Diarist Review: 'miZZcast: Musical Theater Backwards' - The Pride Month Concert at Samsung Performing Arts Theater

In which I wage war with the silly Redditors and their silly anonymous accounts. The website version of this article here.

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miZZcast: Concert as massive, glorious karaoke session

Never bet against Poppert Bernadas and a musical theater ballad.

In miZZcast, the Pride Month concert held June 25, 2026 at Samsung Performing Arts Theater (SPAT), Circuit Makati, Bernadas was easily one of the night’s towering highlights.

The concert obviously took after Miscast, the annual gala in New York City produced by MCC Theater, where artists would sing songs from shows or roles (they think) they would never get to do in real life. In the 2016 concert, for example, Lea Salonga famously performed—for the first time in public since embarking on international career in 1989—Why, God, Why?, the big Act I solo traditionally sung by the character of Chris, Kim’s American GI lover, in Miss Saigon.

In Bernadas’ case in miZZcast, it felt like a sweet instance of artistic destiny—the perfect artist finding the perfect song—as the one-time The Voice of the Philippines contender sang Minsan ang Minahal ay Ako, that ode to the mercurial love-hate relationship between artists and their publics from the original Filipino musical Katy!.

It’s a performance I’ll be thinking about for quite some time: Bernadas was wholly vulnerable, steeped in so much emotional texture, and utterly without pretense, opening the theater to a rare moment of unadulterated communion between audience and performer. You not only understood what that song was about, but felt its profound strains of yearning and hope and (self-)acceptance ripple through your very bones.

When Bernadas sang—with pristine technique, no less—“At kung ako ay malimutan/kahit sa awit ko man lamang/iyo sanang matandaan/bago tuluyang lumisan/na minsan ang minahal ay ako,” it was both an aching plea to be remembered and a howling defiance of a culture of amnesia, in which artists are supposed to be only ever as good and as memorable as their last works.

As if the song itself weren’t enough of a tearjerker already, those four-and-a-half minutes onstage were made all the more poignant by Bernadas dedicating his rendition to the late Floy Quintos, in whose 2014 musical, Ang Huling Lagda ni Apolinario Mabini, he once set the Dulaang Unibersidad ng Pilipinas stage ablaze as the political firebrand Artemio Ricarte. With Minsan ang Minahal ay Ako, Bernadas not only spoke for artists in general—as the piece itself demands—but more specifically invoked the memory of Quintos and other giants of Philippine theater who helped shape the thriving Manila scene we now enjoy today, but whom large swaths of the new, post-pandemic generation of theater-goers may no longer readily recognize.

That last bit requires further consideration. Subtitled Musical Theater Backwards, the concert was a free event, ticketed only for seating purposes—evidently part of ongoing efforts in Makati City to cultivate greater interest in the arts and encourage attendance, especially among younger demographics. It follows in the vein of last February’s open-admission, open-air production of Twelfth Night under the Shakespeare in the Park initiative—yet another endeavor, by the way, inspired by a similarly named program in New York.

If anything, miZZcast highlighted generational gaps in the theater today—some of which I hadn’t thought about. It was obvious, for starters, from the critical perspective: how the stage veterans, so to speak, really stood out and nailed their parts with professional polish.

Directed by Nelsito Gomez and Sarah Facuri, with musical direction by Farley Asuncion, the concert was overall a fun night at the theater—make no mistake about it—but it was also dotted with flubbed notes and other regrettable slips (including an entirely missed lyric at one point during the ensemble finale).

It was, in other words, the concert as massive karaoke session, and I mean that as a compliment. Here, I feel a certain societal responsibility to cement on the public record how Benedix Ramos came clean after bungling an entire section of Aegis’ Basang-Basa sa Ulan, confessing that he desperately needed to pee already (the hilarious sight of Ramos scurrying offstage while the performances continued has since been playing on loop in my brain).

 

It also meant, though, that the likes of Bernadas, Carla Guevara Laforteza, Bituin Escalante, and Floyd Tena stood out simply for delivering spotless performances from start to end. In stunning all-white, Guevara Laforteza even presided over a literal offertory scene, rocking out unironically to Gethsemane from Jesus Christ Superstar as donation buckets were passed around the theater for the evening’s beneficiaries (LoveYourself and the Philippine LGBT Chamber of Commerce).

