First yearender for The Diarist--here! The one thing I couldn't include anymore, because it was neither in Sydney nor Manila, was Kimberly Akimbo with Menchu in Singapore, a legit 40-hour whirlwind adventure!
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Why I still longed for Filipino theatricality in 2025
Writing year-end appraisals of the theater landscape is not only about remembering the shows one saw, but also about taking stock of those one missed. In my case, the latter group includes GMG Productions and Stages’ Come From Away—which many of my fellow reviewers raved about—as well as Repertory Philippines’ Art, the 20th edition of the Virgin Labfest, and a slew of productions by university-based organizations.
That’s because I spent most of the first half of 2025 in Sydney, Australia, as a graduate student in medical anthropology. As it happens, that’s also where I encountered some of my favorite theater of the year.
At the Ensemble Theatre—a 200-seater just across the harbor from the Sydney Opera House, and a few minutes’ walk from the Harbor Bridge with its iconic arch—I saw a production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie that struck a perfect, delicate balance in drawing out the memory play’s dreamlike melancholy and its inherent comedy. There, I also caught Lauren Gunderson’s The Half-Life of Marie Curie—spare, but never slight; emotional, but never histrionic—with topnotch production design that conjured landscapes and seascapes, dank interiors and the great outdoors, with just a small, round, see-through dais for a stage, judicious use of lights, and a sheer curtain hung from a circular track. A third standout in that venue: the Australian premiere of Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2024—“a gentle chamber piece,” to quote one Sydney critic, about a specific kind of life that loneliness and childhood trauma can carve for a grown man. Directed by Darren Yap, this production went straight for the heartstrings with little resort to overt melodrama.
At the Opera House itself, I scored a ticket to the sold-out rerun of the acclaimed Sydney Theatre Company production of Suzie Miller’s RBG: Of Many, One, a monologue that eschewed hagiography in its fleet-footed (re)construction of the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late American justice and women’s rights activist. Heather Mitchell’s performance in the titular role was the very definition of Herculean—maturing and shrinking, aging and de-aging before our eyes in seconds, reminiscent of Shamaine Buencamino’s work for Dulaang UP’s Sidhi’t Silakbo in 2023.
I also count myself fortunate to have snagged a last-minute seat to another sold-out show: Belvoir St. Theatre’s The Spare Room, starring Australian acting royalty and two-time Oscar nominee Judy Davis. Playing a woman who takes in her dying, cancer-stricken friend—and must contend with said friend’s preference for alternative, oft-unproven therapies—Davis was the epitome of knowing how to command an audience (and make them laugh!).
Meanwhile, in the 55-seater Old Fitz Theatre, nestled in the basement of the 150-year-old Old Fitzroy Hotel, I saw the Australian premiere of Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane, about a single mother who—without fail—always chooses to see the bright side of things as she cares for her chronically ill child. The play’s beauty was chiefly in how it used the offstage to convey so much of what’s going on, and watching this superlative production, as the eminent Sydney critic John Shand put it, was akin to witnessing “a little monument be erected to the triumph of shared humanity, scene by aching scene.”
For the most part, though, the Sydney theater landscape—as with Manila’s, or perhaps everywhere else, really—was dotted with shows that settled “into that fuzzy groove somewhere between brilliant and crappy, great and wretched,” to borrow the words of my colleague Gibbs Cadiz; shows that were far from either “drop-dread triumphs or spectacular failures.” True, it offered the chance to see material I’d never seen staged in Manila before, such as Harold Pinter’s The Lover and The Dumb Waiter (a twin bill at the Ensemble Theatre), the musical adaptation of Pedro Almodóvar’s film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and Broadway replica productions of The Book of Mormon and Hadestown. A student production of the musical Nine at the National Institute of Dramatic Art was rather memorable for its flawed use of live video and projections in the vein of European directors Jamie Lloyd and Ivo van Hove.
Longing for Filipino pusò
Yet, watching theater Down Under, I frequently ended up longing for that very Filipino brand of pusò (heart) or passion, that has defined the best of what I’ve seen in Manila—that distinctly Filipino sense of theatricality, bone-deep, utterly unembellished, incontrovertibly human.
