In a span of 18 years, Manila has seen four different productions of Spring Awakening, the 2007 Tony Award winner for Best Musical, about 19th-century German adolescents discovering their sexualities in a repressive, conservative society—and famously set against a crackling alt-rock score.
In 2009, Chari Arespacochaga directed the musical’s Manila premiere for Atlantis Productions, with a limber lead turn from Joaquin Valdes as the “radical,” intellectual-minded Melchior, and excellent support from Nicco Manalo as the ever-anxious Moritz and Bea Garcia as the outcast Ilse.
Andrei Pamintuan directed the second iteration in 2013 with a largely student cast for Ateneo Blue Repertory (BlueRep)—and featuring a standout Maronne Cruz as Ilse.
Six years later, in 2019, BlueRep took a second stab at the musical, this time with Missy Maramara at the helm. The result was, to my mind, that year’s best musical—and one of the decade’s finest pieces of theater: a “revelatory and lucidly mounted production” that became a perceptive psychological excavation of the troubled adolescent psyche.
Now comes version four, with Pamintuan revisiting the piece as director for The Sandbox Collective’s 2026 season opener. In a word, it is handsomely mounted, and makes for a more-than-decent introduction to the material for first-timers.
The look, for one, is ravishing. Set designer Wika Nadera has situated the musical sort of underground, the roots of a tree prominently stretching down from above, the walls a forbidding brutalist gray—an apt illustration of society’s relentless effort to literally bury these teenagers and their sexual awakenings, if not their voices and stories. In this cold, subterranean world, lighting designer D Cortezano conjures a masterclass in illuminating actors in darkness—while making them look like they’re in actual darkness. It’s intelligent, imaginative work, and it also gives the production some truly stunning moments with silhouettes.
The sound, too, is excellent. The acoustics are fairly clean for a production working in a new, unfamiliar venue, even if the mix during ensemble numbers could be clearer with the solos. But, more significantly, there’s Ejay Yatco’s musical direction: This is the third time that Yatco’s tackling the same task (after having worked on both BlueRep versions), and here, with a live band onstage, he has assembled what will surely go down as one of the year’s best-sounding ensembles—while also making many parts of the score sound new with smart, seemingly small choices in orchestration (an EDM thump in I Believe, wisp of cymbals in The Guilty Ones, to name two).
In short, the overall design not only provides a cohesive aesthetic to the production, but also allows it to evoke its subtexts more naturally: the harshness of the world rendered immediate, its frigidity and moral smugness made palpable. At the same time, through the visuals and soundscape, the gentleness of youthful yearning and the fragility of innocence are made less distant and more apparent.
Where this production comes up short is in consistently conjuring a genuine sense of both discovery and tragedy through its human elements. While Spring Awakening follows a sort of barkada, with each member grappling with their own teenage problems (some unsurprisingly more fleshed-out in the text than others), its focus is primarily on the stories of Melchior, whose natural curiosity distinguishes him from the pack; Moritz, Melchior’s dear friend, a walking cache of hormones waiting to burst; and Wendla, basically a pubescent Maria Clara in German frock. And because there are two pairs of actors for both Melchior and Moritz, the fate of each show, as it turns out, rests in who’s playing whom, and opposite whom.
The Melchiors are a study in ideological opposites. Nacho Tambunting, bursting with impregnable self-assurance, is more removed observer than actual denizen of this backward world; it’s as if he’s so over the conservativeness of the whole town and can’t wait for it to burn down. There isn’t a whiff of doubt in him. Alex Diaz, on the other hand—buff man that he is in real life—has miraculously managed to make himself small, convincingly evoking his teenaged character’s natural curiosity and, towards the end, helplessness (Melchior may be a smart-ass, but he’s still just a clueless, impulsive adolescent). It’s through Diaz that we come to care for Melchior as he formally stumbles into the adult world in all its goodness and cruelty; it’s also Diaz’s Melchior who feels like he actually laughs and worries and wonders and errs and lives in that world.
