Diarist Review: 'Macbeth' at Shakespeare in the Park by CAST PH, Ayala Land, Make It Makati, and Circuit Makati

Best Shakespeare in a while! The website version here.

*     *     *     *     *

Macbeth in the park was compelling, Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo sensational

The Shakespeare in the Park program has long been a staple of New York City’s theater landscape, its free-admission productions notable not only for the crowds they draw, but also for the marquee names in leading roles over the years. Denzel Washington played the physically deformed Richard III in 1990. John Lithgow was the titular monarch in King Lear in 2014. Anne Hathaway took on Viola in Twelfth Night in 2009—a part later essayed by Lupita Nyong’o in the 2025 revival.

Makati City’s fledgling version of that program, launched a year ago with Twelfth Night, has yet to boast an Oscar winner as headliner. But even better: It has had Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo.

In the recent three-show run of Macbeth, Lauchengco-Yulo was absolutely sensational as the titular character’s power-hungry wife, whose Machiavellian scheming sets into motion a series of murders that ultimately leads to her and her husband’s fatal undoing. This was a Shakespearean performance of the highest order: lucid in its psychological trajectory, constantly alive with emotional contradictions, and unfailingly precise in its command of language.

Watching Lauchengco-Yulo tackle the role of Lady Macbeth was like hearing it performed for the first time—out of the classic text, she spun ravishing music, and the clarity of her interpretation was unsurpassable.

When Lauchengco-Yulo launched into her character’s iconic soliloquy, calling upon the spirits to “unsex” her very being and grant her the inhumanity to commit murder, the scene registered as a tempestuous summons to every force in existence—living or otherwise, seen or invisible, benevolent or unholy.

At Ayala Circuit Park, where I caught the open-air production’s closing night last Oct. 4, the monologue uncannily felt like a diabolical prayer unleashed into the bare open sky. It was breathtaking to behold.

I could say the same for the entire production, which retained the original script’s Early Modern English, but had essentially been spliced by Nelsito Gomez to its barest bones. Running at a heady 75 minutes, this meat-of-the-matter treatment kept the essentials of Macbeth intact—the tale of a general who acts on a prophecy and murders his way to the royal throne was still all there—but now the psychodrama was amplified to near-operatic intensity, and much of the underlying comedy rendered conspicuous as a result.

It’s a gamble that paid off handsomely: The whole thing felt like a stroke of pure artistic genius and was honestly some of the most compelling theater I’ve seen this year. It was also one of the best productions of Shakespeare I’ve had the pleasure of watching in the metro.

Newcomers to the Bard probably wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual in Gomez’s version— “wouldn’t,” because the splicing was obvious to anyone familiar with the Shakespearean classic.

And yet—as with Lauchengco-Yulo’s Lady Macbeth—it felt like encountering the play anew. Not a minute was wasted in Gomez’s airtight storytelling; his cuts were not only efficient, but also intelligent and sensical, the production logically sliding from one scene to the next, from one dastardly monologue to another—sometimes making for an altogether richer whole.

A particularly striking instance: Late in the play, Lady Macbeth, now dead by her husband’s hand, smothered by him in an attempt to literally silence her grief-stricken madness after she witnessed the orchestrated murders of Lady Macduff and her infant. Cradling his wife’s lifeless body in a kind of reverse Pietà, and nearly consumed by the horror of his uxoricide, the king broke into his “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” monologue. It’s a smart, economical change that ratcheted up the sheer theatricality of the moment.

In fact, with the psychological elements of the tragedy—especially its protagonists’ descent first into delusion, then into madness—made all the louder in so short a time, the play achieved legitimate, edge-of-your-seat thriller status. Or, to be more accurate, it somehow became the equivalent of a popcorn blockbuster: Shakespeare served in gleaming bold letters for the largest possible audience to eat up in the most accessible venue possible.

As a public engagement initiative, the production undoubtedly fulfilled its main objective. When Macduff finally defeated Macbeth, slicing his throat with a long blade while surrounded by the ghosts of those the latter had killed, the audience swiftly burst into rapturous cheers and applause.

The reduced running time also served a practical purpose: It minimized the outdoor production’s vulnerability to the weather. Not a drop fell during the entire performance (it rained two hours later).

Otherworldly distance

The design in general was made to adapt to the different venues (the first two shows were held at Ayala Triangle Gardens, Oct. 2–3). At Ayala Circuit Park, Ohm David’s stage was the central object of the mostly open field, a raised platform sparsely framed by vertical LED strips that glowed in different hues to indicate changes in mood or scene. But the existing natural environment was also incorporated into the scenography: the few surrounding trees adorned with fairy lights, and—in what felt like an almost providential stroke of scenographic luck—a small mound with a lone tree directly opposite the stage turned into a promontory where the prophesying witches first appeared to Macbeth, the rows of silent spectators seated in the wide gulf between stage and mound helping to conjure the illusion of otherworldly distance. 

From the stage, Macbeth aimed his flashlight at the promontory, the better to see the witches, who sported plain masks—just two of several modernist touches to an iteration of the Bard’s play that cared little for specifics of era beyond the language. Sarah Facuri and Hershee Tantiado dressed the full ensemble in black and gray, save for Lady Macbeth, who was in plain kilts (the Lady’s dressed to kill like a company executive).

Later, the ghost of Duncan walked through the audience toward the stage, taunting a panicked Macbeth with a digital clock counting down to his fatal downfall—a device, it bears mentioning, that seemed indebted to Robert Icke’s reimagining of Oedipus. And throughout, rhythmic, haunting percussion intermittently punctuated the air, notably when the characters retreated into their minds, or struggled with a life-altering decision, or weighed the possible consequences of their plans (Gomez doubled as sound designer). The witches spoke in eerie, breathy, sibilant whispers that permeated the field, to chilling effect.

Single nervous system

Gomez was also director, by the way. And his was an ensemble that shared a single nervous system, every performer in sync with the vision of his production. That they fully mined the drama was but expected; that they landed the comedy every single time was the wonderful surprise.

The one-liners were gold. Lauchengco-Yulo was a master of dishing these out seemingly at random, oftentimes in response to Tarek El Tayech’s Macbeth—a brawny tough guy prone to easy bursts of shrill hysteria. Cleaning up after him in the wake of Duncan’s murder, she barked at him: “Infirm of purpose!” Then, a bit later, trying to snap him out of his guilt-ridden daze: “Be not lost so poorly in your thoughts!” There’s nothing quite like gloriously bitchy English for putting a man in his place.

In Macbeth’s final hour, a foot soldier warned him, “There are 10,000!”—referring to Malcolm and Macduff’s approaching army. To which El Tayech responded with appropriately misplaced snark: “Geese? People?”

One could say it’s precisely because Gomez’s cast delivered every instance of comedy—fleshing out its nuances, landing its beats—that the tragedy hit all the harder. Such was the case, for example, with Cholo Ledesma’s Macduff, who unexpectedly emerged as the most sympathetic character of this Macbeth. In that crucial scene, Gomez afforded Ledesma the rare luxury of time to let his character’s grief unfold—the initial denial, the stuttering disbelief, and the accumulating rage upon learning of his family’s murder. And Ledesma was devastating.

Then, there was Lauchengco-Yulo. In an exclusive interview with TheDiarist.ph last year, the actress revealed she’d yet to do Shakespeare in her illustrious career. Consider her Lady Macbeth a precious gift, then: How lucky we all were to be in that park, witnessing one of the foremost—and most generous—theater performers of her generation take on a role of such magnitude, entirely for free. (And so soon after her tremendous Maria Callas in Philippine Opera Company’s Master Class back in May.) Accidental onlookers at either venue of the play could never have known the good fortune that had befallen them.

In this vein, I am reminded of an imperfect parallel at Bonifacio Global City (BGC) a decade ago. Between 2016 and 2017, 9 Works Theatrical partnered with Globe Live (the telecom giant’s entertainment division) and staged three productions at a newly erected open-air theater located next to the Globe Iconic Store, at the opposite end of High Street from Serendra Mall. Long dismantled, the Bonifacio High Street Amphitheater hosted the Philippine premieres of the Broadway musicals American Idiot and Newsies, as well as two runs of Alan Menken and Lynn Ahrens’ A Christmas Carol.

