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.

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'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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Diarist Feature: 16th Gawad Buhay Awards

Fun night! Website version here.  

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16th Gawad Buhay Awards: 'Hindi tayo kayang tapatan, palitan ng kahit anumang AI'

Several statistical milestones marked this year’s Gawad Buhay, the annual awards for theater handed out by Philstage to celebrate the best achievements among its member companies’ productions staged the previous year.

In the 16th ceremonies held July 28, 2026 at Aliw Theater, Pasay City, Tanghalang Pilipino’s (TP) Kisapmata became the first in the awards history to make a clean sweep of the production, direction, writing, ensemble performance, and all four individual acting categories.

Only two other productions had swept the individual acting awards, but neither won for ensemble performance. Repertory Philippines’ (Rep) Sweeney Todd dominated the musical acting categories in the 2nd Gawad Buhay, with Audie Gemora and Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo taking the trophies for lead performance, and Marvin Ong and Liesl Batucan winning for featured performance. The ensemble award for a musical was shared by Ismail at Isabel and Si Juan Tamad, ang Diyablo, at ang Limang Milyong Boto, both staged by Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA).

In the fifth ceremonies three years later, PETA’s Bona—adapted by Layeta Bucoy from the 1980 Lino Brocka classic—saw the acting quartet of Eugene Domingo, Edgar Allan Guzman, Olive Nieto, and Juliene Mendoza snagging their first Gawad Buhays; Outstanding Ensemble Performance for a Play went to TP’s Walang Kukurap, also penned by Bucoy.

Two of Kisapmata’s designers also set records. Joey Mendoza nabbed his third trophy for set design—having won for Rep’s Agnes of God and Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s The Last Five Years—and now ties Mio Infante’s trophy haul in that category. Infante was honored for Trumpets’ The Bluebird of Happiness, PETA’s Rak of Aegis, and 9 Works Theatrical’s American Idiot.

Third trophy

Likewise, Arvy Dimaculangan—a previous winner for The Sandbox Collective’s Every Brilliant Thing and TP’s Nekropolis—bagged his third trophy for sound design, matching Jethro Joaquin’s record. Joaquin’s wins were all for Rep productions: Hamlet, Equus, and Agnes of God; only TJ Ramos has more, with four, for Ballet Philippines’ Encantada, and TP’s Stageshow, Der Kaufmann: Ang Negosyante ng Venecia, and Mabining Mandirigma.

Kisapmata also earned the multi-hyphenate Guelan Varela-Luarca two new Gawad Buhays—one for directing, another for writing—complementing his previous wins for directing TP’s Batang Mujahideen and writing the scripts of Coriolano and Nekropolis for the same company. This year, Varela-Luarca shared the victory for Outstanding Translation or Adaptation with the TP Actors Company (AC), who co-devised the critically acclaimed screen-to-stage transposition of Mike de Leon’s 1981 film about a household seemingly unable to escape the authoritarian spell of its ex-cop patriarch.

Varela-Luarca’s double win that night also made him the third person in awards history to be recognized for directing and writing the same work: His predecessors are Rody Vera, who refashioned Rolando Tinio’s Filipino translation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice into Der Kaufmann, and co-directed that TP production with Tuxqs Rutaquio in 2013; and Chris Millado, who directed Balete for TP and co-devised the script with Vera, dramaturge Sabrina Basilio, choreographer Delphine Buencamino, and the TP AC in 2024.

For musicals, Pat Valera won for his book and direction of Dekada ’70—based on Lualhati Bautista’s novel—in the 13th ceremonies, while sharing Outstanding Original Score with William Elvin Manzano for a different work: Mula sa Buwan.

Kisapmata’s four-person cast consisted of the senior TP AC members affectionately referred to as the “fearsome foursome.” Playing the pregnant daughter Mila, Toni Go-Yadao won her second consecutive Female Featured Performance in a Play award, having won last year for Balete. She also became the first actress to win the category twice.

Marco Viaña, who essayed the role of Mila’s fiancé, was similarly a back-to-back winner for Male Featured Performance in a Play, having won that category last year for Balete. Counting his first trophy for TP’s Ang Pag-uusig—Jerry Respeto’s Filipino translation of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible—Viaña is now the most awarded actor in that category. Most notably, this latest accomplishment marked his fifth trophy overall—he also won Male Lead Performance in a Play for TP’s Katsuri in the 12th ceremonies, and shared Outstanding Costume Design with Paw Castillo for TP’s Sandosenang Sapatos in the 14th.

