Diarist Feature: Manila Society of Theater Reviewers, 1st MSTR Awards, and the need for theater criticism

Wrote a little postscript to this thing we've launched--the website version in The Diarist here. 

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Why we formed the theater reviewers' group

Last January 10, the newly formed Manila Society of Theater Reviewers (MSTR) handed out its inaugural awards celebrating the theatrical works that opened in Metro Manila in 2025. It was a great day for Areté, the thriving arts hub of Ateneo de Manila University: Four productions that it (co-)produced collectively won seven of the 10 categories up for grabs, in addition to a handful of honorable mentions. 

Best Production of a Play, Best New Filipino Work, and Best Achievement in Design went to Quomodo Desolata Es? Isang Dalamhati, the new translation (by Jerry Respeto) and adaptation (by Guelan Luarca) of the seminal Nick Joaquin play A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino. Those who missed this production’s two-weekend run in August 2025 still have a chance to catch it when it returns to Ateneo’s Hyundai Hall beginning January 30, 2026.

Luarca was named Best Director both for his work on Quomodo and 3 Upuan (an Areté co-production with Scene Change), which also took home Best Lead Performance in a Play for Jojit Lorenzo.

Meanwhile, Nelsito Gomez and Wolfgang lead vocalist Basti Artadi’s Si Faust—a rock opera based on the Faustian legend, as dramatized by the German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—bagged Best Production of a Musical, as well as Best Lead Performance in a Musical for Maita Ponce’s electrifying take on the devil Mephistopheles. 

The three other categories won by shows not produced by Areté were Best Featured Performance in a Play (Benedix Ramos for Dagitab, Luarca’s adaptation of the titular 2014 Cinemalaya film by Giancarlo Abrahan, now produced by Scene Change); Best Featured Performance in a Musical (Marvin Ong for The Sandbox Collective’s Side Show); and the Emerging Talent Award (Ramos again, for his impressive body of work last year, which also included his turns in Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s Bar Boys: The Musical and Sandbox’s Next to Normal). Further attesting to Ateneo’s status as the place to be for theater in the capital region’s north these days, Bar Boys also ran at Areté’s Hyundai Hall—a hugely successful engagement from October to November—while Dagitab originated at the university’s Fine Arts Black Box in July. 

At this point, I should disclose that I’m not only a voting member of MSTR, but also its cofounder and convener. So, with absolutely no hint of bias whatsoever, I’ll say that anyone who painstakingly followed the theatrical landscape last year would probably agree that this was a pretty strong set of honorees: works that pushed the boundaries of local theater, championed original Filipino playwriting and music-making, and put on stark display the expansive and distinctly Pinoy emotive and dramatic capacities of our terrific artists.

The impetus to do the hard work of actually forming MSTR came from our founder Nikki Francisco, editor-in-chief and lead reviewer of TheaterFansManila.com (TFM), back in the first quarter of last year. (Vlad Bunoan of ABS-CBN News Online had voiced a similar idea to me separately.)

And really, what spurred each of us to think about collectivizing, in a manner of speaking, was the fact that there was: 1) no existing guild or association for reviewers covering the Manila theater scene, despite the thriving landscape, and 2) no dedicated awards for theater handed out by the reviewers themselves. That “Manila theater is alive!” is a proclamation I’ve been hearing for over a good decade already. In the early 2010s, it truly felt like a new era for the industry: A new generation of artists came of age, more new companies were being established, and new, frequently innovative work was sprouting everywhere. The few of us who were writing regularly back then did what we could to document these developments and trends, spending our weekends and even weekday nights hopping from venue to venue—but in the end, any assessment of the year as a whole was done on an individual basis.

In terms of organized award-giving bodies whose outcomes (or processes) don’t lead to more questions than satisfied silences, Manila has the Gawad Buhay—now on its 16th year and handed out by the Philippine Legitimate Stage Artists Group or PHILSTAGE—as well as the relatively newer LEAF (or Live Entertainment, Arts, and Festivals) Awards. (Disclosure: I have been part of the jury for the former since 2015.)

The gap that MSTR is filling

So perhaps the simple American or British analogy can be most helpful in illustrating the gap that MSTR is filling. In New York and London, you have the Tonys and Oliviers—both industry awards, whose voting bases include a significant proportion composed of members of the industry or theater professionals themselves. (Members of media are also among the voters, but they are a stark minority.) Then you have the awards handed out by theater critics, reviewers, journalists, and/or publishers: the Drama Desks, Outer Critics Circle, and New York Drama Critics Circle for New York; the Critics Circle Theatre Awards for London. There are other awards, such as the Lucille Lortel for Off-Broadway, or the Evening Standard Theatre Awards given out by the English newspaper The Standard, but the above examples should suffice for analogy.

MSTR is intended to be the journalists’ or reviewers’ or critics’ awards—depending on the possessive noun one is comfortable using—which has hitherto been missing in the Manila theater industry.

We started this endeavor without any pretense to so-called exhaustive assessment, or that we could watch every show that opens in Manila and subsequently hand out a “be-all and end-all” awards. None of us nine members during the organization’s first year were—or are—full-time theater reviewers (to my knowledge, no such person exists in the Philippines). So the internal directive was simple: to watch as much as we could and write as much as we could. The eligibility criteria we agreed upon accounted for these limitations: At least three members should have seen a particular production for it to be deemed eligible for the awards, and that production should have played at least four performances. In the end, we still managed to arrive at a roster of 66 eligible productions.