Entering the theater proper itself required a paid ticket, but beyond the barriers, one could technically watch the show for free—seated on the landscaped steps or outside one of the many dining outlets in the area. From a certain distance, one could clearly see the balletic paperboys of Newsies executing their high leaps and pirouettes, or listen to the disillusioned rockers of American Idiot belt out their rage and love, to borrow the lyric, as they scaled the multi-level skeletal set back and forth.

I’m not quite sure how effective Macbeth and the Shakespeare in the Park initiative was as a form of accidental theater, actually. The casual passerby who wasn’t a regular theatergoer might not exactly be the perfect audience for a play spoken in Early Modern English—and indeed, I spied several people leaving at various points early in the show. But the sizeable turnout itself was already heartening, suggesting that people will show up to this, bringing their own mats and snacks and whatnot, and, in communion with those around them, collectively build a physical theater out of a vast expanse of grass.

Future iterations of this program might want to consider going beyond the name and putting on something in Filipino, for genuine accessibility. Imagine the crowdpleasers of the Virgin Labfest, for example: Mula sa Kulimliman and its laugh-a-minute superhero antics; the Catholic school hysterics of Sa Babaeng Lahat; even the largely mindless but somehow politically inflected plate-throwing of Taksyapo!. Imagine the endless squabbling of the three protagonists in Fangirl echoing all over Circuit Makati. The possibilities are endless.

Diarist Review: 'Bongga Ka, 'Day!' by Newport World Resorts, Viva Communications, Inc., PETA Plus, and The Philippine Star; 'Sayaw ng mga Ilaw' by Tanghalang Pilipino; 'Desaparesidos' by Scene Change

Nobody planned this martial law-themed triple bill, but it happened. The website version here.

*     *     *     *     *

'Bongga', 'Sayaw', 'Desaparesidos': You laugh, cry, then it hurts

The cast of Desaparesidos.

History, when it happens, never really announces itself. Oftentimes it unfolds alongside the smallness of everyday life. One minute, you’re watching the evening news over dinner; the next, you’re witnessing reporters scramble for safety on live television as gunfire erupts in the Philippine Senate.

Three shows I caught this past weekend collectively captured that mundanity of living through historical moments. Coincidentally, all three—Bongga Ka, ‘Day!, Sayaw ng mga Ilaw, and Desaparesidos—were set against the backdrop of the first Marcos presidency. And in the way each engaged with that specific stretch of history—in large part determining each one’s effectiveness as cultural works—they somehow invited reflection on one question: What’s a dictatorship when you’re actually living through one?

Bongga Ka, ‘Day!

For Bongga Ka, ‘Day!: The Annie Batungbakal Musical at Newport World Resorts, the dictatorship is something that’s happening elsewhere, and to other people.

Penned by Liza Magtoto and set to songs of the band Hotdog (as musically directed and rearranged by Vince Lim), this new musical fancies itself an uncomplicated story about a simple girl with straightforward ambitions. The titular character, a fashion house despatsadora in 1979 Manila, dreams of becoming a big-shot designer—and believes her best chance at fulfilling that dream lies inside the legendary Malate district disco Coco Banana. Impeding her journey up the social ladder, apart from her inherent lack of privilege in life, are the disco’s snooty regulars who’d rather not have anything to do with her.

Critic Vladimir Bunoan describes the musical as a Filipinized Cinderella, and that’s an apt assessment. It’s a proper cosmopolitan fairy tale, though Magtoto’s book is too long, too noisy, and ultimately shallow. If you’re looking for serious narrative stakes, you’re in the wrong place.

Shallow isn’t always bad, though, especially when the material lands a production that matches—and even magnifies—its frivolity. Sleek and slick, this premiere staging helmed by Chris Millado is easily the most seamless of all the jukebox musicals that have opened at Newport post-pandemic.

Millado has choreographer Stephen Viñas to thank for whipping up one exhilarating disco fever after another with his tireless dancers. The music-making is exuberant; the Manila Philharmonic Orchestra under Rodel Colmenar’s baton sounds fabulous. And the look of this production is frequently inspired: Ohm David’s set working in tandem with Bene Manaois’ projections to maximize the gaping verticality of the stage, and with Hershee Tantiado’s costumes to evoke the general mood of a bygone age.

A stunning opening image involves towering tiers of flashing TV screens dwarfing the ensemble in disco-ball helmets, calling to mind the extraterrestrial proclivities of Little Shop of Horrors or We Will Rock You—and suggesting that what follows might be a landscape too alien for our heroine, or some viewers, to handle.

Through nifty stagecraft, the fashion house where Annie works transforms into the Coco Banana, and once she’s inside, the show goes for brazen outlandishness. It’s one eye-popping spectacle after another, an endless visual feast of screaming colors and outsized personalities. The point appears to be less about period-specific accuracy than the in-your-face silliness of it all.

Everything peaks in the Act I finale, set to BADAF Forever—a Pinoy disco Pride anthem, if there ever was one—that echoes the outrageous excesses of Damien Chazelle’s film Babylon. (At this point, it must be said that John Batalla’s careless lighting often leaves you at a loss as to where to look, or who’s speaking or singing.)

Magtoto’s book teems with skin-deep subplots, but you forgive them because of the actors.

KD Estrada, as one of Annie’s love interests, cuts a suave hippie figure, the ease with which he now carries himself onstage a far cry from his stumbling first stab at professional theater three years ago in Walang Aray.

Sam Concepcion, as another love interest, is in full beefcake and dream-boy mode.

In near-throwaway parts, Gerhard Krysstopher (as Annie’s gay bestie) and Franco Ramos (as a high-strung client of Annie’s fashion house) are comedic aces.

And John Lapus is a hoot as Coco Banana’s literal gatekeeper, playing the quasi-ballroom emcee as the embodiment of RuPaul’s immortal golden rule: “Make me laugh.”

Muddled politics

Honestly, it’s all a fun time at the theater. Then you remember the bigger context, and suddenly the musical’s aesthetics and politics are thorny, muddled, suspect.

It’s useful to remember that the real Coco Banana was not only epicenter of Manila fashion and one of the nuclei of the socialite party scene during the Marcos years; perhaps without meaning to, it was also a glimmering exemplar of the contradictions of the era. Coco Banana was not only where “artists, drag queens, diplomats, journalists, show biz celebrities and members of Manila’s 400” gathered, as Jerome Gomez writes; it was a haven for forgetting the dictatorship, if only for a few hazy hours—and if you could actually afford to.

Bongga Ka, ‘Day wants you to focus exclusively on that glitzy inside—or, when thinking of Annie’s plight, her linear efforts to get in and her eventual triumph at doing so. One is reminded of lyrics from the opening song of Cabaret, another musical set in a fraught historical juncture: “We have no troubles here/ Here life is beautiful.”

Tellingly, the only overt reference to the dictatorship—and the real state of the nation back then—is treated like a nuisance. In that scene, agents ostensibly from the Metrocom nab an unnamed individual. Then, the scene is casually brushed aside, like a tidbit that needs scrubbing from memory, and the musical reverts to fun-and-games mode.

That brushing aside speaks volumes: You aren’t supposed to think about any of that. Instead, viewers should just wallow in the good vibes, in the show’s mellow incarnations of the Manila Sound and its rambunctious disco spirit, or, for those who lived through the era, its generous dollops of nostalgia. The fairy tale is what we’re all meant to be invested in.

Rather inadvertently, then, Bongga Ka ‘Day becomes a perfect present-day representation of Marcosian escapist art. It asks that you take all of it at face value and ask no further questions. The main conflict here is supposed to be just Annie’s journey up the social ladder—never mind that some of those waiting for her at the top—or inside Coco Banana—are the likes of the Marcoses and their cronies, whose unmitigated plunder of the country would have been the broader structural reason Annie and her family had a hard time transcending their socioeconomic limitations in the first place.

Estrada’s character pays homage to Pinoy musicians working abroad, while Concepcion’s flight attendant is introduced in a montage about Filipinos who can’t help “coming home” again and again to Manila—never mind that the reason for this existential need for many Filipinos to find greener pastures abroad was also largely manufactured by Marcos Sr.’s rule. There’s even that bit about Annie’s sister being more “reasonable”—she’s studying to be a doctor—but one can’t help thinking that, in a few years, she, too, would probably migrate abroad, likely to America, as part of the brain drain during the dictatorship.