More interesting, however, was the generational gap signaled by which songs most of the GenZ and Gen Alpha audiences immediately and excitedly identified from their opening chords—and which were met with tentative, searching silence.

For example, Omar Uddin’s Satisfied (from Hamilton) was a rager from start to finish, the crowd assigned ensemble-track duties and roaring with dissonant gusto.

Bombading’s The Music and the Mirror, Jillian Itaas’ Giants in the Sky, and Ramos and Jordan Andrews’ I Wanna Go Back—from A Chorus Line, Into the Woods, and The Notebook, respectively—received enthusiastic recognition from viewers presumably groomed under the post-COVID ascendancy of Theatre Group Asia, which by September will have staged all three Broadway musicals at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater.

In contrast, Escalante’s The Impossible Dream—a full-course meal in itself, and an impossible-to-top, triumphant ending to the night—was met, as its opening chords rang out, by confusion from the girls behind me, one of whom quietly asked, “Is that The Prayer?”

Floyd Tena’s full-on torch-song diva moment with Losing My Mind from Stephen Sondheim’s Follies was worthy of its own standalone album, but it, too, had the kids somewhat lost. Ditto Bernadas and the Katy! anthem.

Still, knowledge of musical theater, like performance technique, can be swiftly remedied and enriched with enough time.

It’s the third form of generational gap that, quite frankly, left me disturbed as I exited the theater. For reasons that evade my millennial comprehension, kids nowadays—and I’m using “kids” here in the generalizing sense—have become incapable of letting a song finish or seeing a final, sustained note through without bursting into rowdy applause. Imagine Escalante’s The Impossible Dream, Bernadas’ Minsan ang Minahal ay Ako, even Lance Reblando’s I’ll Cover You (Reprise) from Rent—all met with the same unfortunate end of having their final bars drowned out by a rabid crowd.

For lack of more polite terms, it is juvenile and tiresome. I suspect this has to do with kids being unable to sit through something so emotionally complicated as a Broadway ballad done well; of them being uncomfortable with confronting their feelings, or at least sitting with those feelings on their own in silence—hence this impulse to shout, holler, hoot, and make vocal that which apparently cannot be contained anymore. Did they not grow up in the Philippines? Have they never heard a fantastic big note served to perfection in their lives?

Should this article find its way to Reddit, I expect the kids over there will skewer me for trampling over their supposed rights to, I don’t know, self-expression. But I actually hope this piece finds its way into that wilderness of anonymous accounts. Because there’s a firm difference between expressing your emotions loudly—and expressing your emotions while still giving the artists you claim to love the respect they deserve.

Going feral way before the song ends only shows you actually don’t care enough to listen to that artist finish the song in its glorious entirety. In fact, it’s not just disrespectful and disruptive; it’s downright narcissistic.

But enough about these silly kids, who still have lots of rice to eat, to translate that Filipino idiom: miZZcast is a welcome addition to the vibrant landscape, and one I hope will become a yearly thing, if those hysterical reactions were anything to go by.

After all, in the face of such greatness as Bernadas’ Minsan ang Minahal ay Ako or Escalante’s The Impossible Dream, what can one do, really, but scream mindlessly?

Diarist Review: 'Yemaya' by 9 Works Theatrical

Finally, some good food from 9 Works! The website version here.

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Yemaya: Ravishing and intelligent

Curtain call at Yemaya, with Tommy Alejandrino in blue atop the prop boat.

There isn’t a moment in Yemaya that feels like it hasn’t been meticulously thought through. The latest offering from 9 Works Theatrical—and undoubtedly the company’s best work since the pandemic—it uses Eljay Castro Deldoc’s new Filipino translation of Quiara Alegría Hudes’ Yemaya’s Belly from over two decades ago. The play has all the qualities of good poetry; the production helmed by Ed Lacson Jr. conjures that poetry into incandescent, almost numinous life.

