PDI Review: 'Kisapmata' by Tanghalang Pilipino

Last review for a while--I'm in Sydney until end of July-ish! Anyway, this play will go down as one of the highlights of my theatergoing life. Website version here.

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TP's 'Kisapmata' delivers chilling, powerful adaptation

Watching Tanghalang Pilipino’s (TP) “Kisapmata,” one easily forgets the film on which it is based. In a way, this is the ultimate compliment.

“Kisapmata” the film, directed and cowritten by Mike de Leon, is widely considered one of the greatest contemporary Filipino works of art. It is about a household under the suffocating spell of its patriarch—a horror film about the systematic erosion of a person’s ability to say no, to the point that constant obedience becomes their only idea of dealing with reality. At the time of its premiere at the 1981 Metro Manila Film Festival, the film became the perfect allegory for the preceding, diabolical decade of martial rule under Marcos Sr.

In “Kisapmata,” retired policeman Dadong dominates his wife Dely, daughter Mila, and son-in-law Noel with an iron fist (sometimes literally). His word is law; going against him is wishing for death.

De Leon depicts the terror permeating Dadong’s household in a straightforward manner, the man’s quiet evil—and his family’s inability to escape him—laid out in plain sight. The result is a kind of cinematic claustrophobia. The doom that befalls the characters feels obvious and inevitable, and one leaves the film shaken yet also seething with frustration at their choices.

“Kisapmata” the TP play retains the film’s story, but somehow takes it all a notch higher. To say it improves upon the film is downright inaccurate (not to mention heretical); instead, the play is its own creature.

Evil transcending time

As written and directed by Guelan Luarca, TP’s “Kisapmata” seems to reach for another kind of horror: something atavistic, an affliction embedded in the deepest recesses of the human psyche. The evil the play portrays is one that seemingly cannot be named—naming it might as well incur the most devastating fate. It is evil that, as in the film, exists in the present in broad daylight, but it also appears to transcend time: reaching heavily into the past and carrying with it the trauma of generations, while also portending an unspeakable future.

No wonder the characters often speak in whispers, as if scared they might be heard by the devil himself. Dely, in particular, has become a kind of Cassandra; she is the audience’s eyes and way into the world of the play, her murmured pronouncements—interjecting the action every so often—becoming omens of the characters’ unchangeable ends. “Whisper and cast your troubles to the grass, to the wind, to the night,” she advises Mila, and so the daughter does.

As simple as it seems, this acting motif of whispering is essential to the atmosphere Luarca has built for the play—one that thrives in abstraction, but is no less fatal. This “Kisapmata” means to throttle the viewer and take the breath out of them bit by bit. And it is unrelenting in this pursuit, the whispered moments becoming intermittent reminders that the characters already exist in a diseased household but have yet to face the worst. Nothing is more frightening than the unseen.

Combined, the design elements fulfill Luarca’s vision for the play: the bareness of Joey Mendoza’s set (mainly a raised platform surrounded by some talahib), like space for an ancient ritual; D Cortezano’s deployment of light not just to illuminate the action, but envelop the stage in shadows; Arvy Dimaculangan’s intelligent use of silence as soundscape; the way JM Cabling lets the actors navigate the spaces of the stage, stalking its “passages” and inhabiting its “corners,” such that moving in and around this imagined house becomes an evocation of the slowness of terror itself, a sort of prowling in the dark.

Story stripped bare

With the actors performing barefoot and in the same costume throughout, the production feels not just like a back-to-basics, but something akin to classical myth, a story stripped bare to expose the evil at its narrative core, poisoning its very bones.

In more than one occasion, in its scenes of violence, this “Kisapmata” unironically becomes “peak theater,” so to speak: as when one character “falls down” a flight of stairs, or when another gradually realizes he’s been deliberately locked inside the house.

Exhuming its characters’ fundamental fears alongside the patriarch’s deep-seated depravities, this “Kisapmata” also renders its political analogies crystal-clear. (In fact, a moment toward the end when overhead projections flash images of certain historical moments in Philippine history feel unnecessary.) In its portrayal of Dely, Mila, and Noel’s inabilities to escape Dadong, and especially in the women’s rationalizations of their choice to stay with him, the play becomes a piercing depiction of the Filipino people’s Stockholm syndrome with their strongmen.

Collab of a lifetime

How apt that the production should be running right now, when Duterte loyalists are making fools of themselves before the International Criminal Court and the rest of the world in the wake of the former president’s arrest and extradition.

And how lucky Manila audiences are not just to be living in the same timeline as Luarca, but also to be able to witness the TP Actors Company senior members in what feels like the collaboration of a lifetime.

Jonathan Tadioan (Dadong), Lhorvie Nuevo-Tadioan (Dely), Toni Go-Yadao (Mila), and Marco Viaña (Noel) have appeared together in TP productions for at least a decade now. The variety is staggering: to name a few, “Ang Pag-uusig” (Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”), “Pangarap sa Isang Gabi ng Gitnang Tag-araw” (Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), “Katsuri” (John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”), and last year’s “Balete” (based partly on F. Sionil José’s novel “Tree”).

In “Kisapmata,” the four actors are each never better, but their work also collectively feels like a culmination of sorts. Each is giving a performance that evinces total mastery of craft, from physicality to emotion, from groundedness in the present to evocation of a character’s past. Yet, they also feel like a single organism, the years somehow having honed their discrete abilities to “feel” each other, such that now they breathe and move and live as one with ease.