In a sense, this brand of denialist escapism extends to the production’s assertion of its leading lady. No name in local theater is probably hotter right now than Atasha Muhlach’s; hers is the casting decision that launched a thousand online debates.

So, how is she as Annie? In a word, passable. She evinces promise as a stage actress, but in all aspects of musical theater performance, she is nowhere near the level that the industry typically requires of its leading ladies. I use “typically”—because for some reason, many have been bending over backwards to justify Muhlach’s casting, sometimes to infantilizing effect. Think of all the fantastic musicals anchored by a leading lady that you’ve seen of late: Muhlach is far from any of that, and stating this fact isn’t being mean. (On that note, the production’s insistence that Muhlach underwent the entire audition process is a hole they probably didn’t expect to dig for themselves: Are we seriously to believe that Muhlach was already the best those auditions could find?)

When I saw Bongga Ka ‘Day on its Sept. 25 gala night, First Lady Liza Araneta Marcos was guest of honor. Before the show started, Millado went onstage to welcome and thank her for always being a supporter of the arts (just like her mother-in-law, I suppose).

Then it was time to have a jolly good time at the theater with this Filipino Cinderella musical. For nearly three hours there, all of us in attendance were at the Coco Banana.

Sayaw ng mga Ilaw

Meanwhile, at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) complex, Tanghalang Pilipino’s new musical Sayaw ng mga Ilaw tells of the dictatorship from the point of view of those who could never afford to gamble a night away at Coco Banana.

Adapted by Juan Ekis from Cheeno Marlo Sayuno’s children’s story, with original music by Krina Cayabyab, Sayaw ng mga Ilaw runs for a breezy 80 minutes under Jonathan Tadioan’s direction. And, well, I’ve never stanned a musical harder.

On the surface, the show seems to be about the kid Laya’s journey to becoming a pandanggo sa ilaw dancer—but really, it’s what happens to her father that is the whole point.

It’s 1981: Martial Law has just been lifted, and Laya’s father is a construction worker in the movie palace being rushed for the first Manila International Film Festival. Any Filipino who knows their history could predict the ending.

To be clear, Sayaw ng mga Ilaw is not the best musical around—Cayabyab’s music can be repetitive and inessential, and towards the end feels like it’s all barreling down in one nebulous avalanche of song. In fact, the musical’s strongest parts are the book ones, or those not in song.

But any show with balls of steel such as this instantly earns my respect: For in the very complex of buildings built by Marcos Sr. and coopted by his wife Imelda to perfume her image as patroness of the arts and architecture—and right under the nose of this current Marcos administration—the designated National Performing Arts Company is staging a musical centered on one of the biggest controversies of the dictatorship, which became emblematic of the administration’s moral depravity. Spoiler alert: The collapse of the Manila Film Center, and the subsequent media blackout, is a major plot point. Laya’s father dies in the tragedy, paving the way for the musical to zero in on worker exploitation and the silencing of journalists. Most important, the musical makes Imelda’s “edifice complex” into a specter that cannot be ignored from beginning to end.

Real star

That’s all realized through an economical marriage of performance and design. Ynna Rafa emerges as the production’s real star, as Laya’s sister, a campus journalist stirred to social consciousness by her father’s death. And playing their mother—a golden-voiced though far too expensive-looking Shiela Valderrama.

Two sequences stand out: The first, a breathtaking union of set, lighting, and projection design (by Marco Viaña, D Cortezano, and Justin Santiago, respectively), that recreates the horrific collapse at the Film Center—and conjures the illusion of concrete cascading like a gushing river—using only billowing gray cloth, dim lights, smoke effects, and clever video.

In the second—the musical’s best scene—we join Laya and her family early in the story as they wait for a jeepney home late at night, her mother antsy and still not used to the absence of curfew. They marvel at the relentless construction around them: all glaring lights and groaning machinery in the near distance. Nothing is yet undone. Their silence, though, betrays not so much faint hope as calm resignation: In their lifetime, they would probably never attain the kind of life that would put them in the company of such opulence. The dictatorship goes on, and so do their lowly lives.

Desaparesidos

Finally, the third show was a staged reading: Guelan Varela-Luarca’s adaptation of Lualhati Bautista’s novel Desaparesidos. Here, at last, was the dictatorship at its most real and most violent. Worlds apart from the glamorous nights at Coco Banana, in the distant rural towns and small barangays, activists fought back against fascism’s deathly grip and waged the people’s war. This, in a way, was what the dictatorship wanted erased: genuine resistance.

Desaparesidos is about two New People’s Army activists, their time in the armed movement, and later on, after the fall of the Marcoses, their confusing return to civilian life. Consequently, it is about how families are formed and/or broken apart by fascism—and thus, about love—the many, sometimes undesirable forms it takes, and the different gradations it assumes.

It’s hard to believe the original staging of this play was a full decade ago already (I saw its 2018 restaging in the then-newly opened Areté in Ateneo, and was promptly blown away by its sheer theatricality and its visceral power.)

For this reading produced by Scene Change, co-directors Varela-Luarca and Kat Batara had assembled what’s essentially a dream cast: Marco Viaña and Sheenly Gener as the activist couple at the story’s core, Maliana Beran as their disillusioned daughter, Toni Go-Yadao as a fellow activist’s wife who ends up becoming the bridge between past and present, to name just four actors.

Watching this reading—and this cast—I couldn’t help wonder how many in the audience had caught the play back then. That was the year Marcos Jr. nearly won the vice presidency; the year Duterte sanctioned the burial of Marcos Sr.’s remains at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

Ten years later, look where we’re at. A new generation of theatergoers has come of age—and a new, fully staged production of this masterpiece, more urgent than ever.

Diarist Review: 'The Notebook The Musical' by Theatre Group Asia

To think I almost skipped this! The website version here.

*    *     *     *     *

The Notebook easily one of the year's better musicals

In the months leading up to the international premiere of The Notebook The Musical at Samsung Performing Arts Theater, Makati City, it was almost as if the show had only one card to play to market itself: Morissette’s rendition of My Days, the musical’s eleven o’clock number.

The Notebook marks Morissette’s much-ballyhooed return to the stage after more than a decade away from musical theater—a decision that, at one point, even attracted unfounded debates on social media regarding stunt casting. And My Days, with its demanding high belts and rapid vocal and emotional build-ups, couldn’t have been a more stunning showcase of her singing prowess.

Last April, the production company Theatre Group Asia (TGA) released her full rendition of the song for the first time, filmed specifically in the empty theater. Three months later came another live capture, this time with Broadway performers Allie Trimm and Lissa DeGuzman for Samsung’s 4th anniversary special After OZ (the title a nod to the imported headliners’ past turns as stars of Wicked on the Great White Way). Finally, in August—less than a month to opening night—Morissette sang on the Wish Bus, the popular mobile studio of FM radio station Wish 107.5, where a performance has become something of a rite of passage and cultural marker in the local industry. (All videos are available on YouTube.)

As it turns out, there’s so much more to the show than this one big song: Polished from start to end, and constantly resisting the urge toward melodramatic hysterics, The Notebook is easily one of the year’s better musical productions in Manila.

I’ve always maintained that a good musical should flow like one continuous breath—and that’s especially true here. In this production directed by Nicholas Polonio, almost every element—human and inanimate—is in sync, like jigsaw pieces clicking into place to conjure the intergenerational love story of Nicholas Sparks’ eponymous, bestselling novel.

The Notebook is about Allie and Noah, who meet by chance as teenagers, quickly fall in love, become forcibly separated by her parents, then reconnect many years later in adulthood. Fundamentally, it is both a story about class and about love. He’s poor and works in the lumber yard, while she’s only vacationing in his backwater town before heading off to some fancy college—ergo, they cannot be together.

It’s hardly a spoiler to say that Allie and Noah’s reunion as adults results in their ending up together—not against all odds, but, in true Got 2 Believe fashion, with her impulsively choosing Noah at the very last minute, never mind that she already has a fiancé and an about-to-happen wedding.

In old age, Allie’s mind becomes so ravaged by dementia, she can’t even recognize her own husband, who lives with her in the care home and reads her life story to her every day from the titular notebook. (Again, not a spoiler.)