As for the awards categories—there are only 10—the idea is one of celebration, rather than competition, and we looked to the UK’s Critics Circle Theatre Awards in particular for inspiration. Hence, the absence of “nominees”; we went straight to voting for and announcing the winners and the honorable mentions, as a way of commemorating the best of the best. 

Our production categories don’t distinguish between Filipino and non-Filipino material, nor between professional and university companies. (Gawad Buhay, in contrast, considers only new productions from its 16 professional member companies.) This rule is not meant to disadvantage smaller-scale and non-professional productions, contrary to what some Redditors would have you think, but rather, embodies our belief in the capacity of these small, non-professional productions and organizations to be just as good—if not better—than the pros. (In 2019, for example, my choices for best musical for my yearend roundup for the Philippine Daily Inquirer were Ateneo Blue Repertory’s Spring Awakening and the thesis musical Hanggang Isang Araw at the University of the Philippines Diliman, and for best Filipino play, Alpha Kappa Omega by Tanghalang Ateneo.)

Flagship award

We also established the category Best New Filipino Work as a kind of flagship award—mainly to encourage Filipino playwrights, composers, and librettists to make more new and original work. And the Emerging Talent Award, as the name implies, is intended to reward breakthrough talent and work, including from individuals not normally associated with the fields they’re being recognized for. This year’s honorable mentions, for instance, included Sarah Facuri—an established actress, yes, but in Si Faust, apparently also a highly imaginative set designer (Facuri previously designed the set for Company of Actors in Streamlined Theatre’s Uncle Jane in 2023, but Si Faust was inarguably her breakout moment).

For Outstanding Contribution to Theater, we decided to posthumously honor two artists who passed away suddenly in 2025, each of them still with shows that were only about to (re-)open: GA Fallarme, who had basically become synonymous with the field of projection design, and George de Jesus III, one of those rare playwrights who seemed to have no problem juggling and balancing different moods and genres—and oftentimes within the same work (see Maniacal, Wanted: Male Boarders, Sala sa Pito).

In hindsight, voting on the awards was the easiest part of the journey of building MSTR. We—that is to say, Nikki Francisco, Esquire Magazine’s Christa De La Cruz, and I, plus TFM’s Frida Tan as our biggest cheerleader—have also had to put up a functional website from scratch; create logos and visuals for the organization, and graphics for the awards (thank you, Canva!); and become sort of overnight social media managers to kickstart and sustain MSTR’s presence on Facebook and Instagram, among other labor-intensive, behind-the-scenes tasks. To be clear, none of us are Gen Z, designers by trade, or self-professed techies.

In his 2025 yearend roundup, MSTR member Gibbs Cadiz—arguably the one voice Manila theater always looks forward to hearing from every end of the year—celebrated the fact that “there are enough of our species now… to form a guild.” Only by ensuring that local theater “is chronicled properly, both honored and scrutinized through sustained documentation and lively discourse,” Cadiz wrote, can we collectively “insist that, in the larger scheme of things, theater is a civic act, and that it matters.” 

Indeed, MSTR is meant to be more than just an award-giving body. As the “About Us” section of our website states, the group aims not just to honor the best theatrical works of the year through its annual awards, but, more importantly, to promote and support the capital region’s theater industry by providing “consistent, publicly accessible theater criticism”—and thus “elevate discourse on theater among industry practitioners, journalists, academics, and the general theatergoing public.” In short, to foster more meaningful, insightful, and in-depth conversation on theater through the medium of the written word. 

To Cadiz’s assessment, I’d add that this insistence on writing constantly about the theater—regardless of whether it’s a rave or a pan—is also a healthy way of preventing the proliferation of yes men and sycophants. Far too often, I’ve heard fellow theater journalists, especially younger and newer ones, say they’d rather not write about a show than write a negative review of it. There might be an economic argument to that, of course—maybe a bad review will shoo prospective ticket buyers away in an already-precarious economy—but nobody, least of all paying audiences, deserves to see a bad show. A review that doesn’t shy away from speaking the truth is the least—and also the most vital—thing theater journalists and critics can contribute to helping the scene grow, and historicizing its peaks and not-so-fine moments.

Unsurprisingly, there are theater practitioners who would disagree with the arguments above, and would rather ban or blacklist reviewers from their shows than make space for fair and level-headed discussion. Yet, it’s impossible to overlook how the civic act of theater is one that can be kept alive only through both inventive, intelligent artistry—and inventive, intelligent criticism. It’s not baseless to say that theater makers and theater reviewers all want the same thing (at least, I know I do): an honest-to-goodness good show. 

Let me end by appropriating the words of film critic David Ehrlich, from his introductory remarks at this year’s New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner: “It’s not what critics and artists want from each other, but what we give to each other that matters. Yes, we give you awards in return for you giving us things to write about, but really, what we give to each other are reasons to continue giving a shit about the things we love, and the courage to insist that the things we love are still capable of giving us something meaningful in return.” What’s an honest review—or any expression of honesty, really—if not the purest expression of love?