In a year that has so far witnessed many new, big-name productions come up short, Luarca’s “Kisapmata” is a force to be reckoned with—truly best-of-the-decade material—and its four actors, epitomes of generous theatrical performances.

PDI Review: 'Anino sa Likod ng Buwan' by IdeaFirst Live

 This was bad. Inquirer website version here.

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'Anino sa Likod ng Buwan': Tonal whiplash

In theater, tone is paramount. It sells the piece to the viewer and makes whatever the play is going for believable, regardless of genre. So what happens when a production bungles this most crucial of artistic elements?

You get something like “Anino sa Likod ng Buwan.” Thirty-two years ago, in 1993, Jun Robles Lana wrote “Anino’s” original iteration, a play that won first prize at the Bulwagang Gantimpala competition. In 2015, his screen adaptation of that play hit the cinemas. Now, Lana has written “Anino’s” third incarnation, adapted from his film script and brought to life at the Peta Theater Center by IdeaFirst Live (its maiden theatrical offering).

The story has remained unchanged, apparently. Emma and Nardo are introduced to the audience as a couple living a life of minimal means in 1990s Marag Valley in the northern reaches of Luzon. They are friends with Joel, though they shouldn’t be—he’s a soldier, part of the military forces patrolling and terrorizing the Philippine countryside in their mission to quash the communist insurgency.

Within an intermission-less 100 minutes, this friendship between the soldier and the couple is revealed to be a con played from both sides. Emma and Nardo are no ordinary couple; they are actually (semi-spoiler alert) part of the resistance. And while all the characters believe they are fighting for what’s best for the country, the larger, moral picture is never less than certain: One side is fighting on behalf of elite capture and the oligarchy; the other, for the displaced, the landless, the land itself.

Lana—inarguably more famous nowadays for his films—writes all that in language that betrays a fondness for poetry and an eye for gritty realism. His technique occasionally heightens the imaginative qualities of the play, but more often results in abrupt shifts in tone. Nevertheless, it’s also language that evinces the writer’s flair for the theatrical, as in some of his recent work: that bravura, 14-minute, one-take scene in the Vice Ganda vehicle “And the Breadwinner Is…”; the doppelgänger device in “About Us But Not About Us,” for example.

Love and desire

Moreover, it’s not difficult to appreciate the dramatic heights to which Lana’s writing for “Anino” aspires. As much as the play is about the politics of state-sponsored conflict in the countryside, it is also about the politics of love and desire, its three characters weaponizing their bodies and urges to wage a war much bigger than themselves.

When the characters talk about bloodshed in the community, then suddenly wax lyrical about love—for a partner, for the nation—it kind of makes weird, imperfect sense.

It’s an entirely different story when Lana’s script is situated within this production directed by Tuxqs Rutaquio. Unable to tame the playwright’s random shifts between metaphor and the literal, such moments simply register as whiplash by way of language. For lack of a subtler phrase, this “Anino” is a tonal mess.

Nowhere is this theatrical schizophrenia more conspicuous than in the fact that the three actors spearheading this production each appear to be inhabiting a different play on their own.

As Joel, Martin del Rosario (in his stage debut) has the complexion of one who has never spent enough hours outdoors and the build of an urban gym rat. When he speaks—whether he’s justifying the army’s actions or defending the government’s atrocities—he frequently does so in an oratorical manner that would make him a promising period-drama star (think Vicomte de Valmont in “Dangerous Liaisons”). He’s a could-be Shakespearean in a play that wants nothing to do with the classics.

As Emma, Elora Españo has such a pinched presence that her crucial big moments later in the play feel disjointed, like the work of another. Lately, Españo has been a darling of the screen, churning out excellent turns in at least three films that premiered locally last year (Lana’s “Your Mother’s Son,” Sigrid Andrea Bernardo’s “Pushcart Tales,” Dominic Bekaert’s “An Errand”). But in “Anino,” Españo is just… small, and also ungrounded. In fact, sometimes she almost floats into the background.

Firm grasp

Only Ross Pesigan, as Nardo, shows a firm grasp of the grammar of theatrical performance. Unsurprising, given Pesigan is a native of the stage (his excellent turns in Dulaang UP’s “Fake” and “Ang Nawalang Kapatid” paving the way, nine years later in 2023, for a Gawad Buhay-nominated performance in Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s “Laro”).

Yet, his Nardo is not entirely convincing, either; there’s not enough gravity, cunning, or weariness in his portrayal of a secret agent of the revolution.

Let loose onstage by Rutaquio like clay figures in a creation myth, the three actors brave scene after scene—and mood after mood—the best they can. One moment they’re approximating Samuel Beckett’s existential poetry; 10 minutes later, they are starring in an afternoon soap; another 10 minutes and they’re doing realism by way of Lino Brocka.

No wonder the audience is equally unmoored. Consider the play’s second “act”: With Nardo momentarily gone, Joel and Emma reveal the sick game of lust and power they have been playing behind his back; they have rabid sex repeatedly, then make professions of love to each other, all while trying to get the other to submit.

On opening night, this whole portion of the play turned the theater into a comedy bar; people kept laughing because the action became unreadable, and therefore unbelievable and downright silly.

Misogyny

Sadly, the tonal contradictions are not the last of this production’s problems; they only make two other things more glaring. One is the perverse misogyny of the play. In “Anino,” the female body (Emma’s, to be exact) is both object of worship and weapon of war. Consequently, there is a lot of nudity here. What’s troubling is how all this is handled: in perhaps the most male gaze-y way possible, the naked body and the sexual act spectacularized and intended only to shock, their necessity to the story chucked to the sidelines. Has Rutaquio’s production heard of an intimacy coordinator?