Hudes’ original play is a Latino Bildungsroman set against the American dream: An impoverished boy from the Cuban hinterlands travels to the big city, learns of the vast country across the sea, then sets his sights on meeting the big man in the White House. And because this is about the American dream, he naturally loses some of those most dear to him, as is the customary fate of those who reach for the self-touted land of liberty. The United States giveth not, and the United States taketh away.

Not too long ago, the news was filled with images of migrants and refugees crammed into unsafe, overcrowded boats trying to land on European shores; of Black and Brown bodies from capsized vessels floating helplessly in the Mediterranean. Now, across the Atlantic, something slightly dissimilar, but no less horrific, has been unfolding in the era of Donald Trump’s ICE. One can only imagine what awaits Yemaya’s protagonist at the end of his journey, were he to complete it today. For better or for worse, the play never gets to that point.

That’s as much of the plot as I’m comfortable divulging. And, anyway, who needs humdrum, racist America when you have the kind of world Lacson and his creative team have imagined in The Black Box at the Proscenium Theater—one so attuned to local culture and bursting with intoxicating life, yet constantly teetering on the brink of the dangerous and fantastical, in keeping with the play’s magical realist bent. Wherever exactly this world is, you can almost touch the stalks of dried grass, feel the scorching sun and cool night, lose yourself in the lights and noise and slow chaos of a town in perpetual decline.

First between different locations on land, then eventually on water, the story of Yemaya not so much unfolds as meanders, echoing how its protagonist moves through life deliberately without what modern, urban audiences might label “direction.” Its hero, Jesus (alias Mulo), endures several departures before the final, most consequential one, weaving in and out of the lives of his worldlier uncle, a coconut vendor, a shopkeeper, and the girl who draws him to the sea. In this meandering, the play forces the viewer to really sit with it—to live in its prolonged pauses and its uncomfortable silences: to be in communion with Jesus himself, see the world at both its most exhilarating and its most barren, and hopefully arrive at the realization that the American dream, in all its myriad permutations, will always find a way to kill you. Patience has rarely been more of a virtue.

And how it rewards the patient viewer with scenes of phantasmagoric beauty, each as visually stunning and sonically intricate as they are suffused with pure emotion. A simple game of dominoes becomes a balletic dance lit like a fiery hallucination. A countryside inferno leaves behind only a corpse wrapped in a blanket, the fact of death creeping in like an epiphany slowly breaking the stillness. The hero’s brief descent into the underworld ignites a horror-house carnival onstage. And—in what may very well qualify as the pinnacle of theater design for the year—a storm in the middle of the sea approximates Turner or Rembrandt turned tropical. (Truly, lighting designer Jethro Nibaten and sound designer Teresa Barrozo are a match made in heaven.)

If anything, this is why Manila theater needs a show like Yemaya: It is the farthest from a straightforward crowd-pleaser, or a big musical, or one of those flashy productions that move from scene to scene as if high on heroin. In an age of endless social media scrolling, when audiences just jump from one reel to the next, consuming only content that’s shorter than a minute, and increasingly rendered incapable of devoting time and attention to long-form writing and “difficult” art, Yemaya is a balm—a welcome what-if, an invitation to once again take up the skill of thinking and return to a more literate existence.

When I saw the play during its first preview, Tommy Alejandrino played Jesus. I’d only ever seen Alejandrino in the movies—in the gay odyssey Some Nights I Feel Like Walking (2024) and, more notably, as the lead of The Baseball Player (2022), for which he won Best Actor at Cinemalaya. In Yemaya, Alejandrino cuts an exciting, electrifying presence—a Peter Pan-esque hero hardly equipped to confront life itself, yet seemingly oblivious to the very concept of misfortune in the way he charges into the unknown with a bravery that borders on recklessness. Orbiting Alejandrino is a uniformly excellent ensemble, which includes Ness Roque (as the girl Maya), Herbie Go (as the coconut vendor Tico), and Anthony Falcon, who plays Jesus’ uncle with such convincing earthiness that he seems less a fictional character than someone you might pass in a dank alley or along a dimly lit street, whether in Cuba or Cubao. That right there is one of our great character actors back onstage at long last.

Only a preview then, Yemaya was already more than ready to open. I can only imagine how good it must be now, halfway into its four-weekend run. It’s an absolute stunner from start to end, and as ravishing and intelligent a piece of theater as we’re likely to see this year.