I haven’t read Sparks’ novel, but I’ve seen its wildly popular 2004 film adaptation starring then-not-so-popular Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. On the whole, it’s a rather agreeable, if unremarkable, way to pass the time. As a love story, the film is far too intent on milking your tear ducts, especially with its dementia subplot (and maybe the adultery one, too, if you’re so inclined).

In fact, it’s a much more potent commentary on class, largely thanks to Joan Allen’s sublime performance as Allie’s hoity-toity mother.

Tearjerking instincts

Fortunately, Polonio’s production has tempered the material’s primal tearjerking instincts: There’s an elegance to how it handles the sappy romcom portions, never mind that the commentary on class is now surprisingly far less substantial onstage than onscreen.

At its best, this TGA production works as a playful, heartfelt exploration on the idea of memory, making the most out of material that’s frankly not that deep.

What was a straightforward linear narrative in the movie has been effectively broken up into multiple timelines converging onstage, the better to elucidate the musical’s conceit. Figures and incidents from the past weave in and out of the present, akin to how the mind can be a jumble of memories.

The musical cohesively plays with three versions of its protagonists, representing three distinct ages, occasionally by having all of them in the same scene—and the outcome summons both the tenderness of mundane recollection and the sweep of intergenerational remembering.

The production is well served by its first-rate design (chiefly, Miguel Urbino’s set and Cha See’s lights), whose evocations of the story’s iconic dock by the lake and the house Noah refurbishes, have a dollhouse-like precision in the way they break up and repurpose these working pieces of scenery.

So, how is Morissette—inarguably this production’s main draw?

Playing Allie in her prime, she is excellent, as capable a dramatic actress as she is a comedian. Her performance of My Days, as my colleague Gibbs Cadiz puts it, is the one instance this production indulges in a proper diva moment, and deservedly so: It’s a breathtaking number, with a wisely deployed orchestra reveal that enhances the song’s ephemeral break from narrative reality.

Orbiting Morissette is a constellation of pros: Carla Guevara Laforteza, doubling as Allie’s mom and her care home nurse (who, in true TGA fashion, sports what sounds like a Pinoy accent); Benedix Ramos and Sheena Belarmino, both in rapturous voice as the teenage protagonists; Rody Vera in an all-timer performance as the elderly Noah; and especially Omar Uddin, who miraculously transforms what could have been a throwaway part as Noah’s physical therapist into the musical’s comedic nucleus.

As teenage Allie, Belarmino beautifully captures the headiness of growing up and falling in love, and lets you see her character making sense of her feelings and grappling with what they mean in real time, in that number appropriately titled If This Is Love.

Epitome of restraint

Vera is the epitome of restraint, giving the most by doing the least. He’s all the weariness of old age, and the fortitude of true love, in a single body.

It’s a shame, actually, that I can’t say the same for Celeste Legaspi as the older, dementia-suffering Allie. Where Vera is all sincere quiet, the OPM legend is all mannerism and attention-calling surface; she’s so visibly acting, while Vera is simply existing. If I shed not a single tear during this musical, it’s mostly because of Legaspi, who on the night I watched kept derailing her scenes’ truthfulness, diluting their emotional power.

There is also one particular instance when Polonio’s directorial polish and understatedness doesn’t really work to his advantage. It’s that crucial, climactic scene at the dock, a storm magicked into being by See’s lighting and Jordana Abrenica’s sound design, with Allie and Noah drenched in the rain as they finally discover why their teenage correspondence ended abruptly. Fans of the movie no doubt have this scene, and the confession to end all confessions at the heart of it, engraved in their minds: “I wrote you a letter every day for a year.”

Polonio hardly lets the scene breath; he sort of rushes through it, the gravity of its revelation landing with the softness of an afterthought. In my view, it’s the one instance The Notebook could abandon itself to some old-fashioned melodrama—and be all the better for it.

Diarist Review: 'Muli: An OPM Musical' by FlipMusic

New musical, bigger concerns. The website version here.

*     *     *     *     *

Muli—When this musical is fun, it's laugh-out-loud, but...

A new original musical is always cause for celebration. In this case, it’s Muli: An OPM Musical, which opened last weekend at the Maybank Performing Arts Theater, Taguig City.

Muli reunites two of the brains behind the critically acclaimed Sugarfree jukebox musical Sa Wakas: Charissa Pammit and Andrei Nokolai Pamintuan. Pammit is executive producer and co-writer with Jose Paolo dela Cruz, while Pamintuan is director. The original score is by Matthew Chang and Nica del Rosario, fresh off their Gawad Buhay win for the self-styled Pinay pop musical Gregoria Lakambini.

Years from now, the amnesiacs among us will probably wonder when it was exactly that bearing witness to an original Filipino musical became a privilege one could no longer take for granted. And let me tell you: It’s right about now, with one such work having taken its first bows, and the dust barely settled on the whole debacle involving Studio A and the questions and allegations surrounding the authorship of its sold-out musical Tulog Na (not to mention that production company’s newfound penchant for mocking critics on social media in the most juvenile ways imaginable). Some might say AI has been knocking on local theater’s door—and not enough people seem to have thoughtfully considered the long-term implications of letting it enter. At the risk of stating the obvious, the time to act is now.

But back to Muli: This is evidently new work—which is to say, Pammit and Dela Cruz’s book needs serious editing. My colleague Emil Hofileña compares it to the Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once, and that’s a pretty accurate reference in many respects. Here in the musical, we have a mother, Anita, going through one of those milestone moments in life—but the not-so-happy kind—and ends up reflecting on the many ways her life could have unfolded or could still unfold. So the musical alternates between the sober present and ditzy throwbacks to her high school days at the turn of the new millennium, or else, sequences from completely imagined alternate lives in which she’s a big-shot contractor, an arrogant pop star, the works.

That’s all set to Chang and del Rosario’s exuberant score, which is the best thing about this current iteration of the show. The music is cheeky, irreverent, adventurous, and packed with a good amount of crazy. And Act I closes with an ode to Defying Gravity from Wicked that makes a rip-roaring ear worm out of that regal mother of all Tagalog cuss words, pun intended.

Judging from the discussions I’ve had with some theater artists and fellow reviewers, I clearly had a better time watching this show than most. When this musical is fun—as when it’s indulging in some protracted throwback to the Y2K era—it can be quite laugh-out-loud funny. But when the seams and rough edges start to show, it makes me wonder about the state—or virtual absence—of a workshop or tryout culture in the local theater industry. There’s no denying that Muli is one such work that could have benefited from several (more) workshops before being handed on a plate for paying audiences to consume. Right now, its most underdeveloped moments might provoke a migraine or two.

The one part that had me rolling my eyes was the big Act II reveal—a twist so trite, you’d think it was written 40 years ago. Without going into specifics, I’ll say that it only underscores what makes the rock musical Next to Normal, with its story of a mother unable to move past her infant son’s death, so effective: The early reveal propels the whole thing forward, requiring the chunky remainder of the show to fully grapple with its existence and consequences. With Muli, I can’t help wondering why its story of a woman realizing she wants—and needs—more from life has to be anchored in some late-breaking tragedy at all.

But then there’s also Kakki Teodoro literally giving her all as Anita, in a performance that must be unparalleled this year for its sheer bravery and the actress’ ability to soldier through the role’s punishing physical demands. There’s the tireless ensemble, almost all of whom fully commit to the musical’s endless inanities. And there’s Chang and Del Rosario’s straight-up human-made hoot of a score.

I hate to end on a grim note, but if we’re not vigilant enough, we might just be seeing the beginning of a tragic, preventable, unnecessary end.

Diarist Review: 'Tagay para sa Ex' by Boxstage Manila; 'Mga Binago ng Araw' by Mad Child Productions; 'El Fuego del Alma' by Porvenir

Haven't had a weekend this good in quite a while! The website version here.

*     *     *     *     *

My theater weekend: Three new Filipino plays of exhilarating artistry

The cast of Mga Binago ng Araw.

Three new Filipino plays of exhilarating artistry and complexity, all staged by fledgling companies in small fringy spaces of Metro Manila, and offering possibilities for the art form that extend beyond what splashier mainstream fare tends to offer—there’s my latest weekend of theater in a nutshell.