The Year in Film & TV (2025)

Like I said at the start of the year: I'm done being an awards season completist. Only 128 entries in my Letterboxd, plus a lot of TV, though still a far cry from my 2020/2021/2022 numbers (I believe there's no returning to those days anymore). The upside is that I ended up seeing 77 pieces of theater, so best to take that earlier declaration with a grain of salt. Now let me leave you with just a top three--as usual, culled from the year's titles and the previous year's leftovers: a trifecta that forms a prescient, frightening, hope-diminishing picture of the world we now live in.

1. 'The Rehearsal' Season 2 (HBO; created by Nathan Fielder)

The best thing I saw this year, a complete overhaul of the phrase "committing to the bit." Fattest brain in the entire universe, in the most Filipino sense. And a richer, far more insightful and expansive look into this pocket of the manosphere, the patriarchy, and the emotional circuits of these effing males, than that British miniseries with the one-take schtick.

2. 'No Other Land' (dirs. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor)

The defining global event of our time; the unmasking of the so-called modern benevolent White Westerner; the ultimate test of our individual and collective moral compasses--all simultaneously complicated and rendered crystal-clear in one of the bravest pieces of filmmaking ever made.

3. 'One Battle After Another' (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

I know, I know, it's a very US film/problem, but it may as well be about us.

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Here are the rest of my 5-star titles in alphabetical order, and hyperlinked to my Letterboxd review where applicable:

• 'Alipato at Muog' (dir. JL Burgos)
• 'Asura' (Netflix; dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda)
• 'Bugonia' (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
• 'Come See Me in the Good Light' (dir. Ryan White)
• 'Common Side Effects' Season 1 (Adult Swim; created by Joe Bennett & Steve Hely)
• 'Dying for Sex' (FX on Hulu; created by Kim Rosenstock & Elizabeth Meriwether)
• 'An Errand' (dir. Dominic Bekaert)
• 'If I Had Legs I'd Kick You' (dir. Mary Bronstein)
• 'I'm Still Here' (dir. Walter Salles)
• 'Kinakausap ni Celso ang Diyos' (dir. Gilb Baldoza)
• 'My Sunshine' (dir. Hiroshi Okuyama)
• 'Nananahan' (dir. Dwein Baltazar)
• 'Only We Know' (dir. Irene Villamor)
• 'The Perfect Neighbor' (dir. Geeta Gandbhir)
• 'The Phoenician Scheme' (dir. Wes Anderson)
• 'Platonic' Season 2 Episode 3 (Apple TV+; dir. Francesca Delbanco)
• 'The Pitt' Season 1 (Max; R. Scott Gemmill, creator & showrunner)
• 'Some Nights I Feel Like Walking' (dir. Petersen Vargas)
• 'The Studio' Season 1 (Apple TV+; created by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory & Frida Perez)
• 'Your Mother's Son' (dir. Jun Lana)
• 'Zootopia 2' (dirs. Jared Bush & Byron Howard)

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Links to my past lists, which are best read as time capsules documenting what I'd seen and where I was at the time I wrote them:

The Year in Film and TV 2024/ 2023/ 2022/ 2021/ 2020/ 2019

The Decade in Film 2010-19

The Year in Film 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014

The Year in Philippine Theater (2025)

First yearender for The Diarist--here! The one thing I couldn't include anymore, because it was neither in Sydney nor Manila, was Kimberly Akimbo with Menchu in Singapore, a legit 40-hour whirlwind adventure!

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Why I still longed for Filipino theatricality in 2025

Writing year-end appraisals of the theater landscape is not only about remembering the shows one saw, but also about taking stock of those one missed. In my case, the latter group includes GMG Productions and Stages’ Come From Away—which many of my fellow reviewers raved about—as well as Repertory Philippines’ Art, the 20th edition of the Virgin Labfest, and a slew of productions by university-based organizations.

That’s because I spent most of the first half of 2025 in Sydney, Australia, as a graduate student in medical anthropology. As it happens, that’s also where I encountered some of my favorite theater of the year.

At the Ensemble Theatre—a 200-seater just across the harbor from the Sydney Opera House, and a few minutes’ walk from the Harbor Bridge with its iconic arch—I saw a production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie that struck a perfect, delicate balance in drawing out the memory play’s dreamlike melancholy and its inherent comedy. There, I also caught Lauren Gunderson’s The Half-Life of Marie Curie—spare, but never slight; emotional, but never histrionic—with topnotch production design that conjured landscapes and seascapes, dank interiors and the great outdoors, with just a small, round, see-through dais for a stage, judicious use of lights, and a sheer curtain hung from a circular track. A third standout in that venue: the Australian premiere of Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2024—“a gentle chamber piece,” to quote one Sydney critic, about a specific kind of life that loneliness and childhood trauma can carve for a grown man. Directed by Darren Yap, this production went straight for the heartstrings with little resort to overt melodrama. 

At the Opera House itself, I scored a ticket to the sold-out rerun of the acclaimed Sydney Theatre Company production of Suzie Miller’s RBG: Of Many, One, a monologue that eschewed hagiography in its fleet-footed (re)construction of the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late American justice and women’s rights activist. Heather Mitchell’s performance in the titular role was the very definition of Herculean—maturing and shrinking, aging and de-aging before our eyes in seconds, reminiscent of Shamaine Buencamino’s work for Dulaang UP’s Sidhi’t Silakbo in 2023.