Diarist Review: Virgin Labfest 21

Back at it again after... six years?! The website version here.

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Virgin Labfest 21: Best play—'Elehiya' by Dustin Celestino

The men of Elehiya at curtain call.

The best play in this year’s Virgin Labfest was not written by a virgin playwright. That’s hardly a surprise, of course: The point of the festival, as its famous slogan proclaims, is the presentation of “untried” and “untested” material, regardless of the author’s career stage. Once upon a time, even the late Floy Quintos and the festival’s founding artistic director Rody Vera appeared in the lineup with their latest, unproduced works.

It just so happens that, in the Labfest’s 21st edition (concluding June 28 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines Complex), the gulf between the most accomplished works and the weaker offerings feels especially vast.

Elehiya

That best play is Elehiya by Dustin Celestino. 

Over the past decade, Celestino has made a career out of “scrutinizing machismo and Filipino patriarchy,” to quote Gibbs Cadiz, counting in his body of work the Labfest entries Mga Eksena sa Buhay ng Kontrabida (2018), Fermata (2022), and Ang Munting Liwanag sa Madilim na Sulok ng Isang Serbeserya sa Maynila (2024).

I missed Fermata; Eksena was a prescient examination of the unfounded “othering” endured by people accused of using drugs, even within their own families, arriving just two years into Duterte’s drug war.

Ang Munting Liwanag… felt like the saddest—but also the most fun—we’ve had of late in unpacking, understanding, and satirizing that rather elusive creature known as the modern DOM (or dirty old man).

And among his films, Habang Nilalamon ng Hydra ang Kasaysayan, recently released nationwide after a festival run in the 2025 Cinemalaya, stands out as the must-see entry.

Elehiya is easily Celestino’s most refined work to date. In brief, it’s a tale about men—distinctly Filipino men—and how generational notions of masculinity manifest in the smallest and most seemingly insignificant ways in their lives, tainting their relationships until the proverbial rot becomes too deep to undo.

If that summary sounds like a SparkNotes excerpt, it’s only in keeping with the play’s sensibilities: As the title suggests, Elehiya is a literal elegy, mourning the what-could-have-beens in two interconnected father-and-son stories, one situated slightly higher up the socioeconomic spectrum with all its concomitant stereotypical patterns of toxicity. Pushing the concept further, the play is written in the epistolary and confessional mode, composed by the sons to their unhearing fathers.

Though it sounds like an idea that GenZ would dismiss as “cringe,” the whole thing—not least the epistolary device—just works really, really well. The production helmed by Ron Capinding completely gives justice to Celestino’s method and style, the director summoning the playwright’s vision to elegant, psychologically incisive life. I’ve never been this invested in listening to brusko Pinoy men talk about themselves and their problems.

Therein lies the play’s genius: It transforms the exhausting banality of mansplaining into art—into theater. One son spills it all in a letter, another rants to his shrink, but in both stories, careening between hurtful past and hurting present, these men can only ever be honest to the void occupied by the audience. They bare it all, except to themselves and those most dear to their lives. The cold truth becomes a gift they ironically withhold from their loved ones.

Extending the metaphors further, designer Mark Lorenz situates the cast within a spare, brutalist set made of what looks like slabs of stone, while Monica Sebial and Sam Quizon dress the actors in Bilibid orange, as if these tormented inmates had wandered into an ancient altar of sorts, ready at long last to offer up their most sacred parts for strangers to partake of.

There’s hardly a shred of artifice in the ensemble Capinding has assembled—without a doubt, this festival’s strongest: Dennis Marasigan and Carlos Siguion-Reyna as the fathers, John Sanchez and Carlos’ real-life son Rafa as their progeny, with an exceptional Yan Yuzon as the narrator (a closing monologue has never landed this hard).

Onstage, these men fold years of muffled pain and heartbreak into 45 minutes of epiphany and liberation, ultimately culminating in something that must feel like catharsis. It may all be fiction, but the sound of quiet sobbing filling the theater by curtain call tells a completely different story—one that I suspect speaks more broadly to the familial intimacies of many Filipinos.