Thanks to Kisapmata, Viaña and Varela-Luarca now belong to an elite company of theater artists—alongside Millado, Ramos, and lighting designer John Batalla—with five competitive Gawad Buhays. Only four others have more: Vera remains the record holder with 11 trophies, while Vincent de Jesus, Cris Villonco, and Myke Salomon have six apiece. Salomon won his sixth trophy this year for his musical direction of Barefoot’s We Aren’t Kids Anymore—an honor he shared with first-time nominee and winner Farley Asuncion—and is the most awarded person in that category, having previously triumphed for the jukebox musicals Rak of Aegis, 3 Stars and a Sun, and  Ang Huling El Bimbo.

Inarguably, the most meaningful win of the night belonged to Jonathan Tadioan, who took home Male Lead Performance in a Play for portraying Kisapmata’s tyrannical patriarch Dadong. Tadioan’s win was long overdue: This was already his 14th acting nomination and 15th overall (he was nominated two years ago for directing Sandosenang Sapatos). No other individual had amassed as many nominations without winning. Think Peter O’Toole and Glenn Close at the Oscars.

Tadioan’s nominations also represented nearly two decades of consistently acclaimed work with TP and the Cultural Center of the Philippines. His first for lead actor was for the Virgin Labfest play Pamantasang Hirang, back when the festival entries were still considered for the awards during the 1st ceremonies. The 13 other acting nominations that followed included his convincing turn—at 29 years old!—as Arthur Miller’s 63-year-old Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, now Pahimakas sa Isang Ahente by Tinio, in 2014; and Mitch in Flores Para Los Muertos—Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire in Filipino—in 2009.

Anti-climactic

How anti-climactic, then, that Tadioan wasn’t physically present for his much-awaited victory—made even sweeter by the fact that he won alongside his wife, Lhorvie Nuevo-Tadioan, who took home Outstanding Lead Actress in a Play (and her second trophy overall, following her featured turn in Batang Mujahideen).

Yet, this absence was also an apt reminder of what the filmmaker David Fincher once said: Awards are just icing on the cake. It’s the work—in other words, creating meaningful art—that matters more.

Among TP’s fearsome foursome, only Go-Yadao was present during awards night; the Tadioan couple and Viaña, with Varela-Luarca, were in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, representing the Philippines in the 2026 Asian Playwrights Meeting. Numerous representatives thus took turns trooping to the stage to accept Kisapmata’s 11 wins—the most by any production—though Tadioan still managed to “personally” accept his award via live phone call.

“Magkita-kita tayo lahat diyan pagbalik namin!” Tadioan said, his voice filtering through a phone held to the microphone by TP production manager Chi Navarra.

In a way, the highly informal manner in which Tadioan accepted his award was entirely in keeping with the atmosphere Gawad Buhay has cultivated over the years. Writing on Facebook two years ago, critic and founding awards juror Gibbs Cadiz mused that, while he once imagined Gawad Buhay to be “like the Tonys, where theater people dressed up and came in their glitzy best on the biggest night in their honor,” he now completely understood “the laidback, chummy, casual vibe that has come to define” awards night, which is “more in line with the spirit of community and camaraderie—more than competition”—that Gawad Buhay has “aimed for from the beginning.”

Chill homecoming

Indeed, this year’s ceremonies felt closer to a chill homecoming than to those fancy, splashy televised awards shows, though a humble red carpet still welcomed attendees who braved the monsoon rains and flooded streets of Metro Manila. (To this end, I must say the Aliw Theater felt too cavernous for this ersatz homecoming, with the attendees scattered all over; I much preferred the more compact offerings of, say, the PETA Theater Center from the 2023 ceremonies.)

The evening’s most memorable segments likewise unfolded with a similar mood. Topper Fabregas, who played the iconic Donkey in Full House Theater Company’s Shrek the Musical and won Male Featured Performance in a Musical, was visibly surprised that he won, a bewildered expression stuck to his face the entire time he made his way to the stage.

Shiela Valderrama, Gawad Buhay winner for Philippine Opera Company’s Passion, and her daughter Simone were both in terrific voice as they sang Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland’s famous mash-up of Get Happy and Happy Days Are Here Again.

“What else does one say except for… what the f*ck?” said Sam Sewell, who evidently did not expect to find herself onstage accepting the final award of the night—Outstanding Production of Existing Material for a Musical—for Come From Away, which GMG Productions co-produced with Stages Production Specialists, Inc.

All-timer speech

And without a doubt, Marynor Madamesila delivered both the funniest and most heartfelt speech of the night—an all-timer, in my opinion—after winning Female Lead Performance in a Musical as one of the Siamese twins of Sandbox’s Side Show.