I also count myself fortunate to have snagged a last-minute seat to another sold-out show: Belvoir St. Theatre’s The Spare Room, starring Australian acting royalty and two-time Oscar nominee Judy Davis. Playing a woman who takes in her dying, cancer-stricken friend—and must contend with said friend’s preference for alternative, oft-unproven therapies—Davis was the epitome of knowing how to command an audience (and make them laugh!).

Meanwhile, in the 55-seater Old Fitz Theatre, nestled in the basement of the 150-year-old Old Fitzroy Hotel, I saw the Australian premiere of Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane, about a single mother who—without fail—always chooses to see the bright side of things as she cares for her chronically ill child. The play’s beauty was chiefly in how it used the offstage to convey so much of what’s going on, and watching this superlative production, as the eminent Sydney critic John Shand put it, was akin to witnessing “a little monument be erected to the triumph of shared humanity, scene by aching scene.”

For the most part, though, the Sydney theater landscape—as with Manila’s, or perhaps everywhere else, really—was dotted with shows that settled “into that fuzzy groove somewhere between brilliant and crappy, great and wretched,” to borrow the words of my colleague Gibbs Cadiz; shows that were far from either “drop-dread triumphs or spectacular failures.” True, it offered the chance to see material I’d never seen staged in Manila before, such as Harold Pinter’s The Lover and The Dumb Waiter (a twin bill at the Ensemble Theatre), the musical adaptation of Pedro Almodóvar’s film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and Broadway replica productions of The Book of Mormon and Hadestown. A student production of the musical Nine at the National Institute of Dramatic Art was rather memorable for its flawed use of live video and projections in the vein of European directors Jamie Lloyd and Ivo van Hove.

Longing for Filipino pusò

Yet, watching theater Down Under, I frequently ended up longing for that very Filipino brand of pusò (heart) or passion, that has defined the best of what I’ve seen in Manila—that distinctly Filipino sense of theatricality, bone-deep, utterly unembellished, incontrovertibly human.

The Producers at the Hayes Theatre, for instance, was a fine example of the Australians’ keen ear for dark comedy—Alexandra Cashmere, fresh out of college, was dynamite as the bombshell Ulla—but I left that show missing the unbridled joy and larger-than-life quality that Audie Gemora brought to his take on the role of flamboyant director Roger de Bris for Repertory Philippines’ production of this musical in 2013.

Sydney was also a good place to watch Shakespeare in the original Early Modern English, even if imbued with contemporary elements that were nevertheless effective most of the time. At the Opera House, Bell Shakespeare’s Henry V (now Henry 5) was quite admirable for its intelligent use of stillness and minimalist gestures to depict the play’s grimy fight scenes. The Seymour Centre at the University of Sydney hosted my first ever Timon of Athens, with Timon’s extravagances and foolishness transposed to the present (the title now I Hate People; or Timon of Athens). Most unforgettable was The Player Kings, Damien Ryan’s two-part, modern-dress marathon of the history plays—Richard II, both parts of Henry IV, Henry V, all three parts of Henry VI, and Richard III. Including intermissions, this was a 12-hour affair. The whole thing was markedly uneven, with some parts working better than others in their condensed versions, but Liam Gamble was a most indelible presence on that stage as Richard III (the actor himself lives with cerebral palsy).

Still, none of those productions actually made me feel, for lack of a more descriptive term, the way Tanghalang Pilipino’s Der Kaufmann: Ang Negosyante ng Venecia left me frozen with soul-expunging terror inside the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Tanghalang Huseng Batute in 2013.

I do think Filipino artists can learn a thing or two from Sydney’s industry, which is no Broadway—where theater has long been a tourist attraction, and seats to hits like Hamilton have occasionally been sold for over $1,000—but no Manila either, with its own set of economic and institutional problems. For example, almost all local companies in Sydney announce the lineup of their shows for the following year in advance, usually around September or October of the current year, and offer subscription packages that enable theatergoers to buy tickets to a certain number (if not all) of the shows for the forthcoming season at discounted prices (the more productions included in one’s package, the larger the markdown per show). Moreover, many companies offer subscribers the option of free ticket exchanges for the first exchange—you can transfer your ticket to another performance at no cost—provided there are seats available for the new date, and provided the ticket holder pays for the additional amount if their new seat were more expensive than the original. And student discounts are available for almost every performance.

Factoring in ancillary expenses like transportation and food, going to the theater in Manila is not exactly easy on the pockets nowadays. Simple procedures like the ones outlined above can greatly boost theatergoers’ confidence to purchase tickets way ahead of time, or encourage new and younger audiences to see their first show. Of course, some companies have made greater strides than others in making theater accessible—hats off to you, Barefoot Theatre Collaborative!—but the overall picture suggests there’s plenty more that can be done. The quest for a truly democratic theater landscape remains a work in progress.

Still, despite the pervasive issues, that landscape has also been, year after year, a constant source of pleasure and thought-provoking insight. Some of the most precious, cathartic moments of my life have been spent in the dark of the theater. Here, then, is a list of 10 to add to those moments:

1. Two versions of ‘3 Upuan’

When I speak of catharsis, this Guelan Luarca play immediately comes to mind. It’s about three siblings mourning the illness and subsequent death of their father; about the many forms that grief assumes in their varied lives, and what little time they each have to make sense of their loss. 