At Rampa, the Quezon City nightclub renowned as bastion of drag performance, I saw Tagay para sa Ex, written and directed by Dudz Teraña for Boxstage Manila, the unofficial alumni arm of Far Eastern University Theater Guild (Teraña is artistic director). To call this play the pinnacle of chismis theater is to pay it the highest compliment.

Tagay para sa Ex is structured as an inúman of five friends: ex-lovers Mark and Liz, current lovers Benj and Mich, and party organizer Poch. Unsurprisingly, the party devolves into a glorious mess, this confluence of fiery friends, tempestuous romantic entanglements, and free-flowing alcohol reopening old wounds and inflicting new ones, in the process whipping up the kind of show you simply can’t stop watching.

Thematically, Tagay para sa Ex belongs to that continuum of distinctly Pinoy art interrogating what it means to love under 21st-century neoliberalism, like a marginally more affluent sibling of the films Endo, Never Not Love You, and Third World Romance.

As an examination of Filipino urban middle class precarity, the play unfolds through frenetic, razor-sharp writing. Not all of its points are original, it bears mentioning, but all of them are incorporated in the play’s intermission-less 90 minutes in so organic and lived-in a manner—exactly like a rambling partygoer who’s had one too many shots of tequila and far too many things left to say.

When we first meet them, the characters have already attained some degree of financial security in life—for starters, the story takes place in the condo of Mark, now a BPO team leader. It’s a fragile freedom to which they have been clinging, though. Someone declares what anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock in the Philippines should know fully well—that the middle class is the new poor, oftentimes just one health emergency away from debilitating poverty. In any other context, that declaration would feel borrowed, predictable even. But here, it lands with surprising visceral force as uttered by Teraña’s characters, whose condo-living aspirations and talk of elusive, keep-up-with-the-trend vacations to Japan make their economic precarity all the more tangible.

Teraña weaves all that talk into what feels like an unparalleled feat of playwriting in recent memory. His characters frequently speak at the same time, their conversations sprouting in unison and running in parallel, precisely as they would in an actual party, that you sometimes find yourself at a loss for where to look or whom to listen to. Yet, miraculously, what could have easily devolved into Babel instead becomes something resembling a chorus, the disparate conversations harmonizing into this sobering picture of a generation flailing and failing and fighting for its life.

I cannot imagine how the play must look like on the page, but Teraña has made sweet, captivating music out of this mess in real time. (It’s his funniest and most confident work yet.) And the production has the good fortune of being brought to life by a superb ensemble—on the night I watched, AJ Sison (Mark), Yesh Burce (Liz), Jel Tarun (Benj), Karyl Oliva (Mich), and Jonas Cunanan (Poch)—whose greatest achievement is coming across like they’ve been actually living in this space long before the audience walked in, making us feel less like ordinary spectators than unwilling eavesdroppers.

The condo set feels just as alive—there’s even real food being prepared and consumed onstage, as in an actual inúman—that you actually forget the show is taking place in a repurposed nightclub. If there’s any complaint to be made, it’s that the sound at Rampa is far from ideal and tends to dampen the experience.

Bad sound notwithstanding, however, there’s no mistaking it: Tagay para sa Ex is a sublime feat of writing, directing, and acting, and easily ranks among the most impressive things I’ve seen pulled off in all my years of theatergoing.

Mga Binago ng Araw

If Tagay para sa Ex makes magic out of colliding conversations, Mga Binago ng Araw manipulates time itself to make sense of the world its characters inhabit and are forced to reckon with.

Staged by Mad Child Productions at Ateneo de Manila University’s Old Communication Black Box—which now feels worlds apart from the swanky Areté complex—the play marks Guelan Varela-Luarca’s third new work to receive a full staging this year, following Scene Change’s Ang Linangan and Ateneo Entablado’s Santa Juana ng mga Katayan.

On the surface, Mga Binago ng Araw may strike you as a run-of-the-mill coming-of-age story, centered on a barkada whose signature stomping ground is their most privileged member’s backyard swimming pool in a plush Makati City subdivision. The question it thrusts upon its characters—and, by extension, the audience—seems in line with this simplistic exterior: Kailan ka unang tumanda?

Obviously, that question is anything but simple. And so is this play, which, by intermission, proves itself to be far from an easy watch. Like Tagay para sa Ex, Mga Binago ng Araw is a refreshingly difficult work of art that rewards discerning, attentive viewers.

By setting the play in the Pinoy summer of 2005, Varela-Luarca has made a love letter of sorts to his fellow millennials, the play animated by the material and audiovisual idiosyncrasies of that era. But the play’s foundational impulses transcend generations: Mga Binago ng Araw is about the confusion that comes with growing up, about contending with big feelings and finding meaning in small ones, about defying or surrendering to the little cracks that eventually splinter even the oldest friendships and relationships.

It’s about family—the biological, as well as the chosen—and about parents failing their children, and children barely surviving the world their parents have built for them. Above all, it’s about memory—as in Varela-Luarca’s 3 Upuan—and grasping for a vocabulary in the future with which to understand the once-unfathomable past.

Varela-Luarca explores all that through his middle-class characters by fracturing their timelines, using the fragments to (re)assemble these shifty attempts at comprehending their emotions and their anxieties, and why they made the decisions they made at the time. It may sound deceptively simple, but it really isn’t: The genius of this play is in how it conjures such vivid, delicate memories for its characters not through straightforward linear recollection, but through a painstaking jigsaw-like piecing together of bits and pieces of incident and feeling as it flits back and forth that crucial summer in the story.

At a couple of points, including one where he sends the characters into outer space and hurtling toward the sun, Varela-Luarca even punctuates his realistic narrative with disruptions of form and style that are honestly such breaths of fresh air when situated against the broader tapestry of playwriting in Manila.

Thank the theater gods Mga Binago ng Araw found a director more than up to the task of doing it justice in newcomer Monty Uy, who has summoned what theater critic Gibbs Cadiz perfectly describes as the play’s “dreamily exquisite” quality. This production feels coated in sepia, the viewers—through the mere act of witnessing—effectively becoming co-creators of its versions of the past, helping will the characters into walking, breathing, speaking shape.

In scene after confident scene, Uy’s production brims with admirable intelligence, invention, and imagination, equally at ease with moments of unrestrained noise and those of crystalline quiet; with youthful exuberance, teenage longing, and piercing sadness.

All his artistic elements, from Michelle Cornejo’s music and John Lucing’s movement to Sarah Facuri’s set, Uriel Tibayan’s sound design, Jethro Nibaten’s lights, Sofia Santelices’ costumes, and Teia Contreras and Julia Vaila’s video projections, are always in sync, reaching their apotheosis in a scene set at a swimming pool that’s quite frankly the coolest, most BDE-filled thing I’ve seen onstage this year.

And there isn’t a false note from the cast comprised of Jam Binay, Zöe de Ocampo, Maliana Beran, Rafael Jimenez, and Vino Mabalot as the teenage protagonists. Binay and Mabalot, in fact, are turning in their best and most affecting performances to date here, playing two versions of adolescents completely unprepared for the hormones-saturated inevitability of growing up. And, as the sixth character in the story, Francesca dela Cruz does a bit during the latter part of intermission that had me completely fooled—and which I won’t spoil here—that might just go down as the year’s most fun piece of acting.

All things considered, Mga Binago ng Araw is a constellation of deftly executed artistic choices. And I haven’t been this excited for a new director in quite some time.

El Fuego del Alma

Meanwhile, at Sine Pop in Cubao, Porvenir’s production of El Fuego del Alma is the very definition of peak theater.

Much has been written in The Diarist.ph about this adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke—the original Southern American setting swapped out by playwright Eljay Castro Deldoc for a rural Philippine town, and the length pared down to a compact 75 minutes—so I will say this: Where Tagay para sa Ex harnessed the power of language, and Mga Binago ng Araw that of time, this last play turns toward space as bedrock for its theatrical magic.

Every inch of the converted old house that serves as this play’s venue has been evidently put to good use, from the bamboo garden that audiences view from inside through a glass panel, to the upper level whose wooden floor becomes a conduit for sounds both literal and metaphorical, and even the glass doors and windows that turn into mirrors in the most consequential moments, casting light, fire, and ghostly apparitions back to the small stage.