The Melchiors thus define the musical’s emotional and narrative rhythms, as dictated by their interactions with Wendla. Here, she is played by Sheena Belarmino as virginal girl almost from start to end, until that one number (Whispering) that finally permits her character to scream to and at the world. This approach already strips the character of her own agency—she appears not to have a clue on how the world works, nor any shred of burgeoning bodily desire; her un-inquisitiveness is tragically innate, a psychological stumbling block. So, when Diaz performs opposite Belarmino, it’s at least a show of equals (sort of): two young people discovering things, feelings, longings, realities alongside each other. When it’s Tambunting with Belarmino, though, it’s like a grown man with a fixed mind next to a kid, full stop, and those crucial, sexually charged scenes (that I’ll leave unspoiled) acquire a coarse, unwelcome shade of outright nasty creepiness.
The Moritzes, on the other hand, are stark contrasts in just about every aspect. Nic Chien mistakes busy, noisy physical exertion for a truthful portrayal of pubescent anxiety and despair (unfortunately, he remains on that plane from start to end). But in Omar Uddin, the production finds a Moritz of limitless authenticity and pathos, his electrifying, full-bodied performance jolting the show flesh-and-dripping-blood alive and granting it, at long last, a much-needed sense of tragedy. (It’s worth mentioning that Uddin, all of 18 years old, is fast becoming one of our most reliable young actors, his Moritz only the latest addition to an exemplary body of work that already includes fine, empathetic turns in Bar Boys: The Musical, Next to Normal, Delia D., and Quomodo Desolata Es? Isang Dalamhati).
Rather critically, the Moritzes influence how the second act unfolds: Now expelled from school for unfounded reasons—and consequently banished from home by his unforgiving father—Moritz finds a moment of brief respite with Ilse (Jam Binay) before dying by suicide, his death the first in a string of tragedies that befall the protagonists. With Uddin, the whole second act completely makes sense as tragedy (his chemistry with Binay is key), and rightfully earns the audiences’ tears.
At the end of the day, then, the actors make the play—which is to say all roads, it would seem, lead to Pamintuan. Like I said, this Spring Awakening is handsomely mounted—but perhaps to a fault. Mirroring Tambunting’s Melchior, Pamintuan seems to have returned to the musical with a more cynical outlook. And depending on whom one catches, one might find much of neither rapture nor rupture in a show that’s so clearly about both.
Instead, this directorial cynicism manifests in an overemphasis on comedy (a masturbation scene is milked to comedic heights; the school authorities are now figures of exaggeration). The wavering, if not absent, sense of sincere discovery—of the human body, of the human world—means that this Spring Awakening can lean too heavily on a performative note, sometimes with a tone of world-weary sarcasm. Sure, this is a story about the cruel, repressive world, with all its archaic inanities—but shouldn’t that be the characters’ spontaneous epiphany? Yet, because the production somehow insists on favoring this lens, it stops short of profoundly illuminating our understanding of the material. Sexual tension is hardly in the mind of this show about sexuality.
Nevertheless, the cast in general makes it worth the trip to the theater: The ensemble is downright terrific, each member summoning such distinct, idiosyncratic characters to life, and doing justice not just to the music, but also to Nunoy Van Den Burgh’s unobtrusive choreography (Touch Me is a divine highlight.) Uddin, in particular, is impressive in the way he channels internal torment into physical action.
This production has also made a gorgeous discovery in Angia Laurel as Martha, with a rich alto that scours the depths of the characters’ fears and history of parental neglect and abuse. And Audie Gemora, Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo, and Ana Abad Santos are each delivering spectacularly grounded, understated work as the menagerie of adults in the musical—but especially as the different children’s parents.
When the characters finally come to the conclusion of Act II and sing The Song of Purple Summer, one is awash with a familiar sensation: that of having seen a show that’s grown, in many senses, yet still have so much room to grow. In a sense, that right there is a proper, stubborn teenager.
No comments:
Post a Comment