PDI Review: 'Mabining Mandirigma' by Tanghalang Pilipino

Confession: I was never a fan of this musical. Right after the first act of the 2015 version, I wanted to leave out of boredom. I always thought it was a musical that didn't behave like a musical--that musicality was its very weakness. Not anymore. I might just see this a second time. The dotnet version of my review here.

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Monique Wilson's Mabini: Why today is the perfect time to see it

Act I finale of "Mabining Mandirigma" during the press preview performance.

Finally, "Mabining Mandirigma" sounds like an actual musical.

Which is to say the current staging--the Tanghalang Pilipino warhorse's fourth run at the Cultural Center of the Philippines--is far and away its best version yet.

The reason is mostly because of Ejay Yatco, who, in the span of six years, has accumulated a body of work that includes the hit Sugarfree musical "Sa Wakas," the original song cycle "Real-Life Fairytales," a luminous "Spring Awakening" at Ateneo de Manila University this year, and even a stint as the piano-playing double to Teroy Guzman's Beethoven in Red Turnip Theater's "33 Variations."

Yatco now takes over from composer Joed Balsamo as "Mabini's" musical director--and under his ministrations, the show has transformed from what sounded like capable but weakly sung play-with-music into a glorious aural spectacle.

The singing here is full-bodied and precise, which only further highlights just how difficult Balsamo's music actually is. The score is filled with odd rhythms, dissonant tones, lengthy passages in counterpoint--all of which the performers execute with newfound clarity.

Woman as titular hero

Part of the reason must also be the new blood teeming in the ensemble of this "steampunk" dramatization of the life of Apolinario Mabini, which initially hit the headlines for its casting of a woman as the titular hero. (Only seven of the 21 cast members from the musical's 2015 premiere remain.)

Phi Palmos is now the young Mabini--and affectingly so. Meynard Peñalosa is the feathered-and-frocked Mark Twain, transforming one of the musical's dives into meta and irony into a true diva moment. Paw Castillo is the surprise standout in his new role as Mabini's bumpkinish assistant Pepe.

And then there's the new adult Mabini--Monique Wilson, who returns to Philippine musical theater after playing Anna Leonowen's in "The King and I" at Resorts World Manila seven years ago.

Compared to Mabini's past, Wilson is neither more meticulous with the role's physicality nor vocally more impressive. But what she brings to the table is the present-day, thinking Filipino's Mabini--an acting intensity that fleshes out the character's tiredness and frustrations, only the heartless wouldn't be moved to tears at some point.

Wilson is the embodiment of dignified defeat. Her Mabini's battles with the powers that be are obviously futile from the get-go, which makes her second-act lamentation, titled--quite accurately--"Mahirap bang Mag-isip Bilang Pilipino?" (sung immediately after the assassination of Antonio Luna), an inadvertent battle cry for our times.

To some extent, you can even say "Mabini" has returned at the perfect time, the country halfway through an administration of lies and cronyism. The musical, then, becomes a sort of looking back to where it all started--to where the power balance in this modern country was first manipulated by its own citizens to favor the rich and privileged. Watching those scenes where the first Filipino politicians lick the feet of a foreign state, you would almost think they were depictions of the Philippines circa 2019.

Inside the theater, "Mabini" has now unlocked splendid-work-of-art status. But right after curtain call, it remains, more than ever, a reminder that the fight for justice in its myriad forms is far from over.

PDI Review: 'Madagascar: A Musical Adventure' by Atlantis Imaginarium Young Theatre

My review of "Madagascar" in today's paper. Watching this, I felt like I was in one of those disgustingly extravagant children's parties in Corinthian Gardens or something. Dotnet link here.

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Atlantis' 'Madagascar' is polished and effortless, but...

From start to end, "Madagascar: A Musical Adventure" looks polished and effortless, progressing from scene to scene with professional ease. Yet, its 60-minute running time somehow feels too long.

It's the material that saddles this debut production of Atlantis Imaginarium Young Theatre--Kevin del Aguila's rote, scene-by-scene book and George Noriega and Joel Someillan's unremarkable score of a so-so adventure story.

The basis is the 2005 Dreamworks animated film about four unlikely animal friends--a lion, a zebra, a hippopotamus and a giraffe--who escape from Manhattan's Central Park Zoo but end up shipwrecked on the titular African island nation.

How do you put that on the stage, anyway? That's always the major challenge faced by stage-to-screen adaptations of stories about anthropomorphized animals or nonhuman beings. 