Doing justice to Williams’ signature themes, El Fuego del Alma is about the repression of sexuality, pitting its santa-santita protagonist Alma against her worldlier, more liberated neighbor, the physician Juanito. The implosion of their “spiritual romance,” to borrow from Tats Rejante Manahan, becomes the driving force of the play, as the two grapple with the repressive religiosity, stifling conservatism, and suffocating provincialism of their small world.

By all accounts, this is a short play—which makes Castro Deldoc’s adaptation all the more triumphant for preserving and conveying the essence of Williams in so little time. And the production directed by Mark Mirando is a stunning, electrifying thing: swirling with high style and elevated gestures; alive with pitch-perfect shifts in mood and ambience; and pulsing with the unmistakable throb of all-too-human desire, buried and quelled before eventually being unleashed. I first took note of Mirando’s work in the 2019 thesis musical Hanggang Isang Araw at the University of the Philippines Diliman; seven years later, he’s now firmly in the big leagues as director.

When I saw the production on a Sunday evening, it was the play as a thing of shadows—a haunting in real time—in contrast to the matinee performances that Cadiz describes as bathed in “a faint buttery yellow patina, like a color-graded cinematic reel or a faded TV melodrama.”

Opaline Santos and Vincent Pajara were an intoxicating pair as Alma and Juanito, respectively, the slow decay of their spiritual romance buttressed by a reliable ensemble who seemed to decay alongside them. The smoke of the title alludes to fire, but through the performances of Santos and Pajara, it may as well signify the gradual snuffing out of their passions en route to genuine spiritual and carnal liberation.

We rarely get productions of Tennessee Williams’ plays in Manila—but here, in this out-of-the-box space down a narrow street in Quezon City, we have a production as good as any for introducing theatergoers to the unadulterated potency of his work.

Facebook Theater Reviews, 2023–2024

All written when I still didn't know if I'd ever have the time to pursue theater reviewing regularly again.

Ang Pag-uusig by Tanghalang Pilipino

March 4, 2023

In the currently running 3rd run of Tanghalang Pilipino's Ang Pag-uusig at the new CCP Blackbox, it's hard to ignore the hashtag Men Talking realness of it all. When it premiered in 2017, the show was a/the most piercing approximation of Dutertismo, as I wrote in my yearender then. Now, in a post-Duterte and post-MeToo era, one somehow ends up rooting for Abigail Williams and her posse; to paraphrase my friend Nikki Francisco (in her review that reminded me just how essential the elements of kindness and joy are to good theater criticism), the show finds a thousand ways to call Abigail a whore, yet nobody's calling John Proctor a man-whore??

Anyway, the joy for me in watching this run is mainly in witnessing four of our most dependable theater actors lead an ensemble composed of many new names; I've been watching these four onstage for a full decade now, I realized. Marco Viaña, I first saw in the Virgin Labfest riot of a play Kafatiran (2011). Two years later began my string of Viaña-Jonathan Tadioan productions, the two always, always delivering: as Antonio and Shylock in Der Kaufmann (2013); Biff and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (2014); Astrov and Vanya in Uncle Vanya (2016); Lisandro and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (2016); Coriolanus and Menenius in Coriolano (2019); George and Toto in Katsuri (2019). Antonette Go's steely Yelena in Uncle Vanya will always be my woah-who-is-that moment for her, while Lhorvie Nuevo's gender-bent Janjalani in Batang Mujahideen, where she conjured pure terror out of silence, remains clear in my mind's eye three years since the pandemic shut that production down. In a way, Ang Pag-uusig feels like both a culmination of sorts and an apt grand welcome back to the theater for this foursome; on that stage, they are serving, they are eating, they are fathering and mothering, doing work that is simply worthy of the loftiest superlatives. In Nuevo's case, she has now played Elizabeth Proctor, Abigail, and Mary Warren--can any other actress in the contemporary, global history of theater claim to have done that?

*     *     *     *     *

Nekropolis by Tanghalang Pilipino; Sari-Saring Soneto: An Evening of Shakespearean Sonnets in English and Filipino at Areté Ateneo; Walang Aray by PETA

April 23, 2023

Never thought I’d get to see an academic essay adapted into a play, but here we are, with Guelan Luarca’s latest, Nekropolis, which draws from, by my count, at least two.

The title itself should be a giveaway to anyone familiar with the academic literature: It’s a direct reference to Achille Mbembe’s landmark essay Necropolitics, which, in a nutshell, explores how power, often political, is used to determine who gets to live and who gets to die (or live in a state of non-life, or be exposed perpetually to the risk of death). Luarca, bless his brain, has somehow distilled into this textual triumph of a play not only Mbembe’s essay, but also its forebears—Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopower, the Panopticon, the whole “Discipline and Punish” shebang—as well as its most relevant progeny to the Philippine setting—Vicente Rafael’s portraiture of Duterte as the “Sovereign Trickster,” how the monster made grotesque humor his vehicle for deciding who didn’t deserve to live under his watch. In other words, three “generations” of scholarship, and along with them, the patriarchy, the revolution, the Philippines as a non-world, as refracted through the mess of the last seven years and the lives of the designated-undeserving-to-live (e.g., the non-straights, the drug users and “addicts,” the ones with mental health issues, the tibaks and “enemies of the state,” etc.).

Which is to say, a disclaimer, first of all: Part of my “day job” has been on the drug war, drug use, and the politics of drugs under Duterte. So I actually entered this play a bit apprehensive, loaded with my self-made expectations of what the play might be about or how it might deliver or whether or not it would even go deep into the scholarship. And what I saw—or more accurately, heard—floored me. Luarca’s text is rightfully ambitious, conceptually challenging, yet also very, very lucid in its dramatization of Foucault-Mbembe-Rafael, and its questioning of what comes after the three—the kinds of worlds we build in our quest to destroy the existing ones, the kinds of lives we lead when death and fear are normalized—goes so, so hard on the sociological, the playwright is frankly a social scientist now.

Which brings me to the production itself, now closed after only a four(?)-day run by Tanghalang Pilipino, directed by Charles Yee. Sa madaling salita, I don’t think it could ever catch up to what Luarca has laid out in his text, or what the text demanded of the production. What I saw could be messy at times, unclear at times, yet also dramatically lucid enough, though never quite enough, that I’m far from pissed off as to totally avoid making this unsolicited post (I actually think it should run again and for longer, regardless of its virtues). Shout-out to Mitzi Comia, far and away the clearest performer of them all (even in Ang Pag-uusig two months ago, it was already impossible to look away whenever she was onstage); and to Antonette Go and Sarah Monay’s perfect, fleeting, “gusto kitang—(yakapin?)” moment. Also, Arvy Dimaculangan’s sound design—a triumph in itself, the underworld made audible, dread rendered into an aural way of life.

Btw, the play can also be funny: The words “reactionary,” “neoliberal,” and “cretin” figure in heated dialogue, and the way they’re each thrown—I cackled. Not too long ago, someone—I can’t remember who now—said, and I paraphrase, ang sarap i-dissect ng utak ni Guelan (I do remember the original quote being more sexually explicit, but I digress). But anyway—agree.

As for the rest of the weekend: Sari-Saring Soneto at the Ateneo was a welcome, chill reunion with the largely Atenean theater crowd (my personal fave among the performers? Miren Alvarez-Fabregas, epitome of emotional coherence; we still need to see her Yocasta on the physical stage!). And a second dose of Walang Aray at PETA, a.k.a. please give Jon Abella and Shaira Opsimar all the awards. It really makes a world of difference when both your leads can, you know, lead. Opsimar’s reading, twice done, of “spy?” Living in my head rent-free.

*     *     *     *     *

The Reconciliation Dinner by Dulaang UP

May 23, 2023

(Quote-sharing Emil Hofileña's review)

Emil’s review of The Reconciliation Dinner, now heading toward the final weekend of its second run, nails so much of what I found great and not so great about it when I first saw it in UP Diliman last year. As sociological analysis, I thought it’s rather superficial, like a research article that didn’t bother doing a thorough literature review, and hardly had anything novel or insightful to say about Marcos, Robredo, and the whole red-versus-pink schism. But maybe that’s an unfair expectation, especially since the play seems pretty clear about where it’s coming from and whom it’s for. In other words, it’s far more comfortable—and much, much stronger—with the familiar; that is to say, with the dramatization and fleshing out of human foibles and relationships, and the insane yet all too rational notion that friendships should always come first, the whole country be damned. The whole cast eats this production up, but I must mention that Frances Makil-Ignacio makes an entrance and lands a first line of dialogue that had me laughing so hard, and Stella Cañete-Mendoza, well… one can only use the phrase “performance of a lifetime” so many times before it gets old, but that’s really what she’s giving here.