In my 17 years of theatergoing, I don’t believe any other play has come closer to capturing with heart-stabbing precision the feeling of watching a loved one slowly fade away, and the existential untethering—that unsettling sense of being adrift in no man’s land—that plagues the weeks, months, even years that follow that loved one’s death. I saw this play twice, and each time exited the theater a bit of a wreck, having been compelled to revisit the final week of my own father’s life in 2017. 

The first time I saw 3 Upuan at the Ateneo de Manila University was in February, with Jojit Lorenzo, JC Santos, and Martha Comia all returning from the 2024 premiere—the play, in their hands, an exercise in intellectualizing raw emotion. In October, I saw the new cast—Paolo O’Hara, Cris Pasturan, and Jasmine Curtis-Smith—their emotions collectively bigger and more in-your-face. Two different versions, each no less potent than the other: theater as spiritual reckoning. I can’t wait for the third, and fourth, and fifth iterations.

2. ‘Kisapmata’ at the Cultural Center of the Philippines

Luarca’s first new, fully staged work for the year was actually this adaptation of the Mike de Leon film from 1981, about a household ruled—and tormented—by an iron-fisted patriarch, and its members’ seeming inability to escape his grip. In my review, I hailed this Tanghalang Pilipino (TP) production best-of-the-decade material: the sensibilities of classical myth merged with the tropes of horror to exhume the proverbial rot at the core. It also felt like the collaboration of a lifetime for the TP Actors Company senior members that composed its four-person cast: Jonathan Tadioan, Lhorvie Nuevo-Tadioan, Marco Viaña, and Toni Go-Yadao, each never better, and together, a portrait of actorly generosity.

3. Marvin Ong in ‘Side Show’

Director Toff de Venecia’s take on this Broadway musical about a pair of Siamese twins who become vaudeville celebrities was chock-full of myriad, big swings that didn’t always work. But many times, this production by The Sandbox Collective also became an artistic spectacle, especially when Mark Dalacat’s set, Carlos Siongco’s costumes, and Gabo Tolentino’s lighting cohered into a thrillingly inventive whole in particular numbers. It was also led by two terrific pairs of actresses playing the twins: Krystal Kane and Molly Langley, Tanya Manalang and Marynor Madamesila.

Above all, there was Marvin Ong, the sideshow’s “cannibal king” and loyal friend to the twins. Ong had just two songs—the jazzy Act I ensemble number The Devil You Know, and his big Act II ballad You Should Be Loved. But in those two songs, more so in the second, Ong was a vision of classical musical theater come to life: Endowed with a voice that lifted this production to theatrical heavens, his performance was the crucial piece that transported the viewer right to the heart of this tale of perverted love and wretchedness.

4. Mikkie Bradshaw-Volante in ‘Into the Woods’

When I speak of pusò, I mean Mikkie Bradshaw-Volante’s Baker’s Wife in Into the Woods—arguably the splashiest theatrical event of the year, care of Theatre Group Asia and director Chari Arespacochaga at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater. The production itself was disappointingly incoherent, forcing an ill-fitting attempt at “Filipinization” upon this Stephen Sondheim musical about a potpourri of classic fairy tale characters trapped in a sort of metaverse.

But then there was Bradshaw-Volante—along with her real-life husband Nyoy as the Baker and Teetin Villanueva as Little Red Riding Hood, three beacons of truthfulness in musical theater performance this year. All warmth and wit, Bradshaw-Volante’s turn was an exquisite distillation of Sondheim’s genius, proving that there’s nothing like homegrown Pinoy talent.

5. ‘Dagitab,’ ‘Quomodo Desolata Es?’, and the Filipino identity

In hindsight, it’s unsurprising that the year’s most genuinely profound and cerebral dissections of the Filipino identity came from Luarca, via his two new plays that premiered at the Ateneo.

Dagitab, which I caught during its transfer to the Power Mac Black Box Theater in Ayala Malls Circuit, used the avatars of two fictional Filipino academics to pick apart the ideas of love and forgiveness, devotion and revolution, as they pertain to a present shaped by the complacency and political failures of an entire, still-living generation. The play is about writers, sure—and the joys and pains that a life shaped around the written word entails. But, by the end, it had also posed the inescapable, rhetorical question: What is the point of all this writing when it shuns an honest reckoning with the ghosts of our past? In other words, how long can the comfortable middle class delude themselves into thinking they are fighting the noble fight and resisting the powers that be—when they can’t even let go of the bourgeois trappings of their daily lives? Playing the couple in the most spectacularly artless manner possible: Jojit Lorenzo and Agot Isidro, the latter making her long-overdue return to the stage after the previous decade’s Changing Partners and Rabbit Hole.

In August, I was invited to attend the final pre-opening rehearsal of Quomodo Desolata Es? Isang Dalamhati—Luarca and Jerry Respeto’s new translation and adaptation of Nick Joaquin’s A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino. In that state, the production was already ready to open—and what a show! “Joaquin was now both chronicler and prophet,” I wrote, a nod to how this adaptation laid bare the kinds of values that supposedly made, or un-made, a Filipino, by refracting our shared personhood through the lens of history. It was also, in my view, the year’s best-designed show, all of its creative elements working in wondrous harmony, evincing a confident, sensible understanding of so-called Filipino-ness.