There has to be a perfect blend of spectacle and showmanship: Now you're trying to convince an audience that these animals are actually worth caring about--that these animals are just as real as they are. The world being conjured here must be big enough to metaphorically surpass the spatial limitations of theater, and its inhabitants small enough to be recognizably human.

You don't get that from the production directed by Steven Conde. It is unable to override the weaknesses of its material--not in the way that, say, its mother company's productions of "Carrie" and "The Addams Family" did back in 2013.

Thus, "Madagascar" has a two-dimensional quality to it. There isn't a fictive world being created here, but a show that is very much conscious--too conscious--of its being a show. It feels like elaborate children's party entertainment, starring grown-ups in expensive costumes.

Comedic highlight

Another fault of the material: It allows for far too few performers onstage. A comedic highlight of the movie is that entire troop of eccentric lemurs--how do you translate that to the stage?

"Madagascar" is also too dependent on audience interaction. (It is marketed as a children's musical, after all.) What happens, then, when the children in the audience aren't participative, or--as was the case during the performance we caught--there are too few children in the audience?

There's also the actor playing the literal star of the show, Alex the Lion, whose inborn qualities as a savage beast in need of animal flesh for food begin to surface after the shipwreck, causing a temporary (and rapidly resolved) rift between him and all the other characters.

In a word, Markus Mann doesn't cut it as Alex--he has cardboard charisma and is unable to carry the show on his shoulders (though he is forced to don a massive, maned headpiece that looks like it drowned in glue).

Mann plays Alex like Rum Tum Tugger from "Cats," that the production's focus actually shifts to Nelsito Gomez as Marty the Zebra, the unfortunate victim of Alex's hunger. In a late and underutilized appearance, George Schulze also commands attention and elicits guffaws as the outlandish king of the lemurs.

Chalk all this up to necessary birthing pains for a new player in an already-small industry, then. For an hourlong kiddie musical, "Madagascar" isn't exactly a show that truly pops and entertains and stays in the memory.

Ultimately, everything boils down to choosing the right material. After all, productions don't become full-blown productions overnight; they begin as scripts.  

PDI Feature: The Sondheim musicals of 2019

Who's a Sondheim nerd? The website version here.

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Stephen Sondheim is coming to Manila--three times

Late post: The cast of "Company" at curtain call.

Not the man himself, of course, who turns 90 in March and whose theater pieces have long endured a reputation for being technically difficult. The critic Richard Corliss said it best in Time magazine: "His melodies [are] meant to challenge the ear, not soothe it," and "his lyrics are often so complex, they have to be heard twice."

But for a year that has largely relied on reruns of musical theater--by December, 11 productions in all, including the returns of "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Cats"--the near-synchronous arrival of three new local productions of musicals by the Broadway icon is as much occasion for ironic incredulity as it is cause for celebration.

Opening within four weeks are Upstart Productions' "Company" (Sept. 13-22), Philippine Opera Company's "Passion" (Sept. 14-29) and Atlantis Theatrical Entertainment Group's "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" (Oct. 11-27).

All-Filipino staging

The last Sondheim show in Manila was the international tour of "West Side Story" at The Theatre at Solaire two years ago. But you'd have to backtrack to 2015 for the last all-Filipino staging of his work--Upstart's "Into the Woods."

Then, it's all the way back to the start of the decade, with Atlantis' "A Little Night Music" and the now-defunct Theater Down South's "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" in 2010. And a year earlier, Repertory Philippines' (Rep) "Sweeney Todd."

Atlantis now takes on "Sweeney Todd"--the tale of an unjustly incarcerated barber who, teaming up with a pie-shop owner who's secretly in love with him, goes on a clandestine, murderous rampage involving meat pies in Victorian London.

Bobby Garcia directs this 40th anniversary production at The Theatre at Solaire, with Jett Pangan as the barber and Lea Salonga as the shop owner Mrs. Lovett. (In November, they will do the musical's Singaporean premiere at the Sands Theatre, Marina Bay Sands.)

Upstart tackles "Company"--a "concept musical" exploring marriage and the tangles of committed, adult relationships. At its center is Bobby, a 35-year-old unmarried New Yorker, orbited by five couples and three other women.

Locally premiered by Rep in 1997, "Company" will play at the Maybank Performing Arts Theater, Bonifacio Global City, with OJ Mariano as Bobby and Topper Fabregas directing.

Opening a day after "Company" is "Passion," which marks the last of Sondheim's seven competitive Tony Awards as composer and lyricist.