*     *     *     *     *

Virgin Labfest 18 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines

June 22, 2023

Hello, it’s me again, with some notes on Virgin Labfest 18 nobody asked for. Initially planned to do a full review ala 2015/16/17/19/20, but not enough time/brain space/drive to do it, so just these… scribblings, lifted almost verbatim straight out of my phone’s Notes app. Gibbs has pointed out that this year’s edition is probably the strongest we’ve had in years—and I agree wholeheartedly: Walang tápòn is the Tagalog expression. Well, okay, fine, in terms of the 12 new plays, it’s an 11/12 for me, but that’s not the point. The point is that a case could probably be made for each of those 11 plays (some stronger than others, of course) to be part of the 2024 Revisited section, when in previous years it was usually a case of picking from a pool of like four or five. So, bravo, VLF 18!

My top two:

For me, the top two plays and/or productions of this festival are pretty clear: Ang Awit ng Dalagang Marmol by Andrew Estacio and Dominador Gonzales: National Artist by Dingdong Novenario. In my notes, I wrote, “no notes.” Because both are sharp as hell, funny as hell, mounted like they weren’t “lab” productions (in the sense that Labfest is supposed to be a lab, though I’ve never bought this argument; see Guryon ng mga Tala, Fangirl, Mula sa Kulimliman, and now these two).

Estacio’s play, held together by Nazer Salcedo’s direction, is a wondrous balancing act of backstage farce and meta-historical-intellectualizing. You kind of expect it to topple towards excessive in either direction, but almost miraculously it never does, and in the process becomes an absolutely delirious and much-welcome hate crime (not derogatory) against dramaturges. Adrienne Vergara’s performance alone is case enough for this play to be Revisited; Vergara and that piano—it’s a match I’ll never forget.

Novenario’s play, we’ve seen before as a reading in 2020 (the online, COVID-ized edition). Even then, it was a riot. Now we have been gifted with the real thing—fully mounted, all its snark and wit and cattiness within reach. What I love about this one, above all, is its verisimilitude, in the sense that it really unfolds the way passive-aggressive conversations between these certain archetypes unfold. Of course, I mean Writers (capital W, derogatory). And unfolds with a meandering, seemingly aimless quality to it (but aimless and meandering only if you’re not paying full attention, because my god, how it all comes together quite marvelously in the end—thematically, narratively, what have you). This is a playwright at the peak of his powers, in full control of his craft, and 101 percent grounded in the milieu within which he writes. At some point, the play takes a swipe at spoken word artists that had me shouting, “Oh my god,” and really, the balls to do that. You can also cast this play using real-life people (wink wink) and it would work just as well.

The others:

As for the 10 other plays: There’s Zheg Arban’s Room 209, first of all. I’m not too crazy about this one, though I do think it is directed and mounted with clockwork precision (bravo, Delphine Buencamino!). My discontent lies mainly in how this play talks way more than it dramatizes, and what it talks about is a whole lot of what we already know—hazing is evil, etc., etc. And so it doesn’t really bring anything new in terms of insight, which renders the expectation of dramatization weightier here (and which, again, it does not satisfy fully). There’s also an expository quality to it that works only when it is being ironic (e.g., talk of loyalty vis-a-vis the protagonist being confronted over “not squealing”); otherwise it’s all just dull and uneconomical use of words. And in terms of plumbing the depths and horrors of toxic brotherhood, hypermasculinity, and violent frat- and military-adjacent cultures, the play can’t help feeling like budget-AKO (Alpha Kappa Omega, Guelan Luarca’s adaptation of Mike de Leon’s Batch ’81 that premiered under Tanghalang Ateneo in 2019). Thus, Gino Ramirez’s monologue, for example, feels unearned because with insufficient dramatic precedent, though performed terrifically. Anyway, I’m nitpicking: as a first play, it makes you excited for what the playwright will write next. (And since we’re nitpicking: Not too keen on how the actors playing the torturers are made to portray the dead in the ending, because that unnecessarily removes dramatic culpability.)

Next, Jerry O’Hara’s O’Donnell, a.k.a. Waiting for Godot if Godot were death in the World War II camps. As directed by Issa Manalo Lopez, the approximation of despair and grime and all manner of disgusting is perfect. Yet, watching this, I was also reminded of what Teju Cole, in his arts criticism collection Known and Strange Things, writes about repeatedly, that you can only subject the viewer to so much despair and horror before they become desensitized, and what transpires before them risks becoming dull, repetitive, even performative. It’s fully the intent of the play, of course, but I also can’t help wishing it met us a little more halfway?

Next up, you know how band fandom people use the word “bias” to pertain to their favorite band members? Well, my bias in this festival is M. Manalastas’ script for Ang Tuyom. Almost like it was written by the smartest guy in the room, the way it renders trauma, hurt, and familial pain into something at once corporeal yet abstract, distant yet also ever-present. Conceptual shit like this is no joke to pull off, and to Manalastas, I say, more plays, please! The production, on the other hand, I’m not quite enamored with; feels quite rough, raw, unpolished, like a thesis play (which I suppose is what labs really are).

On to Juliene Mendoza’s 10 to Midnight: Mendoza, brilliant actor (so good in Dekada ’70 for starters), now quite the up-and-coming playwright, and one who appears to be specializing in the intricacies of brotherly ties (idk, I’m basing this off of this play and his Multiverse from 2020)? What I loved about this play is the refreshing unexpository(?)… unexpositional(?)… anyway, that word, quality of his writing. You know he's doing exposition, but you marvel at how the lines do not sound like exposition. That’s sophistication. And with that, captures the tender heart beating within fraught, fraternal relations in troubled families. Sarah Facuri as director: mistress of efficiency!

The Ate Reg play now—or as it is properly known, Chuck Smith’s Regine: The Fairy Gaymother. Chuck and I were workshopmates at the IWP in La Salle in 2017 (nilindol on the last day lol) so that’s disclosure enough. I say, replace the Regine and you’re good to go. Because as it is, those scenes stand out in their unevenness compared to the rest of the play. Because otherwise, the trio of Tex Ordoñez-de Leon, Ron Capinding, and Adrian Lindayag are hella tight. I particularly love, love, love the celebratory, life-affirming quality of the writing, its assertion of the many forms of coming out, its recognition of fear and self-doubt as parts of the journey to self-actualization. You shine in your own terms, is what it says, and there couldn’t be a better ending.

The next three, quite madaldal, inching their ways toward foregone climaxes and conclusions. Jules Pamisa’s Mga Halimaw rin Kami, an otherwise engaging and relatively refreshing take on the Duterte EJKs, seems like a giddy kid the moment it reaches its big reveal, and then it swiftly, abruptly ends. The production does know what it’s doing with Chrome Cosio, though, the way the perfect, ongoing Season 3 of The Other Two does with Josh Segarra. Shenn Apillado’s Hawaii, Here We Come (or Kung Paano Ako Naging Leading Lady in Malacañang) also makes a similar, if more glaring, late-act stumble, and becomes more an inorganic back-and-forth the further along it goes. And Layeta Bucoy’s Tuloy ang Palabas is the latest in the playwright’s apparent obsession with dead (literal or metaphorical) women(?) (I will never forget *dead* Angeli Bayani being wrapped in tape head to foot in that one play.) Anyway, this new play—lush, appropriately quasi-operatic, appropriately baroque, like one of those gilded church frames. But it also feels not so confident that we’d get that Rissey Reyes’ character is already dead (it makes a point to repeat that again and again, including in the published synopsis) (Structural comparison: Evening at the Opera). And also, as directed and performed, there’s a monotonous quality to it that somehow made me think the dialogue is metrical?? I’m just spewing thoughts here.

