Last January 10, the newly formed Manila Society of Theater Reviewers (MSTR) handed out its inaugural awards celebrating the theatrical works that opened in Metro Manila in 2025. It was a great day for Areté, the thriving arts hub of Ateneo de Manila University: Four productions that it (co-)produced collectively won seven of the 10 categories up for grabs, in addition to a handful of honorable mentions.
Best Production of a Play, Best New Filipino Work, and Best Achievement in Design went to Quomodo Desolata Es? Isang Dalamhati, the new translation (by Jerry Respeto) and adaptation (by Guelan Luarca) of the seminal Nick Joaquin play A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino. Those who missed this production’s two-weekend run in August 2025 still have a chance to catch it when it returns to Ateneo’s Hyundai Hall beginning January 30, 2026.
Luarca was named Best Director both for his work on Quomodo and 3 Upuan (an Areté co-production with Scene Change), which also took home Best Lead Performance in a Play for Jojit Lorenzo.
Meanwhile, Nelsito Gomez and Wolfgang lead vocalist Basti Artadi’s Si Faust—a rock opera based on the Faustian legend, as dramatized by the German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—bagged Best Production of a Musical, as well as Best Lead Performance in a Musical for Maita Ponce’s electrifying take on the devil Mephistopheles.
The three other categories won by shows not produced by Areté were Best Featured Performance in a Play (Benedix Ramos for Dagitab, Luarca’s adaptation of the titular 2014 Cinemalaya film by Giancarlo Abrahan, now produced by Scene Change); Best Featured Performance in a Musical (Marvin Ong for The Sandbox Collective’s Side Show); and the Emerging Talent Award (Ramos again, for his impressive body of work last year, which also included his turns in Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s Bar Boys: The Musical and Sandbox’s Next to Normal). Further attesting to Ateneo’s status as the place to be for theater in the capital region’s north these days, Bar Boys also ran at Areté’s Hyundai Hall—a hugely successful engagement from October to November—while Dagitab originated at the university’s Fine Arts Black Box in July.
At this point, I should disclose that I’m not only a voting member of MSTR, but also its cofounder and convener. So, with absolutely no hint of bias whatsoever, I’ll say that anyone who painstakingly followed the theatrical landscape last year would probably agree that this was a pretty strong set of honorees: works that pushed the boundaries of local theater, championed original Filipino playwriting and music-making, and put on stark display the expansive and distinctly Pinoy emotive and dramatic capacities of our terrific artists.
The impetus to do the hard work of actually forming MSTR came from our founder Nikki Francisco, editor-in-chief and lead reviewer of TheaterFansManila.com (TFM), back in the first quarter of last year. (Vlad Bunoan of ABS-CBN News Online had voiced a similar idea to me separately.)
And really, what spurred each of us to think about collectivizing, in a manner of speaking, was the fact that there was: 1) no existing guild or association for reviewers covering the Manila theater scene, despite the thriving landscape, and 2) no dedicated awards for theater handed out by the reviewers themselves. That “Manila theater is alive!” is a proclamation I’ve been hearing for over a good decade already. In the early 2010s, it truly felt like a new era for the industry: A new generation of artists came of age, more new companies were being established, and new, frequently innovative work was sprouting everywhere. The few of us who were writing regularly back then did what we could to document these developments and trends, spending our weekends and even weekday nights hopping from venue to venue—but in the end, any assessment of the year as a whole was done on an individual basis.
In terms of organized award-giving bodies whose outcomes (or processes) don’t lead to more questions than satisfied silences, Manila has the Gawad Buhay—now on its 16th year and handed out by the Philippine Legitimate Stage Artists Group or PHILSTAGE—as well as the relatively newer LEAF (or Live Entertainment, Arts, and Festivals) Awards. (Disclosure: I have been part of the jury for the former since 2015.)
The gap that MSTR is filling
So perhaps the simple American or British analogy can be most helpful in illustrating the gap that MSTR is filling. In New York and London, you have the Tonys and Oliviers—both industry awards, whose voting bases include a significant proportion composed of members of the industry or theater professionals themselves. (Members of media are also among the voters, but they are a stark minority.) Then you have the awards handed out by theater critics, reviewers, journalists, and/or publishers: the Drama Desks, Outer Critics Circle, and New York Drama Critics Circle for New York; the Critics Circle Theatre Awards for London. There are other awards, such as the Lucille Lortel for Off-Broadway, or the Evening Standard Theatre Awards given out by the English newspaper The Standard, but the above examples should suffice for analogy.
MSTR is intended to be the journalists’ or reviewers’ or critics’ awards—depending on the possessive noun one is comfortable using—which has hitherto been missing in the Manila theater industry.
We started this endeavor without any pretense to so-called exhaustive assessment, or that we could watch every show that opens in Manila and subsequently hand out a “be-all and end-all” awards. None of us nine members during the organization’s first year were—or are—full-time theater reviewers (to my knowledge, no such person exists in the Philippines). So the internal directive was simple: to watch as much as we could and write as much as we could. The eligibility criteria we agreed upon accounted for these limitations: At least three members should have seen a particular production for it to be deemed eligible for the awards, and that production should have played at least four performances. In the end, we still managed to arrive at a roster of 66 eligible productions.