Patayin ang mga Surot

The other accomplished entry in this year’s Labfest is Floyd Scott Tiogangco’s Patayin ang mga Surot, directed with an unrelenting chop-chop rhythm by Lhorvie Nuevo-Tadioan.

I first encountered Tiogangco in 2020, during the festival’s unfortunate (and hopefully one-off) venture into Zoom theater at the height of the COVID lockdowns. Of the nine plays that year that were forcibly and prematurely converted into creatures of the screen, Tiogangco’s Pilot Episode was the most successful—“a brilliant explication of mental illness… compassionate in its portrayal of the cycle of helplessness that hounds not just the patient, but also the patient’s loved ones, to an almost normalized degree,” I wrote back then. That play had great help transitioning to the screen from director Giancarlo Abrahan, and starred a terrific, heartrending Phi Palmos as the protagonist living with bipolar disorder.

Tiogangco returns to the Labfest with a compelling addition to the works of art chronicling and psychoanalyzing the Duterte years—in this instance, that nightmarish, kismet-like juncture when the Philippines was about to transition from one despicable first family to another (in other words, the final night of Duterte’s presidency).

We find ourselves in the ramshackle dwelling of a couple waiting for their son to come home for his birthday celebration. The husband/father was recently released from jail on drug-related charges; the wife/mother is so, so thankful to Tatay Digong for the drug war that, in her view, brought a lot of good to the country.

As a medical anthropologist, I’ve spent a good amount of time studying Duterte’s anti-drug and anti-poor crusade, alongside colleagues such as Gideon Lasco, Jayeel Cornelio, Mary Racelis, Ica Fernandez, and Lee Yarcia. Patayin ang mga Surot is the first play I’ve watched that doesn’t feel the least bit strained in its explication of the drug war’s divisive impact on the communities, as if it had immersed itself in the academic literature and churned out a readily intelligible distillation of lived reality.

This is literally Japanese scholar Wataru Kusaka’s work on how certain poor communities managed—against confounding odds—to justify and even champion the drug war that was decimating their own.

Nuevo-Tadioan’s production is very, very funny—and also properly dirty (you can almost smell the sour stink of sweat, and feel the grime and humidity clinging to your skin)—with a laugh-a-minute star turn from Donna Cariaga as the pro-Duterte mother. If there’s one negative criticism to level against the play, though, it’s that it ends in the kind of tragedy that might feel inevitable for drug-war stories, but is in actuality rather unnecessary, and even self-defeating.

The 10 other plays

After Elehiya and Patayin ang mga Surot, Ron Evangelista’s She’s Electric is my distant third favorite. The play is the latest to ponder the question of artificial intelligence—specifically, that iffy, no-man’s-land scenario in which a real person falls in love with a robot.

Hollywood movies like Her and Ex Machina have long dealt with this what-if, of course, but what’s genuinely interesting about She’s Electric is how it situates that scenario within a modern Filipino context—and hurls all the thorny questions back at its own characters.

Notably, the play features the theatrical debuts of director JP Habac and actress Glaiza De Castro—who is terrific as the star of the films Sleepless (2015) and Liway (2018), but in this play, proves herself just as confident and commanding onstage.

As for the nine other festival entries: Lualhati, written by Gab Mactal (one of the translators of Tanghalang Ateneo’s triumphant Emilia last April), is a sapphic love story between two nuns, one of whom decides to pursue a life beyond the convent. The play touches on many familiar themes—faith, sexuality, and the messy, all-too-human in-betweens—but the writing and staging both somehow lack that sharp, edgy bite and sense of worldliness that would render the arguments thoroughly convincing.

The bright side: The production directed by Mara Marasigan has given us back Bea Garcia, who single-handedly supercharges the proceedings into life as the nun who “stays” (remember Garcia as Natalie in Atlantis’ Next to Normal?)

Elijah Felice Rosales’ Human Rights Story of the Year takes a jab at pat-on-the-back celebrity journalists (pun unintended, if you can spot it) and the murky ethical crossroads they might find themselves in, to the tune of award-winning drug war stories. But somewhere along the way, the play devolves into a tinnitus-inducing affair, its two characters (both writers) reduced to mouthpieces locked in a diva-off and sounding like, well, arguments strung together on sheets of paper. (The night I saw this production directed by Nelsito Gomez, the acting was rather stilted.)