A third play can be added to this list: Philippine Educational Theater Association’s Nobody Is Home, a return to form for the illustrious company—delightful as educational docu-theater, heartfelt as a tribute to overseas Filipino workers.

6. Two ‘small’ plays

I’m taking a leaf from my colleague Arturo Hilado here in celebrating what he terms “small theater”: the ones often sidelined by buzzier “mainstream” fare.

The first was Nelsito Gomez’s adaptation of the Greek tragedy Electra, officially titled Elecktra After Sophocles. Gomez is a busy, prolific, imaginative man who is clearly interested in asking big questions for the stage—he’s a blood relative to Luarca, in this sense. His Elecktra, the acting thesis production of lead performer Dippy Arceo, had the exact pulse of ancient, blood-drenched myth, even if written in today’s English: one of those plays that seemed intent on not letting the viewer breathe from start to end. Arceo was an electrifying Elecktra, and had formidable sparring partners in Dani Roque (Chrysothemis) and an appropriately intense Issa Litton (Clytemnestra).

On the opposite end of the emotional scale was Boxstage Manila’s Sala sa Pito—my favorite surprise of the year, if surprises mean that overwhelming desire to jump up from one’s seat in applause by curtain call. Directed by Dudz Teraña, this production of the late George de Jesus III’s adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde was the paragon of restraint and tonal control. It also starred three of my favorite flesh-and-blood creations of the year, from Yesh Burce, JP Estaras, and the sensational Karyl Oliva as a Bisaya bar girl who’s allergic to nonsense.

7. ‘Si Faust’

Gomez again, this time teaming up with Basti Artadi (of Wolfgang fame) to create what Emil Hofileña rightfully called “a thrilling, unholy marriage of theater and heavy metal.” The subject: the German playwright Goethe’s interpretation of the legend of Faust, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for all sorts of earthly gratification.

I confess to having been disoriented by the heavily stylized singing in this rock opera. However, once I got over that, it was indeed a most thrilling night at the theater—what Luarca described as “total theater,” a show animated so completely by a sense of “extreme theatricality,” and one that left you gobsmacked and “inexplicably shookt,” to use the Filipino slang. High drama, show-stopping vocals, knockout visuals, and a bewitching Maita Ponce as the devil Mephistopheles front and center.

8. Best singing of the year

Besides Ong’s You Will Be Loved, there’s Shaira Opsimar’s Halik ni Hudas in Si Faust (quite apt, for a show about the cosmic [mis]fortunes of mere mortals, that she hit a series of notes bordering on inhuman); and from the song cycle We Aren’t Kids Anymore, woven into a poetic, contemplative whole by director Rem Zamora for Barefoot Theatre Collaborative, Maronne Cruz’s Turn the Page and Gab Pangilinan’s Faking Cool.

9. The comedians of the year

Many would argue that comedy is a tougher skill to master. These six performers made it all look like a walk in the park: In Let’s Do Lunch, Ash Nicanor as a TikToker housemaid who may as well sideline as a party magician; in Ateng, Jason Barcial as a doltish, easily manipulated parlorista; in Shrek the Musical, Alfredo Reyes as Lord Farquaad (nuff said!) and Topper Fabregas as Donkey with a hypnotic, almost-robotic speech; in Gregoria Lakambini, Heart Puyong as the ultimate raketera ensemble player; in Delia D., John Lapus as drag mother to the story’s drag queens—a role without its solo musical moment, but which the actor nonetheless elevated to comic heights with the barest of noises.

10. Five technical standouts

Let me end this piece by saluting five of my favorite technical achievements of the year: One, Marco Viaña’s costumes for Gregoria Lakambini, which deserve to be walked on the brightest runways. Two, from that same musical, the song Buwan, Buwan—proper ear worm, hip, romantic, sexy. Three, Gabriel Ramos and Dexter Lansang’s original music and sound design for Via Dolorosa, the play itself a timely, impassioned, and erudite explication of the Palestinian question (or why the genocide in Gaza and the ever-increasing violence in the West Bank will never be a “complicated,” two-sided issue). Finally, Joyce Garcia’s projections for Si Faust and Bar Boys: The Musical, in both instances showcasing the expansive imaginative possibilities that this art form could take when given careful consideration.

In October, GA Fallarme, who essentially pioneered the field of theater projection design in the Philippines, passed away suddenly. Fallarme’s body of work included his Gawad Buhay-winning design for Pingkian: Isang Musikal—mind-tickling in its use of abstract images—as well as his blend of cityscapes for Repertory Philippines’ I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change. In Fallarme’s absence, it’s now up to Garcia and other designers like Steven Tansiongco, JM Jimenez, Bene Manaois, Teia Contreras, and Joee Mejias to ensure the art form continues to flourish and evolve in never-less-than exciting ways. Here’s to the ones who paved the way, and the promise of an exhilarating future!

Diarist Review: 'Shrek the Musical' by Full House Theater Company; 'Gregoria Lakambini' by Tanghalang Pilipino; 'Ateng' by Boy Abunda & RS Francisco; 'Sala sa Pito' by Boxstage Manila

 Last set of reviews for the year, in The Diarist--here!

