just be mothers and girlfriends from the sidelines, as tends to happen in male-centric tales.
But the whole thing still comes across as too scatterbrained: These characters, whether the sons or their mothers, have been shoehorned into stereotypes. They all feel interchangeable and indistinct but for their assigned quirks or “problems” (the boy next door, the martial arts buff, the rich kid, etc.; the struggling single mom, the elitist socialite, etc.). The slice-of-life approach to the story rarely results to anything of consequence that would justify the over 2.5-hour running time; at one point, there’s even a musical number centered on one of the characters’ uncircumcised circumstance (literally!) that comes across as a bad parody of the already-laughable plastic-surgery number in the Oscar-nominated film Emilia Pérez.
The whole production, in fact, is almost a migrainous blur. The artistic team from Philippine Educational Theater Association—director Maribel Legarda, writer J-mee Katanyag, musical director Vince Lim—seems adrift in the sprawling stage of the Newport Performing Arts Theater. The show never feels big enough when it needs to be, nor musically and aesthetically cohesive—despite the busy retro furnishings—to make for convincing, captivating theater. Instead, it’s the ‘80s feel-good flick as carnival attraction, or as IP product—a relic from four decades ago that can’t quite find its footing onstage.
Maybe that’s the whole point of this endeavor, though: Bagets The Musical—the show itself—is the big, shrieking nepo baby in the room, coasting to that curtain-call standing ovation largely on nostalgia and the audience’s presupposed familiarity with the source material. It stands on the shoulder of a giant, and seems to think the act of standing, or waving an arm to the tune of Just Got Lucky, is enough.
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