Relatedly, this misogyny also shapes the play’s imagination of the revolutionary movement, and women’s roles in it. Here it all goes back, yet again, to the female body, and how Lana imagines its purpose—its uses, in the most utilitarian sense of the word—in realizing ideology. Without spoiling anything, I will say that somehow the play appears to be so enamored with the spectacle of melodrama that, in the end, it comes off as hollow histrionics — quite a disservice to the movement and all its women martyrs.

PDI Review: 'Next to Normal' by The Sandbox Collective

Saw this twice. Title says it all. Next, please. Website version here.

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'Next to Normal': Third time's not always the charm

Some shows seem set up for success, armed with text that’s structurally airtight, emotionally rigorous, unyielding in its pursuit to deliver nothing but the most truthful moments onstage. All the production needs to do is, pardon the cliché, “trust the material.”

“Next to Normal,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical about a family fractured by its matriarch’s mental illness, easily qualifies as such a show.

Four characters form the crux of the musical: Diana, who struggles with bipolar disorder amidst the lingering trauma of her infant son’s death (no longer a spoiler at this point!); her husband Dan, stretched to his limits; her teenage daughter Natalie, also stretched to her limits; and Gabe, Diana and Dan’s son who, in a stroke of narrative brilliance, exists throughout the show in adult form.

Reviewing its 2009 Broadway premiere, Ben Brantley of The New York Times rightfully described the show as a “feel-everything musical”: one that exhumes “with operatic force” the deep-seated, familial anguish of its characters to become a frequently moving, occasionally devastating portrait of intergenerational dysfunction. And it also comes with an all-timer pop-rock score (by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey) that captures the jaggedness of its protagonists’ individual and collective psyches.

All that was evident in the first two instances this musical was staged in Manila: in 2011, directed by the late Bobby Garcia for Atlantis Productions, an “electrifying, heart-shredding” iteration that evinced complete “mastery of the Broadway musical idiom,” as I wrote in my best-of-the-2010s roundup for this paper; then, in 2020, directed by Missy Maramara for Ateneo Blue Repertory, a spare, emotionally lacerating, visibly text-first treatment—the musical “with its insides fully exposed,” as I described it. (The latter unfortunately closed after its opening weekend—one of 27 theatrical events forcibly shuttered by the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic.)

Lack of trust

Now comes Manila’s third glimpse of this musical, directed by Toff de Venecia for The Sandbox Collective. In brief, it only proves that third time’s not always the charm. What may seem a guaranteed win on paper can end up, like this production, a frigid and antiseptic experience.

Mirroring Diana’s fragmented mind, Sandbox’s “Next to Normal” alternates between gratuitous resorts to metaphor and a grating literal-mindedness that, taken together, betray a seeming lack of trust in the material—an uncalled-for itch to do “more.”

The reach for metaphors is apparent quite early. For example, the opening number, which introduces the viewer to the protagonists as they mill about the house getting ready for the day, culminates in the first hint that something’s awry in this otherwise ordinary household: In a manic frenzy, Diana starts making as many sandwiches as she can, “to get ahead on [everyone’s] lunches”—to the point of preparing them on the floor. This is made perfectly clear in the dialogue, as well as the script directions.

But in this Sandbox production, there are no sandwiches; Diana only sits, then stands, on a chair, singing her mania away. And while departures from the script are quite fine and routine in the theater these days, this specific instance is a head-scratcher, especially considering everything else that follows.

It might have made more sense if this impulse to leave things to the imagination were consistently the only feature here. But balancing this strange penchant for minimalism is an urge—just as recurrent, and no less bothersome—to spell things out in ways this production probably deems “expressionistic.”

There is, for one, a drawn-out, five-minute pre-show of sorts involving a Pablo Neruda quote being erased gradually on the wall, until only “absence is a house” (from the poet’s Sonnet XCIV) is left. Does this elevate the viewer’s understanding of the musical? Not at all, one realizes by curtain call, though the whole charade does add five extra minutes to the production.

Throughout, chairs become the centerpiece of movement: The actors carry around their own chairs, (re-)arranging them, emoting “into” them. It’s been 60 years since Dionne Warwick first crooned that “a chair is not a house/and a house is not a home …” Here, one is reminded of that song, to be fair, but this “Groundhog Day”-esque “chair choreography” is always far too busy, intrusive, and obvious to ever be truly meaningful. (In fact, the intrusive choreography doesn’t let up even in the final song.)

Emotionally static

Meanwhile, moments of intense emotion, as reflected in the music and lyrics, are often left emotionally static by the blocking and direction. When they’re not lugging chairs around, many times the actors are made to just stand there, or sit there, occupying their own spots, and sing to high heavens. The attempt to portray the characters in their closed-off, individual worlds is clear; the excess of unused space onstage is likewise painfully glaring.

Considering the amount of attention devoted to metaphors, to choreography (and nonmovement), to a lighting design that keeps calling attention to itself, it is a travesty that not much care has been given to the sound. While the venue—the Power Mac Blackbox Theater—is notorious for its appalling acoustics, this “Next to Normal” has to count as one of the worst-sounding productions ever staged there. The performances are thus wasted in this space; already made emotionally distant by De Venecia’s direction, they become literally incomprehensible because of the sound.

As Diana, Shiela Valderrama can be a vision of coherence in her best moments, while Nikki Valdez’s rawness occasionally works to her advantage (even if she’s frequently belabored by unsteady dramatic and vocal technique). Floyd Tena and OJ Mariano only manage to live up to the largeness of their characters in the second act.