Anthony Kim Vergara’s Password 123, Pilipinas 321 is a much-needed, radical dive into the world of big-time Pinoy scam operations, but it’s simply begging to be turned into an investigative essay (as a play, it seems way more interested in spewing kilometric facts and revelations, than in actual, human people).

Taksyapo!, written by comedian John Lapus, is nothing more than a fun time in the theater, to paraphrase Emil Hofileña—“a gay man and a carnival booth vendor throw plates at a wall” is really all there is to it—but it can also be aimless and, in the most counterproductive sense, matapobre (there are digs at laborers and people who use drugs that aren’t as funny as the writer may have thought.)

Faith Ferrer Lacanlale’s Betamax gets lost with the ostensibly fun concept of “woman starts seeing people with pig body parts,” but at least it proves that Jam Binay really is one of the funniest actresses working now.

Jerom Canlas’ Footprint, based on real events in the author’s life, is drowned out by Mikko Angeles’ manic, tech-addled direction, as well as bloated performances that sap the play of its honesty and emotional power (save for Elijah Canlas’—his unembellished turn as the grief-stricken protagonist is one of the festival’s most affecting).

Nik Azcuna’s Balos plunges the viewer right smack into a hospital during the foggy first day of the 2017 Siege of Marawi, but its singular focus on what I can only describe as Medical Ethics 101 debates unfortunately leaves the thornier and more interesting aspects of being a physician in that part of the country, during that specific period, underdeveloped. In a similar vein, Alab Usman’s Haram tries to patch together three snippets exploring Muslim queerness, but the result still feels largely elementary, if not contrived.

And Gerald Manuel’s Buhaghag, an otherwise straightforward and inventive anthropomorphism of depression, gets stuck rather quickly in the mental quicksand of its own invention (and has apparently mystified many a Boomer and Gen X-er).

Nevertheless, it’s heartening to look at the list of this year’s entries and find more unfamiliar names than familiar ones among the roster of playwrights. The Labfest may be about the material—but it’s also just as much about “untried,” “untested,” and especially “unstaged” writers: about discovering new names and providing a platform for new talent, especially for voices from beyond Metro Manila. I’ve droned on and on about the need for a more inclusive, expansive, and democratic theater landscape—and having the likes of Azcuna and Usman in this festival is, in fact, one concrete step toward realizing that goal.

And an even more encouraging development: For the first time since its inception, the Labfest is running for four weeks—and the performances have almost always played to full houses; it was packed every time I attended in its second week. Gone are the days when we had to make do with the puny provisions of the Tanghalang Huseng Batute. I don’t doubt that the growing involvement of celebrities like Lapus, De Castro, and Canlas, not to mention Angel Aquino in Lualhati, is a major factor driving this continuing surge in interest. Whatever the other reasons, one can only hope the festival sustains this momentum and attracts ever bigger audiences, cementing its place as a kind of annual pilgrimage in the theater calendar. 

TheaterFansManila Review: 'Pasiya' ('Every Male or Female'; 'People v. Dela Cruz') by The Corner Studio

My third guest review for TFM--the website version here!

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'Pasiya' tackles the law, but doesn't sustain its case

Curtain call after Every Male or Female.

Although Pasiya seems, on the surface, to be preoccupied with law, its main interest clearly lies in history. Or, to be more precise, in situating law within moments of historical rupture—whether real or imagined—and recasting them as moments of melodrama.

 

The latest offering from The Corner Studio, Pasiya is a twin bill of one-act plays: the first, a new work titled Every Male or Female, and the second, the returning People v. Dela Cruz, which made its premiere in January this year. Both are penned and directed by Eldrin Veloso, who also acts in the second.

In both plays, Veloso places the audience in a sort of fork-in-the-road situation, in a time framed as historically significant and therefore necessarily imbued with the weight and gravity of such a temporal juncture. Then he zooms in on the human element, imagining how ordinary people come to terms with that juncture: How does one grapple with a time preordained as important?