For Ophalain Serrano’s Hukay, I don’t really have much insight to give (told you this isn’t a proper review). It’s short and sweet, which is what any Labfest play should aim to be at the very least, but, so what happened was, okay so there’s some problem with enunciation the afternoon I caught this play, and so I totally missed the part where the actors said that *thing* Andoy Ranay is burying is a horse, and so the whole time I was like, oh, so they’re burying a man, and then when that whole horse flying in the sky ending happened, I was like, hmm, is this a metaphor for how these men can only pangangabayo in their dreams, in the stars, in the galaxies, because they can never pangangabayo on earth? Anyway, that *thing* was absolutely NOT a horse-sized corpse!

Okay, lastly—so I did say I was 11/12 okay with this festival, and the only one I didn’t like was O, a play about the female orgasm that was clearly written by a man, and I don’t wanna be any nastier so I’ll just end here. See you next year!

Some awards (lol):

Best Scripts: Ang Tuyom, Ang Awit ng Dalagang Marmol, Dominador Gonzales: National Artist

Best Director: Delphine Buencamino, Room 209

Best Ensemble: O’Donnell

Six Essential Performances (alphabetically): Jao Catarus, Room 209; Tex Ordoñez-de Leon, Regine: The Fairy Gaymother; Bombi Plata, 10 to Midnight; Opaline Santos, Ang Tuyom; Joel Saracho, Dominador Gonzales: National Artist; Adrienne Vergara, Ang Awit ng Dalagang Marmol

*     *     *     *     *

Laro by Barefoot Theatre Collaborative

June 24, 2023

Okay, last Manila theater-related post in a while: The currently running production of Floy Quintos’ Laro, directed by John Mark Yap for Barefoot Theatre Collaborative, is flat-out terrific! I say this as someone who left the 2019 version of this show liking only half of what I’d seen. In other words, the glow up is very real. It’s not just that this current Laro is impeccably cast (the more I think about the casting, the more I love this show). It’s also that, even at 2.5 hours, I’d call it impeccably paced; you hardly ever feel the production sag, so astute are its rhythms. Maybe also aided by Quintos’ rewrites, the production feels more strung together as a series of 10 vignettes, each one spilling into the next more seamlessly to create quite the Pride Month tapestry.

More admirably: The second act, the one with all the *nasty* stuff, has been rendered more urgent than the usually more accessible first! There seems to be this weird thinking that this second half is too exploitative, too dirty, too dark, to the point of being repetitive, if not inessential—a thinking that, to me, betrays a disturbing myopia toward the specificities of modern queer politics. Because now, this second act is even more essential, more piercing and unflinching in its critique of #gays; in other words, more resonant. We have upstanding, “good” gays being revealed to be pedophiles; “straight” cousins; Vic Fabe-ish “content creators”; losyang twink models and the losyang patrons who support them—and Yap’s production generously gives each of them breathing room to be fleshed out.

And so this cast of riches: Gio Gahol (as the policeman) is ever-reliable, and Phi Palmos (as the drag queen) literally brings down the house (it was his one-person show the afternoon I caught this). But there are also, for me, two fine discoveries in Jeremy Mayores (as the student, quietly heart-wrenching) and Noel Escondo (what comic timing as *that* vlogger!). Jojo Cayabyab fully makes sense of his cray-cray English-spouting pilantropo role, he is to Act II what Palmos is to Act I; Al Gatmaitan nails the preening, “good gay” role with shades of (legendary actress) in a muted nervous breakdown; and Andre Miguel will be my casting bias here, because he is just eerily spot on as a skinny, bronzed, Vogue-ish model who is actually cuckoo deep down. Love, love, love the musical interludes here, too, and maybe in the well-earned next run, we’ll have padám.

*     *     *     *     *

Anywhere We Sing Is Home by the Cultural Center of the Philippines

September 10, 2023

Post-the CCP 54th anniversary concert Anywhere We Sing Is Home, my only pressing thought was that Arman Ferrer should star in a revival of El Filibusterismo the musical asap. His perfectly calibrated Awit ni Isagani was, for me, the haunting highlight of the night.

*     *     *     *     *

Pingkian: Isang Musikal by Tanghalang Pilipino

March 21, 2024

There’s a number in Tanghalang Pilipino's Pingkian—the new musical centered on Emilio Jacinto—that’s key to appreciating the brilliance of the entire thing. It happens quite early, in the middle of Act I, when the story’s fledgling revolutionaries come together to compose what would become The Kartilya, the guiding document of The Katipunan. The whole number is basically just the words of that document set to music, but the words and phrases have been cherry-picked, translated, rearranged, simplified—elegantly, intelligently—essentially ’re-composing’ the Kartilya into something seemingly newly spoken in this day and age. At this point, it becomes clear this musical has no interest in conventional plot; in its place, introspection, a progression of ideas as opposed to so-called story. Adopting the cadence of the streets, that number gradually evolves with each certain beat into a kind of rap huddle, performed by common men and women evoking history and revolution through language they know best, reenacting heroism and its follies through their own grammar.

In the entirety of this 2.5-hour production, that number is its surest point. It’s when the show’s firing on all cylinders; when all the talent and skill and hard work that’s evidently been put into its making are in full, glorious display, cohering into a galvanising spectacle of modern, Filipino musical theatre. You realise you’re in good hands; you know you’re watching something special; a shared realization forms between you the viewer, those performers onstage, and the creatives behind the scenes, that what you’re watching is the shit. And they know they’re the shit.

I’ve been going to Manila’s theatres for 15 years now, and let me tell you, nothing compares to the feeling of seeing a show ooze confidence and know its worth. I’m thinking of The Room Where It Happens in last year‘s Hamilton, Totally Fucked in BlueRep’s Spring Awakening in 2019, Kayumanggilas in 2015’s Kung Paano Ako Naging Leading Lady, the climactic battle in 2014’s Ang Nawalang Kapatid, Sinta with the bubbles in Rak of Aegis, to name just five examples. For the full three-and-a-quarter minutes of Ang Kartilya, the whole of Pingkian becomes the stuff that standing ovations were made for.

Shoutouts to Jenny Jamora’s direction (the same mastery of imagination that floored me in her 33 Variations back in ‘15); Jomelle Era’s choreography and GA Fallarme’s projections conjuring the show’s physical and psychological terrains; Marco Viaña landing that heartrender of a monologue; Juan Ekis’ why-or-why not-or-why distillation of revolution; and, of course, Ejay Yatco’s music here, which is simply a body-of-work best. And a special shoutout to Vic Robinson—if you’re Ilonggo, you cannot not see him in his leading turn here as Jacinto. If not in this current soldout run, then in future reruns that are guaranteed to happen. I don’t make the rules, but also, Ilonggo bias aside, the man’s singing the hell out of this role.

Finally, Bituin Escalante’s hair alone in this production should win her all the awards.

*     *     *     *     *

Balete by Tanghalang Pilipino

September 15, 2024

Between Pingkian last March and the newly opened Balete, it’s truly been a banner year for Tanghalang Pilipino. I can cavil about the latter’s ending, but really, it’s the one, small imperfect spot in an otherwise terrific production. Largely devised from an F. Sionil Jose novel and an existing Rody Vera script based on the novel, this play is above all a marvel of stagecraft. People become the set and soundscape, and movement is the main narrative driver, and the result is an astoundingly cohesive union of theatrical elements evoking the grand sweep of the novel as a literary form (an all-too-rare occurrence, imo). More than anything, the play is an act of remembering, as a son tries to make sense of the feudal monstrosity that was his father, who once lorded over the landless in the not-yet-solid north. It’s ‘haunting’ in the most anthropological sense made manifest on the stage, not only in the spectral comings and goings of the poor people that marked the son’s early life, but also in the constant presence of poverty and numbing hardship at once proximate yet alien to his lifeworld. And so it must be said: It makes a world of difference when a production, and the people behind it, is grounded in the reality of those it seeks to portray; when a production actually genuinely empathizes with its characters, and does not treat them like mere play things in a silly game of dress-up. Everyone involved here delivers topnotch work, and this triumph is, for me, made sweeter by the fact that the design team is almost all (relatively) new names to the scene! Marco Viaña barks, Toni Go counts in Hokkien, Lhorvie Nuevo asserts she’s no thief, Tad Tadioan makes the most hilarious sounds, Gelo Molina wins a medal for “best in eating,” and the great Nonie Buencamino—well, you’ll just have to see for yourself the wonders he makes out of his role(s). Running until October 6 at the new CCP Blackbox.