Among the actors playing second-generation characters, Omar Uddin delivers the clearest performance by a mile; as Natalie’s boyfriend Henry, he not only lands what the character requires of him, but somehow enlarges the part through sheer will, his presence becoming the most compassionate and compelling in the show.

And if this production is about “making choices,” only Vino Mabalot succeeds in making an altogether interesting choice, his take on Gabe as a malevolent, teenage specter adding a much-welcome sprinkle of excitement to the proceedings.

Yet, Uddin and Mabalot (alternating with Davy Narciso and Benedix Ramos, respectively) are only pieces of the larger puzzle. The production they inhabit has neither the former’s flesh-and-blood accessibility nor the latter’s well-defined commitment to deviate from convention.

Like a number of Sandbox’s previous outings—last year’s “Tiny Beautiful Things,” the monologue “Every Brilliant Thing” and its Filipino translation “Bawat Bonggang Bagay”—this “Next to Normal” has been marketed heavily along the lines of mental health advocacy. And why not? The advocacy part is already crystal-clear in the powerful material. Rather than let the themes emerge naturally, however, this production ends up speaking over them—an exercise in muddying clarity.

PDI Review: '3 Upuan' by Scene Change and Areté

First review of the year is of a play that's the most I've cried in the theater in my 17 years of theatergoing. It's so great to have a working website again--the online version of this article here. 

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Time as great arbiter of grief in Guelan Luarca's '3 Upuan'

Here’s something you only ever learn when the time actually comes: Grieving a loved one’s death is a bizarre, alienating experience. It forces you into a different timeline, a kind of temporal suspension in which your grief is only ever your own, while life around you goes on as if nobody has died. The only way the rest of the world can know your grief is if you actually articulate it—if you ever manage to do so, that is.

This alienation-in-grief, this state of being adrift in time and space, is what preoccupies Guelan Luarca’s “3 Upuan,” a heart-wrencher of a play that’s easily best-of-the-decade material. As precise as it is profound in its rumination on what it’s like to lose someone, this play is perhaps the most persuasive exploration of the subject Philippine theater has seen of late. Put simply, it gets it all right.

It understands, for example, that grief is about perspective. Throughout this play, the characters of three siblings each alternate as narrators, guiding the audience through their individual experiences mourning the sickness and death of their father. Jers, the eldest, is an academic whose idea of processing loss hinges mainly on the vocabulary of the humanities that he deploys daily in the classroom. Jack, the middle son, is a visual artist who finds—and loses—himself, and his sorrows, in sculpture and poetry.

And Jai, the youngest, is a journalist based in America, whose grasp of grief is perhaps, understandably, the most vivid, evocative, grounded.

In a span of 90 minutes, “3 Upuan” takes the audience on a journey that begins at the siblings’ father’s deathbed—but then quickly unfurls backwards and forwards across time, and beyond this single family unit, into a remarkably complex exploration of the origins of human sadness.

Pivotal event

Grief, this play asserts, never really goes away—it only grows or shrinks with time, stuck to our psyches and forever dictating the way we perceive the world after that pivotal, sorrowful event. It is why the world spins the way it does; why people behave the way they do.

In other words, time is the great arbiter. In the play, each sibling becomes ensconced in a world of their own grief, living out a timeline separate from the rest, even as they ostensibly experience the fact and aftermath of their father’s death together.

Jers and Jack pass the time talking hypotheticals in the hospital. Fast-forward after the funeral, Jack and Jai enjoy the most mundane drives around town. Much, much later, Jers and Jai become bonded by yet another tragedy in the family. In all this, we see each sibling existing in two presents: the one that everybody else in their fictive world can see, and the one only they can perceive, shaped by their individual grief. Each effectively becomes a cipher to the others.

The central mystery of this play, then: How does one stop being that cipher of grief?

Here, Luarca proffers the same answer: time. If grief is an experience that halts time, it is also one that can be understood and articulated fully only with time. In this sense, “3 Upuan” becomes a most articulate play about articulating the seemingly inarticulable.

Drawing partly from the French thinker Jacques Lacan, the play is a journey of making sense of the senseless. Articulating their grief becomes, for the characters, a project of piecing together memories, sharing moments of fleeting joy, learning to see the world from the others’ eyes, and finding the right words to capture that singular, incomprehensible feeling. It is a project that takes time, and can only ever be finished with enough time.

Intellectual rigor

Staged in a 60-seater repurposed classroom, Scene Change and Areté’s production of the play (directed by Luarca himself) forces you to confront the characters’ grief head on—and perhaps also reflect upon your own. This intimate setup also renders “3 Upuan’s” intellectual rigor crystal-clear: how this play is structurally unassailable, expansive in its imagining of incident, in how it puts into words the past, present, and future.

That the production somehow miraculously manages to make full sense of the script is a testament to Luarca as director, who has tamed and turned theatrically coherent the novelistic impulses of his own writing. The design here is simple yet utterly effective: mixed-and-matched ceiling fluorescents by lighting designer D Cortezano, pitch-perfect atmospheric sounds by Julia Vaila, and the smartest use of video and projections I’ve seen of late by Teia Contreras.

The cast Luarca has assembled, all returning from last year’s premiere, are impeccable in the way they plumb the emotional recesses of their characters: Jojit Lorenzo as Jers, JC Santos as Jack, and—in what has been rightfully labeled a career-best performance—Martha Comia as Jai, a beacon of actorly precision, down to her trying-to-belong-but-could-never-belong American accent as the US-based sibling.