“Sabi ko kanina, dahil I’m ‘neurospicy’ and mentally ill and sleepless, isipin ko na lang na panalo na ako, so kung sino mananalo, panalo ako with her—tapos nanalo ako!” Madamesila said, alternating between overwhelmed, panicked, hilariously self-aware, and genuinely emotional and grateful. She went on to thank her mother—a “stage mom pro-max” who once took out a prayer book backstage to calm her down during a pre-performance panic attack—and expressed her hope for theater to enjoy the same scale and vitality it has in Manila in places beyond the capital region, reaching “the grassroots and the little kids.”

But the most consequential parts came early in the night. First, PETA executive director Anj Heruela delivered Philstage’s annual report, where she revealed that the last two years have actually witnessed a steady uptick in the number of individual performances staged by member companies since the industry’s post-COVID reopening—from 325 performances among 26 productions in 2023 to 717 performances among 28 productions in 2025. These shows also “reached” 235,452 audiences in 2025—a 23 percent increase from 2023’s 190,048, according to a graphic from that presentation.

After discussing these statistics, Heruela asserted the need to continually refine the systems in the theater industry, not least by ratifying a code of ethics and establishing a review and classification board.

“Professionalization is not the enemy of art, but what makes it viable and sustainable” Heruela said. It is how “we protect our artists” and how “we protect our productions.”

A bit later came the presentation of Outstanding Original Score—one of 28 competitive awards up for grabs. That category had only two nominees: The Necessary Theatre and WHYNot Manila’s production of David Hare’s Via Dolorosa, set to haunting, evocative music by Gabby Ramos (on oud, Nigerian udu, guitar, kalimba, and sampler) and Dexter Lansang (on cello); and TP’s original Pinay Pop musical Gregoria Lakambini, composed by Nica del Rosario and Matthew Chang, who also penned the lyrics with book writers Eljay Castro Deldoc and Nicanor Tiongson.

Gregoria was a deserving winner, if only for giving the world that gorgeous romantic earworm Buwan, Buwan (available on Spotify). But Chang’s acceptance speech—brief and breathless—was the subtext-laden jolt of electricity the room likely didn’t see coming.

“Hindi tayo kayang tapatan o palitan ng kahit anumang AI (artificial intelligence),” Chang declared, to rapturous cheers and applause.

At any other time, Chang’s words could have been just another impassioned affirmation of the artistic spirit; an urgent call to action to safeguard the fragile, human dimension of art against the rampant, irresponsible use of AI; and a plea to reverse what lately feels like the inevitable dumbing down of an entire civilization.

But this wasn’t any other time: Chang’s speech was, one can safely presume, directly in response to—and in support of—the industry-breaking article by TheaterFansManila.com managing editor Frida Tan regarding “authorship, attribution, and the future of Philippine musicals,” to quote the title.

Murky authorship

Published only two days before awards night, Tan’s article investigated the murky authorship of Tulog Na: The Musical by Studio A Productions (not a Philstage member company, it should be clarified). Or, to be more precise, what appears to be its non-authorship; no composer or lyricist has been publicly identified and credited by the company, when these individuals should be “inseparable from the identity of the musical itself.”

Initially claiming it was composed by “an in-house creative team,” Studio A later told Tan that a certain JR Dee is supposedly behind the music and lyrics of Tulog Na. Since then, the company has been vague and non-responsive to further questions, including to Tan’s request to profile Dee—whom no one in the theater community seemed to know, and curiously had no digital footprint as far as a “publicly documented artistic background” is concerned.

To go by the lengthy discussions on Facebook and Reddit, the article has ignited suspicions that AI may have possibly played a role in the creation of Tulog Na, which was a sold-out play before becoming a musical (and about to star the comedian Pokwang, no less). Chang himself was interviewed by Tan, pointing out that the very absence of a public credit for a composer naturally “raises questions about authorship and creative transparency.”

Tan’s razor-sharp concluding points are well worth reiterating and reprinting: “If we stop asking who wrote the music and lyrics… we lose the ability to recognize the human beings behind the work and the creative labor they have given to it. At a time when our creative industries are being reshaped by technology, preserving that humanity is more important than ever. Every musical should have a human being attached to its music and lyrics, not just privately, but publicly.”

Empasis on “reshaped by technology,” I might add, capped off with a knowing, frustrated wink.

So far, the suspicions regarding AI use have remained on the discussion boards, with noticeably few theater artists being vocal on the matter. The article shares and reactions, however—especially from many artists themselves—suggest that louder and more heated conversations might be taking place far beyond what is perceptible to general observers. If anything, Chang’s speech only brought those conversations into as large and public a space as possible, at precisely the right time.