The musical, adapted from Ettore Scola's 1981 film "Passione d'Amore," concerns the destructive obsession of an ailing woman over a soldier in 19th-century Italy.

"Passion," also premiered in Manila by Rep in 1996, will run at the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium, RCBC Plaza, starring Sheila Valderrama-Martinez as the woman, Fosca, and directed by Robbie Guevara.

Incidentally, Upstart's "Company" marks the latest Sondheim collaboration between two pillars of the country's English-language musical theater: Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo and Michael Williams, currently co-artistic directors of Resorts World Manila's Full House Theater Company.

Lauchengco-Yulo's last stab at Sondheim was her Gawad Buhay-winning turn as Mrs. Lovett in Rep's 2009 "Sweeney Todd," 27 years after playing Sweeney's daughter Joanna in the musical's 1982 Manila premiere, also by Rep.

In 1996, Lauchengco-Yulo was Fosca in Rep's "Passion." Opposite her as the soldier, Giorgio, was Williams, who would co-direct the 2009 "Sweeney Todd" with Rep co-founder Baby Barredo.

But "Passion" wasn't their first appearance together in a Sondheim musical; it was in the 1992 Manila premiere of "Into the Woods," whose maze-like story involves beloved fairy-tale characters by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm living through the consequences of their purported happily-ever-afters. Williams was Jack (of the Beanstalk fame); Lauchengco-Yulo was The Witch.

In 2007, the two returned to "the Woods" in a production directed by Rito Asilo for New Voice Company. This time, Williams and Lauchengco-Yulo played the Baker and the Baker's wife, respectively, whose quest to have a child ties together the other tales in the musical.

Now, in "Company," Lauchengco-Yulo returns to the role of Joanne--her 11 o'clock number "The Ladies Who Lunch" immortalized by Elaine Stritch and Patti LuPone--22 years after first playing that part in the Rep production. Playing her stage husband is--guess who?--Williams.

PDI Feature: Twin Bill Theater and 'Dancing Lessons'

Think of Twin Bill as the young Red Turnip. The website version of my piece here.

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'Dancing Lessons' between man with Asperger's and injured Broadway dancer

The cast of "Dancing Lessons."

Twin Bill Theater returns this month with the Asian premiere of Mark St. Germain's "Dancing Lessons," a two-hander between a man with Asperger's syndrome and an injured Broadway dancer who becomes his instructor.

The play marks the first time founder Francis Matheu assumes directorial duties for a fully staged production by the 7-year-old company. It also signals an end to Twin Bill's two-year hiatus of sorts.

After staging Margaret Edson's "Wit" in 2017, "we had to slow down [and] find the direction of the company financially," Matheu says. His cofounder and twin brother Joseph had his commitments to lighting and sound design company Hues n Cues and to GMA Network's "Eat Bulaga!" as the noontime show's lighting designer.

Meanwhile, Matheu collaborated on a doctoral research project on applied theater and climate change. His research took him to Samar and Leyte, as well as the Canadian cities of Vancouver, Victoria and Winnipeg, where he toured and presented the project as a theatrical piece titled "Muro/Puro."

"When I got back [to the Philippines] last November, I immediately worked on connecting with international universities and conferences for possible exchange," Matheu says. In fact, his proposal was accepted for an exhibit at the SOAS University of London Philippine Studies division, but he turned down the invitation due to lack of time in obtaining a visa and funding.

Third season

And so, onward to Twin Bill's third season.

The company's past four productions have all been about "provoking minds for constructive societal revolution," as Matheu puts it. "Since 2016, we have [utilized] theater to raise awareness on topics that people in general often find too taboo to bring up over lunch or during Sunday family gatherings."

The subjects of Twin Bill's plays, all staged in intimate venues, have ranged from suicide (Andrew Hinderaker's "Suicide, Incorporated," 2016) to the reconciliation between art and religion (Aaron Posner's "My Name Is Asher Lev," 2017).

"After 'Wit,' I was already on the move looking for plays for our next season," Matheu says. "I chanced upon 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time'--[Simon Stephens' acclaimed adaptation of the Mark Haddon novel about a boy with Asperger's]--[and] fell in love with how it was originally staged, only to learn it wasn't available for licensing yet."

A further Google search led him to St. Germain's play, which he hopes will help shed light on how it really is to live with an autism spectrum disorder. A talkback with an expert will follow every performance.