To go by Veloso’s characters, there’s never a more perfect moment to be small and subsumed by the fallibility of human emotion. 

Every Male or Female

Of the two, Every Male or Female is evidently the more successful work. Set on the day of the 1935 constitutional plebiscite, which eventually ratified the new Constitution and established the Philippine Commonwealth, the play dangles a lose-lose situation to its three women characters: Voting yes in the plebiscite will bring the country one step closer toward independence, but it might also mean losing their hard-won right of suffrage as women under a largely Pinoy-run Commonwealth (which was exactly what happened at the start of that era); voting no, or not voting at all, will preserve their right of suffrage—but keep them shackled as subjects of America. 

The play is a breezy 30 minutes—and in that half-hour span, a lunchtime gathering predictably, and deliciously, devolves into chaos. Veloso uses his three characters as avatars for conflicting—but no less valid—points of view, all of which bring the present-day audience closer to understanding the fears and anxieties that women at the time might have harbored. Hilda (Rain de Jesus) is a staunch non-voter; Esperanza (Althea Aruta) is a sunny yes vote; and caught in between are the elder Pacita (Carla Martinez) and Hilda’s daughter Felisa (Vea Noroña), who has a new suitor. (That the presence of this suitor in their lives inevitably influences the characters’ stances should go without saying.) 

To a certain extent, the play succeeds in evoking a harmonious look and feel—the 1930s rendered intentionally anachronistic through occasional contemporary slips in language and the acting styles of its ensemble, in a way portending the slow, winding road to genuine progress in women’s rights. De Jesus, in particular, can be quite gripping in her best moments: a visibly modern woman paradoxically chained to the past.

On the whole, however, the play still feels too loose to be truly compelling drama: more a surprisingly effective first stab at the material than a cohesive work of art. It has many things to say, a lot of them meaningful, but it’s still working toward becoming the best speaker in the room. 

People v. Dela Cruz

This looseness in theater-making is even more glaring in the second, and longer, play. Whereas Every Male or Female casts its gaze toward the past, People v. Dela Cruz looks to the future, imagining a Philippines with a jury system. The story itself is set in the backroom discussions of the country’s first jury trial deliberations, revolving around a case of Duterte-style nanlaban that makes the play seem as though it were unfolding in the present.

Judging by TheaterFansManila.com editor-in-chief Nikki Francisco’s review of the original run, little has changed in the play. It’s still Veloso “staging a room full of people he clearly doesn’t think could jury a case… and letting them confirm his suspicion.” In fact, the existence of the jury is only a device; the real priority of this play lies in corralling a group of problematic individuals, each with their own stereotypical quirks and assigned issues, and watching them explode in this pressure-cooker scenario. 

Francisco describes the play as “headed for a mistrial,” but to my mind, it’s already a mistrial from the start—the point being the gradual uncovering of the loud, wearying whys over the course of an hour. That resort to comfortable narrative predictability unfortunately proves to be the play’s fatal flaw.

The Corner Studio and ‘small’ theater

Hopefully, neither play—particularly the second—represents its definitive version. The productions themselves are also staged with the kind of spareness that detracts from the world-building—not so much a lack of design as a distracting absence in areas where it is most needed (for instance, sound). 

But there’s also something meaningful to be gleaned from this spareness: Pasiya is staged in a space that was obviously not intended to be a theater. The venue is a mixed-use site serving other purposes during the day, an office or function room and shelves housing interior-design bric-a-brac. And the production company itself has been staging theater for only two years, this twin bill being its third offering.    

If anything, this scrappy, DIY-coded brand of ‘small’ theater is not only a welcome antidote, but an indispensable complement, to the mainstream, with its flashy venues and splashy production values. Here, The Corner Studio has much in common with the likes of Artist Playground, Mad Child Productions, Scene Change, and Company of Actors in Streamlined Theatre—for whom experimentation is not treated as a gamble to be altogether avoided, and testing new material is second nature. 

In a landscape constantly pulled between the imperative to make consequential theater and the practical need to make, well, money, these small companies have never been more essential—almost an existential lifeline, to be honest, if only for the kind of liberating spaces they afford artists.

In this sense, at least, one can deliver a fairly firm verdict on Pasiya.