Never bet against Poppert Bernadas and a musical theater ballad.
In miZZcast, the Pride Month concert held June 25, 2026 at Samsung Performing Arts Theater (SPAT), Circuit Makati, Bernadas was easily one of the night’s towering highlights.
The concert obviously took after Miscast, the annual gala in New York City produced by MCC Theater, where artists would sing songs from shows or roles (they think) they would never get to do in real life. In the 2016 concert, for example, Lea Salonga famously performed—for the first time in public since embarking on international career in 1989—Why, God, Why?, the big Act I solo traditionally sung by the character of Chris, Kim’s American GI lover, in Miss Saigon.
In Bernadas’ case in miZZcast, it felt like a sweet instance of artistic destiny—the perfect artist finding the perfect song—as the one-time The Voice of the Philippines contender sang Minsan ang Minahal ay Ako, that ode to the mercurial love-hate relationship between artists and their publics from the original Filipino musical Katy!.
It’s a performance I’ll be thinking about for quite some time: Bernadas was wholly vulnerable, steeped in so much emotional texture, and utterly without pretense, opening the theater to a rare moment of unadulterated communion between audience and performer. You not only understood what that song was about, but felt its profound strains of yearning and hope and (self-)acceptance ripple through your very bones.
When Bernadas sang—with pristine technique, no less—“At kung ako ay malimutan/kahit sa awit ko man lamang/iyo sanang matandaan/bago tuluyang lumisan/na minsan ang minahal ay ako,” it was both an aching plea to be remembered and a howling defiance of a culture of amnesia, in which artists are supposed to be only ever as good and as memorable as their last works.
As if the song itself weren’t enough of a tearjerker already, those four-and-a-half minutes onstage were made all the more poignant by Bernadas dedicating his rendition to the late Floy Quintos, in whose 2014 musical, Ang Huling Lagda ni Apolinario Mabini, he once set the Dulaang Unibersidad ng Pilipinas stage ablaze as the political firebrand Artemio Ricarte. With Minsan ang Minahal ay Ako, Bernadas not only spoke for artists in general—as the piece itself demands—but more specifically invoked the memory of Quintos and other giants of Philippine theater who helped shape the thriving Manila scene we now enjoy today, but whom large swaths of the new, post-pandemic generation of theater-goers may no longer readily recognize.
That last bit requires further consideration. Subtitled Musical Theater Backwards, the concert was a free event, ticketed only for seating purposes—evidently part of ongoing efforts in Makati City to cultivate greater interest in the arts and encourage attendance, especially among younger demographics. It follows in the vein of last February’s open-admission, open-air production of Twelfth Night under the Shakespeare in the Park initiative—yet another endeavor, by the way, inspired by a similarly named program in New York.
If anything, miZZcast highlighted generational gaps in the theater today—some of which I hadn’t thought about. It was obvious, for starters, from the critical perspective: how the stage veterans, so to speak, really stood out and nailed their parts with professional polish.
Directed by Nelsito Gomez and Sarah Facuri, with musical direction by Farley Asuncion, the concert was overall a fun night at the theater—make no mistake about it—but it was also dotted with flubbed notes and other regrettable slips (including an entirely missed lyric at one point during the ensemble finale).
It was, in other words, the concert as massive karaoke session, and I mean that as a compliment. Here, I feel a certain societal responsibility to cement on the public record how Benedix Ramos came clean after bungling an entire section of Aegis’ Basang-Basa sa Ulan, confessing that he desperately needed to pee already (the hilarious sight of Ramos scurrying offstage while the performances continued has since been playing on loop in my brain).
It also meant, though, that the likes of Bernadas, Carla Guevara Laforteza, Bituin Escalante, and Floyd Tena stood out simply for delivering spotless performances from start to end. In stunning all-white, Guevara Laforteza even presided over a literal offertory scene, rocking out unironically to Gethsemane from Jesus Christ Superstar as donation buckets were passed around the theater for the evening’s beneficiaries (LoveYourself and the Philippine LGBT Chamber of Commerce).
More interesting, however, was the generational gap signaled by which songs most of the GenZ and Gen Alpha audiences immediately and excitedly identified from their opening chords—and which were met with tentative, searching silence.
For example, Omar Uddin’s Satisfied (from Hamilton) was a rager from start to finish, the crowd assigned ensemble-track duties and roaring with dissonant gusto.
Bombading’s The Music and the Mirror, Jillian Itaas’ Giants in the Sky, and Ramos and Jordan Andrews’ I Wanna Go Back—from A Chorus Line, Into the Woods, and The Notebook, respectively—received enthusiastic recognition from viewers presumably groomed under the post-COVID ascendancy of Theatre Group Asia, which by September will have staged all three Broadway musicals at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater.
In contrast, Escalante’s The Impossible Dream—a full-course meal in itself, and an impossible-to-top, triumphant ending to the night—was met, as its opening chords rang out, by confusion from the girls behind me, one of whom quietly asked, “Is that The Prayer?”
Floyd Tena’s full-on torch-song diva moment with Losing My Mind from Stephen Sondheim’s Follies was worthy of its own standalone album, but it, too, had the kids somewhat lost. Ditto Bernadas and the Katy! anthem.
Still, knowledge of musical theater, like performance technique, can be swiftly remedied and enriched with enough time.
It’s the third form of generational gap that, quite frankly, left me disturbed as I exited the theater. For reasons that evade my millennial comprehension, kids nowadays—and I’m using “kids” here in the generalizing sense—have become incapable of letting a song finish or seeing a final, sustained note through without bursting into rowdy applause. Imagine Escalante’s The Impossible Dream, Bernadas’ Minsan ang Minahal ay Ako, even Lance Reblando’s I’ll Cover You (Reprise) from Rent—all met with the same unfortunate end of having their final bars drowned out by a rabid crowd.
For lack of more polite terms, it is juvenile and tiresome. I suspect this has to do with kids being unable to sit through something so emotionally complicated as a Broadway ballad done well; of them being uncomfortable with confronting their feelings, or at least sitting with those feelings on their own in silence—hence this impulse to shout, holler, hoot, and make vocal that which apparently cannot be contained anymore. Did they not grow up in the Philippines? Have they never heard a fantastic big note served to perfection in their lives?
Should this article find its way to Reddit, I expect the kids over there will skewer me for trampling over their supposed rights to, I don’t know, self-expression. But I actually hope this piece finds its way into that wilderness of anonymous accounts. Because there’s a firm difference between expressing your emotions loudly—and expressing your emotions while still giving the artists you claim to love the respect they deserve.
Going feral way before the song ends only shows you actually don’t care enough to listen to that artist finish the song in its glorious entirety. In fact, it’s not just disrespectful and disruptive; it’s downright narcissistic.
But enough about these silly kids, who still have lots of rice to eat, to translate that Filipino idiom: miZZcast is a welcome addition to the vibrant landscape, and one I hope will become a yearly thing, if those hysterical reactions were anything to go by.
After all, in the face of such greatness as Bernadas’ Minsan ang Minahal ay Ako or Escalante’s The Impossible Dream, what can one do, really, but scream mindlessly?
No comments:
Post a Comment