Between this play and “The Impossible Dream,” which recently enjoyed a one-weekend revival at the Philippine Educational Theater Association’s Control + Shift Festival, Luarca has clearly distinguished himself as the preeminent Filipino playwright of his generation. If writing for the theater is an act of radical imagination—of conjuring infinite possibilities, redefining the real, and stretching the limits of our emotive capacities—then Luarca’s body of work is, for lack of a subtler term, peerless.

Cathartic gift

In “The Impossible Dream,” Luarca uses the straightforward premise of a fictitious encounter between Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and Ninoy Aquino as a launchpad for meditating on ideas of revolution and heroism in the post-truth age (and all done in such piquant language!). Likewise, in past plays such as “Nekropolis,” “Desaparesidos,” and even the imperfect “Ardor,” he has consistently pushed for dissections of the Filipino consciousness—in its immediate and imagined forms—that none of his peers could, at present, ever claim to equal.

In “3 Upuan,” Luarca has visibly taken a more inward-looking turn—yet one that is no less meticulous in its explication of a very Filipino human-ness. Those who’ve never grieved for a loved one will nonetheless find in this play a work of astounding sophistication and emotional maturity.

But if you’ve ever gone through the roller coaster of watching a loved one die, anticipating their death, pregrieving the loss to come, then actually grappling with that loss and trying to make sense of the all-consuming aftermath, this play is a cathartic gift.

The Year in Film and TV (2024)

In January, I biked some 31 kilometers of the Angkor archeological grounds in Siem Reap. Two days earlier, I was at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, silently cursing the Filipino boomers and Gen X-ers on the "right side of history" for failing to properly hold the Marcoses to account. Outside of Ho Chi Minh City a few days later, I found myself wearing one of those hats from 'Miss Saigon' as part of the tourist-trap Mekong River Delta boat ride I'd cluelessly signed up for. 

In April, I ate those heavenly Bakehouse cinnamon rolls in Hong Kong, hanami-ed the shit out of Osaka and Kanazawa, wore a kimono for a couple of hours in Kyoto, went onsen-hopping in Kinosaki, biked the pine-laden Amanohashidate causeway. Then, turned 32. In July, ticked off some items from my bucket list for Europe: the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb altarpiece in Ghent, the Bruges belfry, the Eiffel Tower and Montmarte, Da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks and Palma Vecchio's Adoration of the Shepherds with a Donor in The Louvre. Strolled the banks of the Seine, spent a golden sunset in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, saw Seurat's Sunday in the Park croquetons in the Orsay. Listened to a touring youth choir in the Chartres cathedral. Got properly stoned in Amsterdam. Beheld Fabritius' The Goldfinch in The Hague's Mauritshuis and marveled at the fascinating architectural landscape of Rotterdam. Also finished my MA and started my PhD. Then the blur that was the year's last quarter: koyo peeping and my first solo hike in Nikko. 'Sunday' at the Sydney Opera House and 'Jesus Christ Superstar' at the Capitol. My maternal grandmother's funeral. More-than-friend-ing one of my oldest friends. Such is life.

All of that to say, I saw only 146 films in 2024, according to my Letterboxd--the downward trend continues--and not counting TV series. For accountability: I hereby declare this post to be the end of my brief life as an awards season completist. Thanks for reading! Now go live.

1. 'Somebody Somewhere' Season 3 (HBO; created by Hannah Bos & Paul Thureen) 

I'm not sure this is the best thing I watched in 2024. What I'm sure of is that it's the one thing I want to remember the year for, if I could pick only one. In its final season, this miracle of a show became a much-needed appeal to choose love, always, and kindness, always. To love someone, this show asserts, is to completely come to terms with one's self--and to share that healed self wholly with another. In the end, we have only our family, our friends, the friends who become family, the small connections we make and sustain, our town, our neighborhood, our small place in the world--all the things that bring us joy and ease our sadnesses little by little.

2. 'Baby Reindeer' (Netflix; created by Richard Gadd)

Nothing but admiration and respect for Gadd and Jessica Gunning. Would make for a terrific, necessary triptych with 'I May Destroy You' (2020) and 'Procession' (2021).

3. 'The Zone of Interest' (dir. Jonathan Glazer)

Free Palestine!

4. 'Interview with the Vampire' Season 2 (AMC; Rolin Jones, showrunner)

The gayest show of 2024 also happened to be its most romantic. So unserious, so theatrical (a compliment), so histrionic (an even bigger compliment), and chock-full of hot, beautiful people. "Siri, pause."

5. 'Conclave' (dir. Edward Berger)

Someone wrote on Letterboxd that this film has the best third-act use of a photocopier since 'Mean Girls', and honestly, I can't argue against that. When John Lithgow said he will pretend the conversation never took place, and Ralph Fiennes replied, "But it has taken place!," I felt the quiver in Fiennes' voice in my bones. Fiennes here is literally me during Gawad Buhay deliberations.

6. 'Pachinko' Season 2 (Apple TV+; created by Soo Hugh) 

To appropriate Roxana Hadadi, a show that fully grasps how the only way one can endure amidst the cumulative largeness of "family, history, war, culture, capitalism, nationalism, debt, love, [and] faith" is "to understand how small [one] might be in the face of all that." Season 1 made me cry over rice; this season made me cry over tofu. 

7. 'The Substance' (dir. Coralie Fargeat)

Movies should be fun! And I must say, Margaret Qualley has excellent suturing skills.