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From Shrek to Sala sa Pito: All were worth the 'lagari'

The ensemble of Gregoria Lakambini at curtain call.

In the last five weeks, a little over 20 productions of varying sizes and persuasions have played Metro Manila’s disparate theater spaces, from the big, splashy musicals by professional companies to spare, one-act plays by university groups; from fully staged productions to bare-bones readings. Once again, it’s lagarì season for Metro Manila’s theater scene (the term connoting the impossible desire to saw off one’s body just to get to all the places it needs—or wants—to be).

What’s a theater aficionado to do, then, but run after these shows in successive weekends, especially since many had just two or three Friday-to-Saturday runs?

I’ve managed capsule appraisals of four shows I caught to conclude my 17th year of theater-going.

Shrek the Musical

Until Dec. 21, 2025.

The first song says it all: It’s a big bright beautiful world in Full House Theater Company’s production of this Broadway musical adapted from arguably the world’s most famous movie about an ogre.

Eleven years since it premiered in Manila care of the late Bobby Garcia and Atlantis Theatrical Entertainment Group, Shrek now finds new life in the hands of director Dexter Santos, the musical’s sense of spectacle and childish glee amped up to a thousand percent.

This is a full-blown children’s musical that knows exactly who its audience is—kids, first of all, and the kids-at-heart. But even the most clueless adult will find its theme park-inflected charms irresistible. The hardworking ensemble Santos has assembled never seems to run out of breath, and at times literally takes your breath away (Freak Flag, late in the second act, is quite the showstopper).

Notably, the production makes intelligent use of the cavernous space at the Newport Performing Arts Theater—something I’ve never seen done in the venue, and which I now wish more productions would consider. When Shrek (Jamie Wilson) journeys with newfound friend Donkey to rescue Princess Fiona from her dragon-guarded tower, the action spills into the audience: mascots and puppets galore embodying the forest and fairy tale creatures of the story. The whole thing doesn’t come across as a convenient gimmick; instead, it feels integral to the musical’s aims and true to the material’s spirit. What a sight to witness the young and old alike sit up with excitement as they momentarily become part of the show, so to speak. 

Lawyn Cruz’s set can be a bit clunky, though, especially when beheld up close (I was seated on the fourth row). And I do feel this production has sacrificed some of the original film’s wry humor, in exchange for a broader, easier landing. 

Thankfully, this production has Topper Fabregas and Alfredo Reyes, as Donkey and Lord Farquaad, respectively, summoning that exact brand of humor in ways that retain the original’s spirit without coming across as lazy duplicates. These are two of the year’s funniest performances onstage, from two actors who, to use the oft-intoned clause, make the roles truly their own (it’s imaginably even bigger of a challenge for Fabregas, who’s tackling a famously Black-coded part created by Eddie Murphy). And, as Princess Fiona, Krystal Kane continues to prove she’s one of local musical theater’s most exciting and dependable actresses, her first entrance alone a true-blue you-can’t-look-away moment. 

Gregoria Lakambini: A Pinay Pop Musical

Until Dec. 14, 2025.

If Tanghalang Pilipino (TP) wasn’t planning on making its own “Bayaniverse”—one that can plausibly rival filmmaker Jerrold Tarog’s cinematic trilogy on Antonio Luna, Gregorio del Pilar, and Manuel L. Quezon—the Cultural Center of the Philippines resident theater company nevertheless has one in its hands now.

After Mabining Mandirigma (which returns in March 2026) and Pingkian comes this latest musical, penned by Mabini playwright Nicanor Tiongson with Eljay Castro Deldoc—one of the smartest comedic writers working now—and set to music by Nica del Rosario and Matthew Chang.

One can’t be faulted for entering the theater thinking this is going to be a serious musical dramatizing the life of the titular character (Andres Bonifacio’s wife)—how else, after all, to tackle what Nick Joaquin calls this “question of heroes”?

What a breath of fresh air, then, the way this musical upends expectations (the subtitle should be clue enough). 

Gregoria Lakambini is irreverent meta-theater; an upsized town fiesta skit; kanal humor earning its rightful place in the annals of TP history. Gregoria, played by Marynor Madamesila as a Sarah Geronimo-adjacent heroine, is now the star of her own ersatz noontime variety show. And Del Rosario and Chang have composed quite the irresistible, pop-heavy score, laden with some truly gorgeous melodies and blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em, whip-smart lyrics (Buwan, Buwan is a proper earworm; a chart topper in another life!).

In general, the production directed by Delphine Buencamino comes across as a show that’s cognizant of what the material demands of it. Marco Viaña’s costumes are a standout, if only for those fierce jorts worn by ensemble member Sarah Monay. But as a self-professed “Pinay pop musical,” the dancing certainly still has room for more snap and sass, some more sharpness, some more confidence fit for the world’s biggest stages (the choreography by Buencamino and Jan Matthew Almodovar).

This musical is strongest when it’s just having a fun time—when it’s funny, it’s absolutely hilarious, but when it shifts to serious, trying-to-be-profound mode, you can feel the clock ticking. It’s effective less as solemn Hamilton, and way more as wacky It’s Showtime—at the heart of which is Heart Puyong, the surprise MVP of this production, juggling her multiple ensemble tracks with wicked comedic timing and, more importantly, a very Pinoy brand of pusò. 