The Producers at the Hayes Theatre, for instance, was a fine example of the Australians’ keen ear for dark comedy—Alexandra Cashmere, fresh out of college, was dynamite as the bombshell Ulla—but I left that show missing the unbridled joy and larger-than-life quality that Audie Gemora brought to his take on the role of flamboyant director Roger de Bris for Repertory Philippines’ production of this musical in 2013.
Sydney was also a good place to watch Shakespeare in the original Early Modern English, even if imbued with contemporary elements that were nevertheless effective most of the time. At the Opera House, Bell Shakespeare’s Henry V (now Henry 5) was quite admirable for its intelligent use of stillness and minimalist gestures to depict the play’s grimy fight scenes. The Seymour Centre at the University of Sydney hosted my first ever Timon of Athens, with Timon’s extravagances and foolishness transposed to the present (the title now I Hate People; or Timon of Athens). Most unforgettable was The Player Kings, Damien Ryan’s two-part, modern-dress marathon of the history plays—Richard II, both parts of Henry IV, Henry V, all three parts of Henry VI, and Richard III. Including intermissions, this was a 12-hour affair. The whole thing was markedly uneven, with some parts working better than others in their condensed versions, but Liam Gamble was a most indelible presence on that stage as Richard III (the actor himself lives with cerebral palsy).
I do think Filipino artists can learn a thing or two from Sydney’s industry, which is no Broadway—where theater has long been a tourist attraction, and seats to hits like Hamilton have occasionally been sold for over $1,000—but no Manila either, with its own set of economic and institutional problems. For example, almost all local companies in Sydney announce the lineup of their shows for the following year in advance, usually around September or October of the current year, and offer subscription packages that enable theatergoers to buy tickets to a certain number (if not all) of the shows for the forthcoming season at discounted prices (the more productions included in one’s package, the larger the markdown per show). Moreover, many companies offer subscribers the option of free ticket exchanges for the first exchange—you can transfer your ticket to another performance at no cost—provided there are seats available for the new date, and provided the ticket holder pays for the additional amount if their new seat were more expensive than the original. And student discounts are available for almost every performance.
Factoring in ancillary expenses like transportation and food, going to the theater in Manila is not exactly easy on the pockets nowadays. Simple procedures like the ones outlined above can greatly boost theatergoers’ confidence to purchase tickets way ahead of time, or encourage new and younger audiences to see their first show. Of course, some companies have made greater strides than others in making theater accessible—hats off to you, Barefoot Theatre Collaborative!—but the overall picture suggests there’s plenty more that can be done. The quest for a truly democratic theater landscape remains a work in progress.
Still, despite the pervasive issues, that landscape has also been, year after year, a constant source of pleasure and thought-provoking insight. Some of the most precious, cathartic moments of my life have been spent in the dark of the theater. Here, then, is a list of 10 to add to those moments:
When I speak of catharsis, this Guelan Luarca play immediately comes to mind. It’s about three siblings mourning the illness and subsequent death of their father; about the many forms that grief assumes in their varied lives, and what little time they each have to make sense of their loss.
In my 17 years of theatergoing, I don’t believe any other play has come closer to capturing with heart-stabbing precision the feeling of watching a loved one slowly fade away, and the existential untethering—that unsettling sense of being adrift in no man’s land—that plagues the weeks, months, even years that follow that loved one’s death. I saw this play twice, and each time exited the theater a bit of a wreck, having been compelled to revisit the final week of my own father’s life in 2017.
The first time I saw 3 Upuan at the Ateneo de Manila University was in February, with Jojit Lorenzo, JC Santos, and Martha Comia all returning from the 2024 premiere—the play, in their hands, an exercise in intellectualizing raw emotion. In October, I saw the new cast—Paolo O’Hara, Cris Pasturan, and Jasmine Curtis-Smith—their emotions collectively bigger and more in-your-face. Two different versions, each no less potent than the other: theater as spiritual reckoning. I can’t wait for the third, and fourth, and fifth iterations.