8. 'Civil War' (dir. Alex Garland)/ 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' (dir. George Miller)

The two most "movie" movies I saw in 2024: the former a delicious vision of America (and the myth of liberal Western benevolence) shitting itself and finally breaking apart, the latter just kind of insane for how confident it is with its visual language.

9. 'Hacks' Season 3 (Max; created by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs & Jen Statsky) 

A perfect season of television. Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder flawless.

10. 'Ghosts of Kalantiaw' (dir. Chuck Escasa)/ 'Gitling' (dir. Jopy Arnaldo)

Hiligaynon supremacy! (Okay, that's not entirely accurate, but you get what I mean.) 

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The rest of my 5-star titles, in alphabetical order:

'Didi' (dir. Sean Wang)

Izaac Wang delivers one of the season's best--and most underrated--performances in this exquisite study of all-consuming sadness masquerading as a run-of-the-mill Asian-diaspora-in-America story. So painfully honest, and real, and beautifully unembellished.

'Flow' (dir. Gints Zilbalodis)

Never thought I'd give a capybara entrance applause, but here we are.

'Four Daughters' (dir. Kaouther Ben Hania)

Life becomes a lot less stressful--and makes a lot more sense--I think, when one starts thinking of one's mother as just another 20-something stuck in a middle-aged person's body. Of course, cycles need breaking at some point.

'Godzilla Minus One' (dir. Takashi Yamazaki)

Now this is an action/superhero movie. Ryunosuke Kamiki a star.

'Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show' Season 1 (HBO; dir. Ari Katcher)

This is so good, but also so sick and disturbing, like masturbation done on the world's biggest stage, under the world's brightest lights, with the world's largest audience. For real, though: We all need to learn to care less about what other people think; to give less fucks; to seek approval less.

'Juror #2' (dir. Clint Eastwood)

Just all-around solid filmmaking, like one of those ancient texts done exceedingly well. What a way to go for Eastwood.

'When This Is All Over' (dir. Kevin Mayuga)

The most accurate depiction of Filipino (upper-)middle class apathy I've seen of late, with a scene-stealing turn from Chaye Mogg (giving Poveda/Woodrose realness), and Juan Karlos continuing to prove himself a reliable screen performer.

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PLUS--23 other titles worth checking out:

'Abbott Elementary' Season 3 (ABC; created by Quinta Brunson); 'American Fiction' (dir. Cord Jefferson); 'Anora' (dir. Sean Baker); 'Ate Bunso' (dir. Angelica Llanera); 'The Boy and the Heron' (dir. Hayao Miyazaki); 'Challengers' (dir. Luca Guadagnino); 'The Curse' Season 1 (Showtime; created by Nathan Fielder & Benny Safdie); 'Drag Race Philippines' Season 3 (HBO Go/ WOW Presents Plus; dirs. Arnel Natividad & Ice Seguerra); 'English Teacher' Season 1 (FX; created by Brian Jordan Alvarez); 'Fargo' Season 5 (FX; created by Noah Hawley); 'Ghostlight' (dir. Kelly O'Sullivan & Alex Thompson); 'His Three Daughters' (dir. Azazel Jacobs); 'Hito' (dir. Stephen Lopez); 'The Idea of You' (dir. Michael Showalter); 'Io Capitano' (dir. Matteo Garrone); 'Mr. & Mrs. Smith' Season 1 (Amazon Prime Video; Francesca Sloane, showrunner); 'The Old Man and the Pool' (dir. Seth Barrish); 'Nowhere Near' (dir. Miko Revereza); 'The Seed of the Sacred Fig' (dir. Mohammad Rasoulof); 'Thelma' (dir. Josh Margolin); 'Third World Romance' (dir. Dwein Baltazar); 'Tumandok' (dirs. Richard Jeroui Salvadico & Arlie Sweet Sumagaysay); 'Tumatawa Umiiyak' (dir. Che Tagyamon)

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Here are 30 of my favorite performances of the year, apart from the ones already mentioned earlier:

1. Tim Bagley ('Somebody Somewhere' Season 3)

2. Penélope Cruz ('Ferrari')

3. Ben Daniels ('Interview with the Vampire' Season 2)

4. Enchong Dee ('Here Comes the Groom')

5. Kirsten Dunst ('Civil War')

6. Mark Eidelstein ('Anora')

7. Maya Erskine ('Mr. & Mrs. Smith' Season 1)

8. Dakota Fanning ('Ripley')

9. Nathan Fielder ('The Curse' Season 1)

10. Ralph Fiennes ('Conclave')

11. Mary Catherine Garrison ('Somebody Somewhere' Season 3)

12. Anne Hathaway ('The Idea of You')

13. Jeff Hiller ('Somebody Somewhere' Season 3)

14. Jung Eun-chae ('Pachinko' Season 2)

15. Karren Karagulian ('Anora')

16. Keith Kupferer ('Ghostlight')

17. Justine Lupe ('Nobody Wants This' Season 1)

18. Patti LuPone ('Agatha All Along')

19. Mikey Madison ('Anora')

20. Lesley Manville ('Disclaimer')

21. Paul Mescal ('All of Us Strangers')

22. Demi Moore ('The Substance')

23. Lupita Nyong'o ('A Quiet Place: Day One')

24. Gabby Padilla ('Gitling')

25. Glen Powell ('Hit Man')

26. Florence Pugh ('We Live in Time')

27. Sebastian Stan ('A Different Man')

28. Kakki Teodoro ('Isang Himala')

29. Zoe Saldaña ('Emilia Pérez')

30. Zendaya ('Challengers')

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I have 10 more things to say:

1. The year in musical numbers: 'El Mal' in 'Emilia Pérez' (Saldaña pop-rapping in that red pantsuit? Hot.), and 'Dancing Through Life', the only number that actually improves upon the original in 'Wicked' (Jonathan Bailey and that rotating library!). 