Randy Villarama plays Ever, a geosciences professor with Asperger's who seeks a dance instructor to literally help him get through an awards dinner; Jill Peña plays Senga, the dancer whose Broadway career is sidelined by an injury.

"One of my professors said that when a director casts the right actors, 50 percent of the work is already done," Matheu says. In choosing his actors, he set three criteria: versatility, depth and experience. "The actors should have the capacity to 'be' Ever and Senga. Little details of this and that have to manifest onstage."

And also, Matheu adds, "talent is not enough. Theater has always been and will always be a collaboration of expertise. [So] for 'Dancing Lessons,' I looked for hardworking team players. I refuse to work with people who have a 'this is my design, no one can touch it' attitude."

The creative team of "Dancing Lessons" includes Kayla Teodoro (scenery), JM Cabling (choreography), Joseph Matheu (lights), Arvy Dimaculangan (sound) and Nicole Garcia (video graphics).

PDI Opinion: 'Cleaning up' Manila

New op-ed in Inquirer Opinion! Website version here.

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'Cleaning up' Manila

Ascending to the mayoral throne once occupied by plunder convict Joseph Estrada, Isko Moreno pledged to clean up the city of Manila and restore it to glory worthy of a sepia-tinted postcard of the past.

If you happened to be outdoors or aboard public transportation in Manila during those first few, fledgling days of the Moreno administration, you might have seen up close and personal what the rest of the country only marveled at through photographs in the papers or social media: the streets of Divisoria and Avenida suddenly awash in airy brightness--the kind begot not by a change in weather, but by the absence of people.

Cleaning up the filth that filled the gutters and sidewalks is one thing. "Cleaning up" the people whose livelihoods depended on their very presence on these streets is another.

And yet, the general reaction one gleaned from Facebook and Twitter--at least, from the bubble that constituted my social media sphere--was one of glee and relief. Thank the good mayor for getting rid of these street vendors; now we're a step closer to sanitizing Manila!

I've heard this very same logic before. And you, dear reader, probably have, too. Not too long ago, someone deemed radical and "of the people" also won a political post--a most powerful one--and promised to rid this country of those he deemed eyesores to society. That man, you might bloody well know, has made good of that promise.

No street vendors have been unjustly gunned down in broad daylight, of course. But while you laud Moreno's efforts from the comforts of home, silently cheering as you watch footage of this "clean-up drive" from your smart phone or laptop, probably enjoying a warm meal or ensconced in your soft bed, scores of living, breathing Filipinos have actually been rendered jobless. What you might view as necessary birthing pains for the success of this new government in reality translate to families suddenly bereft of breadwinners, informal workers cut off from their only sources of income, parents now clueless as to where to get the money for the day's next meal.

Isn't that a kind of slow, uncertainty-filled death? This isn't even a metaphor when you're talking about people who don't have any health insurance or savings in the bank--people who literally survive on a day-to-day basis.

And all for what? More sidewalk parking spaces? Wider roads for cars to inundate? More people in malls (which, by the way, are real urban eyesores)?

Moreno has said he isn't antipoor; he is, after all, of the poor. He has also provided some justification for this "clean-up drive"--for example, the showy arrest of so-called organizers who extort rent from these street vendors. But his drastic actions have negatively impacted only the very poor people he claims to come from.

The bigger picture reveals only a disturbing lack of foresight. No, not "foresight" in the context of long-term plans and pipeline projects, such as relocating the "cleaned-up" vendors to some other place, but "foresight" as in: Immediately after being "cleaned up," what are these vendors supposed to do? Sit on the streets? Beg for money? Starve?

That is the kind of thoughtless governance the privileged class has apparently equated to bravery, to making a stand, to promise. The choice of language is also telling: Just listen to how we've talked of "cleaning up" Manila, as if these street vendors were mere parasites that must be scrubbed off the body of the city.

And like parasites insufficiently eradicated, "babalik lang 'yan," the more cynical commenters on social media have said of the evicted street vendors. "They will just return." True enough, the other day, a news bit showed some vendors--already back in their vacated spots--scrambling to pack up their wares after receiving word that the mayor was set to visit their area. If this "clean-up" were really a serious policy, how were the vendors back so quickly? Who enabled their return? Who's in cahoots with them and warned them of the mayor's imminent arrival?

There are more questions than there are answers here. But for now, this: So long as leadership isn't grounded on inclusive, people-centric tenets and on policies that seriously consider the plight of the poor, we'll forever be cleaning up this city of its less-privileged inhabitants--and the ones with privilege can keep believing that's genuine change.