2. ‘Kisapmata’ at the Cultural Center of the Philippines
Luarca’s first new, fully staged work for the year was actually this adaptation of the Mike de Leon film from 1981, about a household ruled—and tormented—by an iron-fisted patriarch, and its members’ seeming inability to escape his grip. In my review, I hailed this Tanghalang Pilipino (TP) production best-of-the-decade material: the sensibilities of classical myth merged with the tropes of horror to exhume the proverbial rot at the core. It also felt like the collaboration of a lifetime for the TP Actors Company senior members that composed its four-person cast: Jonathan Tadioan, Lhorvie Nuevo-Tadioan, Marco Viaña, and Toni Go-Yadao, each never better, and together, a portrait of actorly generosity.
Director Toff de Venecia’s take on this Broadway musical about a pair of Siamese twins who become vaudeville celebrities was chock-full of myriad, big swings that didn’t always work. But many times, this production by The Sandbox Collective also became an artistic spectacle, especially when Mark Dalacat’s set, Carlos Siongco’s costumes, and Gabo Tolentino’s lighting cohered into a thrillingly inventive whole in particular numbers. It was also led by two terrific pairs of actresses playing the twins: Krystal Kane and Molly Langley, Tanya Manalang and Marynor Madamesila.
Above all, there was Marvin Ong, the sideshow’s “cannibal king” and loyal friend to the twins. Ong had just two songs—the jazzy Act I ensemble number The Devil You Know, and his big Act II ballad You Should Be Loved. But in those two songs, more so in the second, Ong was a vision of classical musical theater come to life: Endowed with a voice that lifted this production to theatrical heavens, his performance was the crucial piece that transported the viewer right to the heart of this tale of perverted love and wretchedness.
When I speak of pusò, I mean Mikkie Bradshaw-Volante’s Baker’s Wife in Into the Woods—arguably the splashiest theatrical event of the year, care of Theatre Group Asia and director Chari Arespacochaga at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater. The production itself was disappointingly incoherent, forcing an ill-fitting attempt at “Filipinization” upon this Stephen Sondheim musical about a potpourri of classic fairy tale characters trapped in a sort of metaverse.
But then there was Bradshaw-Volante—along with her real-life husband Nyoy as the Baker and Teetin Villanueva as Little Red Riding Hood, three beacons of truthfulness in musical theater performance this year. All warmth and wit, Bradshaw-Volante’s turn was an exquisite distillation of Sondheim’s genius, proving that there’s nothing like homegrown Pinoy talent.
In hindsight, it’s unsurprising that the year’s most genuinely profound and cerebral dissections of the Filipino identity came from Luarca, via his two new plays that premiered at the Ateneo.
Dagitab, which I caught during its transfer to the Power Mac Black Box Theater in Ayala Malls Circuit, used the avatars of two fictional Filipino academics to pick apart the ideas of love and forgiveness, devotion and revolution, as they pertain to a present shaped by the complacency and political failures of an entire, still-living generation. The play is about writers, sure—and the joys and pains that a life shaped around the written word entails. But, by the end, it had also posed the inescapable, rhetorical question: What is the point of all this writing when it shuns an honest reckoning with the ghosts of our past? In other words, how long can the comfortable middle class delude themselves into thinking they are fighting the noble fight and resisting the powers that be—when they can’t even let go of the bourgeois trappings of their daily lives? Playing the couple in the most spectacularly artless manner possible: Jojit Lorenzo and Agot Isidro, the latter making her long-overdue return to the stage after the previous decade’s Changing Partners and Rabbit Hole.
In August, I was invited to attend the final pre-opening rehearsal of Quomodo Desolata Es? Isang Dalamhati—Luarca and Jerry Respeto’s new translation and adaptation of Nick Joaquin’s A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino. In that state, the production was already ready to open—and what a show! “Joaquin was now both chronicler and prophet,” I wrote, a nod to how this adaptation laid bare the kinds of values that supposedly made, or un-made, a Filipino, by refracting our shared personhood through the lens of history. It was also, in my view, the year’s best-designed show, all of its creative elements working in wondrous harmony, evincing a confident, sensible understanding of so-called Filipino-ness.
6. Two ‘small’ plays
I’m taking a leaf from my colleague Arturo Hilado here in celebrating what he terms “small theater”: the ones often sidelined by buzzier “mainstream” fare.