2. The music work of 'Io Capitano', alternating between subdued and loud in all the right places, conveying joy or hope or muted terror with simple precision.

3. The sound design of 'The Zone of Interest' is the thing.

4. Kudos to the cinematography, editing, and sound design of 'The Taste of Things' for making me actually hungry while watching this. Two other noteworthy cinematographic works of 2024: the stunning black-and-white photography of 'Ripley' and the sand-covered wastelands of 'Dune: Part Two' (those floating mercenaries!).

5. Best opening title sequence ever: 'Pachinko' Season 2! Never skipped this every episode.

6. Best animation I saw in 2024 was from 'The Wild Robot'--those flying geese turning into specks of autumn leaves? Gorgeous. 

7. At the start of 'The Substance', an entire career--and Hollywood's habit of discarding its women--told through a single time-lapse of a (fake) Walk of Fame star.

8. Opposite examples of evoking horror: The opening sequence in 'A Quiet Place: Day One', plunging us into Lupita's disoriented POV amid the smoke-filled chaos of the initial NYC attacks; and episode 3 of 'Pachinko' Season 2--airplanes in the provincial sky, fires erupting in the distance.

 

9. Speaking of perspective, 'When This Is All Over' really nailed the privileged druggie's perspective, thanks to incisive editing and cinematography.

10. The Patti LuPone-centric episode in 'Agatha All Along' was an all-timer in the Marvel canon. And 'Drag Race Philippines' Season 3 gave us the best snatch game in global 'Drag Race' history.

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Finally, my favorite non-2023/24 titles that I saw for the first time in 2024:

'All About My Mother' (1999, dir. Pedro Almodóvar)

'BPM (Beats per Minute)' (2017, dir. Robin Campillo)

'Election' (1999, dir. Alexander Payne)

'E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial' (1982, dir. Steven Spielberg)

'My Best Friend's Wedding' (1997, dir. P. J. Hogan)

'A Prophet' (2009, dir. Jacques Audiard)

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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 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 (2024)

On November 30, I watched Dulaang UP's "Nanay Bangis" (a Filipino adaptation of Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children") at UP Diliman--an absolutely insufferable show--and then, had to rush to Makati for the 7:30 evening show of The Sandbox Collective's "Tiny Beautiful Things"--another insufferable show. "Nanay Bangis" finished at almost 5 already, so I had to take a motorcycle taxi to get to the South on time on a payday weekend! Thank you, JoyRide. Anyway, thus was born the idea for the final paragraph of this piece.

Inquirer Plus now has a wonderfully functional website--the online version of this article here. See you at the theater in 2025!

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Theater 2024: Discerning patterns and possibilities

Miren Alvarez-Fabregas (Medea) and Yan Yuzon (Yason/ Jason) in Tanghalang Ateneo's 'Medea'.

No longer based in Manila, yet still striving to see as much of its theater as possible, I definitely missed a number of shows this year--for instance, "3 Upuan," "Mga Multo," and "Nagkatuwaan sa Tahanang Ito," which all lived brief, acclaimed lives at the Ateneo.

What follows, then, is an appraisal of Manila's theater scene that's more preoccupied with the patterns of its strengths, its limitations, its possibilities for growth.

Tanghalang Pilipino's banner year

The Cultural Center of the Philippines' (CCP) resident theater company staged two of 2024's most intellectually satisfying productions. "Pingkian," an original musical about Emilio Jacinto and the Katipunan, was that rare play propelled narratively by ideas, rather than conventional plot points. (A key number--the year's most thrilling, in fact--essentially rewrote the Kartilya, the Katipunan's bible, into a rousing, rap-sung manifesto of freedom and personhood.) Meanwhile, "Balete," partly hewn from two of F. Sionil José's works, was a marvel of inventive theatricality, its lucid dramatization of the specter of feudalism evidence of what genuine artistic collaboration could achieve.

Together, these shows became ardent interrogations into what makes--or breaks--a nation. They were also exemplary additions to the company's distinctive body of work in the past decade: along with "Batang Mujahideen," "Nekropolis," "Ang Pag-uusig," "Mabining Mandirigma," and "Mga Buhay na Apoy," theater that unflinchingly confronts what it truly means to be Filipino.

'Medea' and seeking the classics

Post-curtain at Tanghalang Ateneo's "Medea" in November, director Ron Capinding spoke of the company's near-future direction to pursue the classics in honor of the late Ricky Abad. "Medea" was a perfect herald of that future: an ancient text deftly revived, its primal histrionics made intelligible for modern viewers--despite Rolando Tinio's baroque Tagalog translation.

The larger questions it raised were also worth pondering for other companies: How do we make great art accessible to audiences besieged by brain rot and TikTok? What and where is the place of these stereotypically dusty tomes in a landscape saturated with jukebox musicals?

Months earlier, The Sandbox Collective had hinted at a tangential answer, via its rip-roaring production of the modern cult classic "Little Shop of Horrors"--the success of, among other reasons, intelligent casting. In both cases, it was clear audiences will flock to shows that meet them halfway. The Atenean kids I watched "Medea" with ate up every single crumb of it!