 

Ateng

Closed Dec. 7, 2025.

It’s no secret that Vincent de Jesus is a terrific musical composer, but this play, returning 20 years since it premiered in the first ever Virgin Labfest, is testament to his skills as a comic playwright. 

The production directed by Rem Zamora was most successful in conveying the dark humor of this play about two parloristas and the manipulative boy toy one of them becomes entangled with. One hour zipped by; Zamora easily plunged the audience back to the mid-2000s, when gay marriage had just been legalized by a handful of countries in the West. The world back then was still a far cry from the relatively more tolerant society of today, though the play might as well have been set in the present, the struggles of its two parloristas only secondarily about quintessential gay and trans liberation—and primarily about the socioeconomic injustices inherent in gay politics in low-income Filipino communities.

As the elder parlorista, Thou Reyes tilted the production a bit too much towards mystery thriller; Reyes’ approach was defined almost purely by his sarcasm, half-muted anger, and deadpan humor, his shifts towards wistful—when the play changed gears every now and then to a fourth wall-breaking, introspective tone—curiously breaking the momentum, rather than organically heightening the drama. Reyes was far too intense (and also felt like he was always in a hurry to spew his caustic zingers), you never doubted he would actually kill his sibling’s boy toy (Dyas Adarlo)—that it struck me as a head-scratching, performative surprise when he didn’t. 

Still, I ended up buying this version of the play—and this version of Reyes’ character—largely thanks to De Jesus’ razor-sharp writing. And also because Reyes had Jason Barcial as a sparring partner, playing the younger, love-struck, doltish sibling. It’s Barcial who gave this play its pathos—a performance that evoked laughter and pity in equally distending proportions, and sometimes both at once.

The drag-club venue itself was somehow quite appropriate: With Ben Padero’s set convincingly replicating the interior of a financially challenged parlorista’s house, the production came across as a drag act that you watched from a remove, with two queens exchanging never-ending blows for our entertainment.

The ensemble of Sala sa Pito at curtain call.

Sala sa Pito

Closed Dec. 6.

Within the Manila theater scene, the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde is perhaps most recognizable in the form of the late Floy Quintos’ Laro. First produced in 2004, Quintos’ adaptation transposes Schnitzler’s 19th-century play about the sexual lives and moral conflicts of the Viennese to the contemporary Philippines of non-heterosexual urbanites. (A Barefoot Theatre Collaborative production of Laro won the best ensemble prize, as well as best director for John Mark Yap, in the 14th Gawad Buhay Awards in 2024.)

But, going by the recently concluded Boxstage Manila production, the late George de Jesus III’s take on Schnitzler’s play deserves to be held in just as much esteem. As a theater fanatic, I live for the small surprise—a newcomer stealing the spotlight, a new play hitting all the right notes, a fledgling company producing an unexpected hit. Sala sa Pito, though not at all a new play, unmistakably felt like such a surprise: a low-key knockout production that deserved to run longer and be seen by more people.

As with La Ronde, the main conceit of Sala sa Pito was that every scene’s a two-hander, with each of its characters daisy-chained to appear in the next scene with another. Save for one, De Jesus’ Filipinos were all ostensibly heterosexual. And, a genius, original touch: Love songs—hugot tunes, as we’d call them—served as transition devices, with the character of a wise-cracking omnipresent singer doubling as a kind of meta-narrator.

The result was a play that dissected those so-called matters of the heart with surgical precision, while cleverly using its characters’ small-scale conversations as avatars for larger debates on the ways Filipinos love, make love, and wrong the ones they love. An anniversary date between a husband with control issues and his battered wife became a canvas for examining the nature of gender-based violence; an unassuming meetup between that wife and her closeted gay friend became an honest confrontation of the unique societal pressures faced by gay men who haven’t come out to their families. In scene after scene, De Jesus cracked open the modern Filipino psyche: our most intimate and perverted problems laid bare.

For all of its 90 minutes, director Dudz Teraña’s production was the epitome of tonal control: always truthful and restrained, and never visibly settling for what in Tagalog could be described as “puwede na.” The use of lights and music seemed straightforward, but did wonders in propelling the play’s narrative and emotional trajectories.

Teraña and his stouthearted cast had relevant things to say, and they made darn sure the audience listened, and laughed and cried healthy amounts of tears along the way. The afternoon I caught this show, three performers easily proved themselves worthy of spots in the forthcoming year-end best-of-theater roundups: Yesh Burce, simply heartbreaking as the battered wife (and what a cinematic face!); JP Estaras, his feather-light take on the closeted gay friend admirably grounded and sincere; and the amazing Karyl Oliva, whose Bisaya bar girl with a comic streak and an aversion for beating around the bush was as fully flesh-and-blood a creation as any I’ve seen onstage this year—or any other year, in fact.

I count myself lucky to have witnessed Oliva run away with Teraña’s Bisaya monologue Proposal in 2019, during that year’s Saltik, a laboratory production of new one-act plays under the Far Eastern University Theater Guild. In Sala sa Pito, Oliva was the very definition of having an interior life; you just knew her bar girl had roamed the streets, fought her fair share of fights, dealt with her fair share of boys. Oliva commanded that stage with not a shred of vanity: She took your breath away, and made you want to jump from your seat and scream, “More!”