As for the awards categories—there are only 10—the idea is one of celebration, rather than competition, and we looked to the UK’s Critics Circle Theatre Awards in particular for inspiration. Hence, the absence of “nominees”; we went straight to voting for and announcing the winners and the honorable mentions, as a way of commemorating the best of the best.
Our production categories don’t distinguish between Filipino and non-Filipino material, nor between professional and university companies. (Gawad Buhay, in contrast, considers only new productions from its 16 professional member companies.) This rule is not meant to disadvantage smaller-scale and non-professional productions, contrary to what some Redditors would have you think, but rather, embodies our belief in the capacity of these small, non-professional productions and organizations to be just as good—if not better—than the pros. (In 2019, for example, my choices for best musical for my yearend roundup for the Philippine Daily Inquirer were Ateneo Blue Repertory’s Spring Awakening and the thesis musical Hanggang Isang Araw at the University of the Philippines Diliman, and for best Filipino play, Alpha Kappa Omega by Tanghalang Ateneo.)
Flagship award
We also established the category Best New Filipino Work as a kind of flagship award—mainly to encourage Filipino playwrights, composers, and librettists to make more new and original work. And the Emerging Talent Award, as the name implies, is intended to reward breakthrough talent and work, including from individuals not normally associated with the fields they’re being recognized for. This year’s honorable mentions, for instance, included Sarah Facuri—an established actress, yes, but in Si Faust, apparently also a highly imaginative set designer (Facuri previously designed the set for Company of Actors in Streamlined Theatre’s Uncle Jane in 2023, but Si Faust was inarguably her breakout moment).
For Outstanding Contribution to Theater, we decided to posthumously honor two artists who passed away suddenly in 2025, each of them still with shows that were only about to (re-)open: GA Fallarme, who had basically become synonymous with the field of projection design, and George de Jesus III, one of those rare playwrights who seemed to have no problem juggling and balancing different moods and genres—and oftentimes within the same work (see Maniacal, Wanted: Male Boarders, Sala sa Pito).
In hindsight, voting on the awards was the easiest part of the journey of building MSTR. We—that is to say, Nikki Francisco, Esquire Magazine’s Christa De La Cruz, and I, plus TFM’s Frida Tan as our biggest cheerleader—have also had to put up a functional website from scratch; create logos and visuals for the organization, and graphics for the awards (thank you, Canva!); and become sort of overnight social media managers to kickstart and sustain MSTR’s presence on Facebook and Instagram, among other labor-intensive, behind-the-scenes tasks. To be clear, none of us are Gen Z, designers by trade, or self-professed techies.
In his 2025 yearend roundup, MSTR member Gibbs Cadiz—arguably the one voice Manila theater always looks forward to hearing from every end of the year—celebrated the fact that “there are enough of our species now… to form a guild.” Only by ensuring that local theater “is chronicled properly, both honored and scrutinized through sustained documentation and lively discourse,” Cadiz wrote, can we collectively “insist that, in the larger scheme of things, theater is a civic act, and that it matters.”
Indeed, MSTR is meant to be more than just an award-giving body. As the “About Us” section of our website states, the group aims not just to honor the best theatrical works of the year through its annual awards, but, more importantly, to promote and support the capital region’s theater industry by providing “consistent, publicly accessible theater criticism”—and thus “elevate discourse on theater among industry practitioners, journalists, academics, and the general theatergoing public.” In short, to foster more meaningful, insightful, and in-depth conversation on theater through the medium of the written word.
To Cadiz’s assessment, I’d add that this insistence on writing constantly about the theater—regardless of whether it’s a rave or a pan—is also a healthy way of preventing the proliferation of yes men and sycophants. Far too often, I’ve heard fellow theater journalists, especially younger and newer ones, say they’d rather not write about a show than write a negative review of it. There might be an economic argument to that, of course—maybe a bad review will shoo prospective ticket buyers away in an already-precarious economy—but nobody, least of all paying audiences, deserve to see a bad show. A review that doesn’t shy away from speaking the truth is the least—and also the most vital—thing theater journalists and critics can contribute to helping the scene grow, and historicizing its peaks and not-so-fine moments.
Unsurprisingly, there are theater practitioners who would disagree with the arguments above, and would rather ban or blacklist reviewers from their shows than make space for fair and level-headed discussion. Yet, it’s impossible to overlook how the civic act of theater is one that can be kept alive only through both inventive, intelligent artistry—and inventive, intelligent criticism. It’s not baseless to say that theater makers and theater reviewers all want the same thing (at least, I know I do): an honest-to-goodness good show.
Let me end by appropriating the words of film critic David Ehrlich, from his introductory remarks at this year’s New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner: “It’s not what critics and artists want from each other, but what we give to each other that matters. Yes, we give you awards in return for you giving us things to write about, but really, what we give to each other are reasons to continue giving a shit about the things we love, and the courage to insist that the things we love are still capable of giving us something meaningful in return.” What’s an honest review—or any expression of honesty, really—if not the purest expression of love?
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