Above: Reb Atadero (Seymour) and Sue Ramirez (Audrey) in The Sandbox Collective's 'Little Shop of Horrors'. Below: Sam Concepcion (Popoy) and the company of PETA's 'One More Chance, The Musical'.

Two musicals and popular success

Without question, two of the year's biggest popular hits met viewers halfway--and knew their audiences. The Philippine Educational Theater Association's adaptation of the John Lloyd Cruz-Bea Alonzo romcom "Once More Chance" sold out its three-month run (from April to June) even before opening--a first in company history. Barefoot Theatre Collaborative's (BTC) "Bar Boys," based on the titular film about four aspiring lawyers, enjoyed similar success, its initial three-weekend run in May spawning a six-weekend rerun later in the year.

Far from flawless, both were nonetheless hugely enjoyable nights at the theater. And how they drew the crowds--lawyers and law students at "Bar Boys," just about every demographic imaginable (that had presumably seen a Star Cinema romcom) at "One More Chance." Even people I knew who weren't regular theatergoers were asking about these shows--a reliable metric of success, I've found. Most important, their respective companies clearly put in the work into marketing these musicals, from publicity to partnerships to, simply put, transforming them into "theatrical events."

Right performers, right roles

Some performances were Herculean inevitabilities: Nonie Buencamino in "Balete," Miren Alvarez-Fabregas in "Medea." Some felt like kismet: actors seemingly born for their roles, like Reb Atadero's Seymour, equal parts comic and loser, in "Little Shop of Horrors"; Sheila Francisco and Juliene Mendoza in "Bar Boys," twin experts in the emotional grammar of the stage; Leo Rialp as an unholy cardinal in Encore Theater's "Grace"; and--my bias--Sam Concepcion's Popoy in "One More Chance," a sublime marriage of performer and skill set birthing local musical theater's newest leading man (or to borrow from The Knee-Jerk Critic, a true "quadruple threat").

Some other performances felt revelatory, an actor finally given a sizable spotlight and owning it completely: Benedix Ramos in "Bar Boys"; Julia Serad in "Little Shop of Horrors"; at the Virgin Labfest, Jam Binay as a demented Catholic schoolgirl in "Sa Babaeng Lahat" and Joshua Cabiladas as a millennial "dirty old man" in "Ang Munting Liwanag sa Madilim na Sulok ng Isang Sebeserya sa Maynila." With Maronne Cruz (Emilia in Company of Actors in Streamlined Theatre's "Othello") and Krystal Kane (juggling a dozen or so parts in Repertory Philippines' "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change"), it was two former Ateneo Blue Repertory leading ladies slaying--yet again.

The trend of film and TV stars "crossing over" to theater also continued, and amid numerous misses was an undeniable hit: Sue Ramirez, utterly luminous from her first entrance as Audrey in "Little Shop of Horrors."  

The companies of 'Ang Munting Liwanag sa Madilim na Sulok ng Isang Serbeserya sa Maynila' (above) and 'Sa Babaeng Lahat' (below) at Virgin Labfest 19.

Design that earned its place

I mean design that effectively evoked a play's essence. In "Balete," two relatively new names--Wika Nadera (set) and Carlos Siongco (costumes)--jointly conjured the characters' old-world, agrarian aesthetic. GA Fallarme's projections in "I Love You..." and Fabian Obispo's sound design for Repertory Philippines' "Betrayal" were epitomes of restraint and sophistication.

In "Buruguduystunstugudunstuy," the Parokya ni Edgar musical at Newport World Resorts, Raven Ong's outlandish trash-bag gowns best captured the musical's inane spirit. Bituin Escalante's hair in "Pingkian" was its own entity; so, too, was Alvarez-Fabregas' cape in "Medea."

The eternal question of access

Lastly, the Samsung Performing Arts Theater this year became an inadvertent site for continuing conversations on access. On the one hand was "Request sa Radyo," the play about a Filipino migrant worker in America headlined by Lea Salonga and Dolly de Leon, and which boasted a fully functioning apartment set by Tony-winning designer (and co-producer) Clint Ramos. With top tickets costing almost P10,000, "Request" begged the question: Who exactly was meant to see this "coming together" of beacons of "Philippine pride," to quote its website? Certainly not most ordinary theatergoers, whom it shut out with ticket prices unparalleled in their exorbitance in recent local history. If anything, it all betrayed an anomalous marketing direction so detached from present realities.

On the other hand was "Mula sa Buwan" Pat Valera and William Elvin Manzano's take on "Cyrano de Bergerac." Returning under BTC, it offered a far more egalitarian theatrical event--one closely attuned to the pulse of local theater. At the full-house performance I attended, the crowd was diverse, with many young-looking members--some of them students on sponsored tickets, I was told--all laughing, crying, and reacting to the whole thing. Through mastery of social media, a dedication to cultivating its fan base, and the sheer will to make itself affordable to as many people as possible, "Mula sa Buwan" illustrated what inclusive, accessible Filipino theater could look like.

Further, accessibility can also mean using subtitles, as in "One More Chance." Or announcing performance dates and schedules reasonably early enough so people can plot their viewings. Or considering the practicality of watching two shows in one day (why endure Manila traffic on separate days?) and leaving ample time for people to travel between matinees and evening performances (why even start at 7:30 p.m. on Saturdays?).

Regardless of the means, the end remains the same: We need a theater landscape that strives to open its doors to more people, even from places beyond Manila--especially from places where regular theater is rare and therefore could be a precious, life-changing experience.