The first was Nelsito Gomez’s adaptation of the Greek tragedy Electra, officially titled Elecktra After Sophocles. Gomez is a busy, prolific, imaginative man who is clearly interested in asking big questions for the stage—he’s a blood relative to Luarca, in this sense. His Elecktra, the acting thesis production of lead performer Dippy Arceo, had the exact pulse of ancient, blood-drenched myth, even if written in today’s English: one of those plays that seemed intent on not letting the viewer breathe from start to end. Arceo was an electrifying Elecktra, and had formidable sparring partners in Dani Roque (Chrysothemis) and an appropriately intense Issa Litton (Clytemnestra).
On the opposite end of the emotional scale was Boxstage Manila’s Sala sa Pito—my favorite surprise of the year, if surprises mean that overwhelming desire to jump up from one’s seat in applause by curtain call. Directed by Dudz Teraña, this production of the late George de Jesus III’s adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde was the paragon of restraint and tonal control. It also starred three of my favorite flesh-and-blood creations of the year, from Yesh Burce, JP Estaras, and the sensational Karyl Oliva as a Bisaya bar girl who’s allergic to nonsense.
Gomez again, this time teaming up with Basti Artadi (of Wolfgang fame) to create what Emil Hofileña rightfully called “a thrilling, unholy marriage of theater and heavy metal.” The subject: the German playwright Goethe’s interpretation of the legend of Faust, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for all sorts of earthly gratification.
I confess to having been disoriented by the heavily stylized singing in this rock opera. However, once I got over that, it was indeed a most thrilling night at the theater—what Luarca described as “total theater,” a show animated so completely by a sense of “extreme theatricality,” and one that left you gobsmacked and “inexplicably shookt,” to use the Filipino slang. High drama, show-stopping vocals, knockout visuals, and a bewitching Maita Ponce as the devil Mephistopheles front and center.
8. Best singing of the year
Besides Ong’s You Will Be Loved, there’s Shaira Opsimar’s Halik ni Hudas in Si Faust (quite apt, for a show about the cosmic [mis]fortunes of mere mortals, that she hit a series of notes bordering on inhuman); and from the song cycle We Aren’t Kids Anymore, woven into a poetic, contemplative whole by director Rem Zamora for Barefoot Theatre Collaborative, Maronne Cruz’s Turn the Page and Gab Pangilinan’s Faking Cool.
9. The comedians of the year
Many would argue that comedy is a tougher skill to master. These six performers made it all look like a walk in the park: In Let’s Do Lunch, Ash Nicanor as a TikToker housemaid who may as well sideline as a party magician; in Ateng, Jason Barcial as a doltish, easily manipulated parlorista; in Shrek the Musical, Alfredo Reyes as Lord Farquaad (nuff said!) and Topper Fabregas as Donkey with a hypnotic, almost-robotic speech; in Gregoria Lakambini, Heart Puyong as the ultimate raketera ensemble player; in Delia D., John Lapus as drag mother to the story’s drag queens—a role without its solo musical moment, but which the actor nonetheless elevated to comic heights with the barest of noises.
10. Five technical standouts
Let me end this piece by saluting five of my favorite technical achievements of the year: One, Marco Viaña’s costumes for Gregoria Lakambini, which deserve to be walked on the brightest runways. Two, from that same musical, the song Buwan, Buwan—proper ear worm, hip, romantic, sexy. Three, Gabriel Ramos and Dexter Lansang’s original music and sound design for Via Dolorosa, the play itself a timely, impassioned, and erudite explication of the Palestinian question (or why the genocide in Gaza and the ever-increasing violence in the West Bank will never be a “complicated,” two-sided issue). Finally, Joyce Garcia’s projections for Si Faust and Bar Boys: The Musical, in both instances showcasing the expansive imaginative possibilities that this art form could take when given careful consideration.
In October, GA Fallarme, who essentially pioneered the field of theater projection design in the Philippines, passed away suddenly. Fallarme’s body of work included his Gawad Buhay-winning design for Pingkian: Isang Musikal—mind-tickling in its use of abstract images—as well as his blend of cityscapes for Repertory Philippines’ I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change. In Fallarme’s absence, it’s now up to Garcia and other designers like Steven Tansiongco, JM Jimenez, Bene Manaois, Teia Contreras, and Joee Mejias to ensure the art form continues to flourish and evolve in never-less-than exciting ways. Here’s to the ones who paved the way, and the promise of an exhilarating future!
