Diarist Review: 'Jesus Christ Superstar' - The 2016 Regent's Park Open Air Theatre Revival in Manila

I still think Cats is Andrew Lloyd Webber's best work--I'll die on this hill gladly. The website version of this review here.

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Jesus Christ Superstar blows the theater roof off

Pre-Act I view of the stage.

The first time I saw anyone blow the roof off the theater with anything from Jesus Christ Superstar was in October 2014.

That was Bituin Escalante at Cultural Center of the Philippines, where her solo concert Everything in Bituin closed out season two of the Triple Threats series.

Escalante was a force of nature that evening: scorching in Cole Porter’s Find Me a Primitive Man, dynamite in Proud Mary. The unbeatable highlight, though, was her medley from Jesus Christ Superstar, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s landmark rock musical retelling of the Passion of Christ.

In the 2001 Manila staging directed by the late Bobby Garcia for Atlantis Productions, Escalante had played Mary Magdalene. Naturally, for the concert, she sang Mary’s signature number, the chart-topping I Don’t Know How to Love Him.

Midway through the song, however, Escalante shifted gears and launched into Heaven on Their Minds—the big solo of Judas Iscariot that opens the musical. It was a moment of seismic energy: “an earthshaking, sea-parting rendition,” I wrote for The Philippine Daily Inquirer, that made “musical theater worshipers in the house shoot up from their seats” and sent “everybody’s ears (into) a kind of auditory orgasm.”

What better word to capture the sheer thrill of Escalante’s performance than the Tagalog “halimaw”? A gender-bent production of the musical, starring Escalante as Judas, should have been in order. (Spoiler alert: It’s yet to happen.)

Ten years later—and over 6,000 km southeast of Manila—I met Escalante’s spiritual successor.

It was December 2024. At the Capitol Theatre in Sydney, Australia, the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre revival of Jesus Christ Superstar was a month into the first leg of its tri-city Australian tour. The production had reigned supreme during the 2016–2017 London theater season, winning Best Musical Revival at the Olivier Awards and Best Musical at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards.

I absolutely adored this production directed by Timothy Sheader, despite the stale, musty smell of the house. It was hot, fresh, electric, triumphantly deploying the grammar of street style and the lexicon of the pop-rock concert to render a musical from the 1970s unmistakably now. In hoodies, sweats, and sneakers, the ensemble looked like a hip-hop crew. They danced like a hip-hop crew (Drew McOnie’s choreography, with its cyclic use of staccatos and crescendoes, was oddly hypnotic). The set, dominated by a downward-sloping, cross-shaped platform—as if a ginormous crucifix had fallen from the sky—and the lights, repeatedly blazing and in-your-face, all seemed to gesture toward some divine concert in progress.

Unabashedly queer

And every now and then, the production turned toward the unabashedly queer: the character of Herod engulfed in a cascading cape of scintillating gold; the bare-chested Sanhedrin in flowy, grey cloaks, twirling their pastoral staffs (that doubled as microphones) like butch drag queens in a glamour act; Judas getting his hands coated in dripping, shimmering silver during his infamous betrayal of Christ; the lashing of Jesus enacted with—of all things—bursts of glitter! For an age-old story involving a literal coronation, the Passion was now even more baklà—and all the better for it.

At the center of it all was Michael Paynter, former contestant of The Voice Australia, who essayed the musical’s titular role.

Paynter’s boyish charm and carefree approach to the part aptly encapsulated the most vital question this Jesus Christ Superstar seemed intent on answering: What if the son of God were Justin Bieber? The whole pop-rock concert aesthetic made perfect sense with his interpretation.

Then, there was Paynter’s Gethsemane—Jesus’ big number in Act II. To this day, I’m still thinking about this specific performance. It’s the very definition of show-stopping: Paynter scaling the punishing notes in the song’s second half as if he’d been singing the score since birth, promptly earning a mid-show standing ovation from the hysterical audience (the evidence is afloat on YouTube). It’s one of the very few times I’ve seen a show stopped cold.

The only downside to this production was that Jesus’ dynamic with Judas—the musical’s key relationship—felt a bit askew. Javon King’s Judas, a riffing twink with a restless skip in his step, was inadvertently swallowed whole by Paynter’s Jesus (to King’s credit, nobody could have possibly survived the latter’s Gethsemane).

So, more than anything, it was this sense of imbalance that I was wary of while watching Jesus Christ Superstar at The Theatre at Solaire. (The same production from London and Australia has finally arrived in the Philippines, care of GMG Productions and is down to its final week of performances.)

I’m happy to report that, based on the May 16 evening performance I caught, this unevenness is nowhere to be found.

Tip-top shape

The production itself is in tip-top shape, with all the elements that made it terrific theater in Sydney intact. But in place of Paynter, we have a British Jesus in Luke Street. Even with, or perhaps because of, his silly little mustache (a compliment!), Street looks like someone barely out of his teens. My colleague Gibbs Cadiz compares him to American pop star Benson Boone, which I think is an accurate assessment. And his earnest, happy-to-be-here demeanor has a Trojan Horse-like effect: Street’s Gethsemane, a roof-rattling take, also feels like a genuine internal breakdown that happens within the world of the musical—not an out-of-show and out-of-body experience like Paynter’s. Street thoroughly embodies the momentary agony of this made-mortal son of God.

Opposite him, King is a worthy non-adversary—he’s even better now than when I saw him in Sydney: fiercer and sassier, galloping across that stage as if possessed by the spirit of Tina Turner. At one point, King even has it out with a saxophone feature. And his interactions with Gab Pangilinan’s Mary are all imbued with the frisson of a proper diva-off, which, if you really think about it, is nothing if not appropriare for a country that loves its telesérye and sampálan scenes onscreen. The two could give Nora Aunor and Vilma Santos at the end of Ishmael Bernal’s Ikaw Ay Akin a run for their money; if they went for each other’s wigs, I wouldn’t have been surprised. It’s the Passion as a spicy love triangle.

A shame, then, that the production hasn’t gained as much traction with Filipino theatergoers as other GMG shows that sold out their runs. In the era of jukebox musicals, this version of Jesus Christ Superstar is an exhilarating testament to the heights that original musical theater can attain. For those who’ve never seen the show, it’s an excellent introduction to the material. At its most breathtaking, it easily blows the roof off The Theatre at Solaire.

Diarist Review: 'Master Class' by Philippine Opera Company

Well, not everything can be unequivocally good. The website version of this review published May 18 in The Diarist here.

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Master Class: Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo has us in the palm of her hands

Curtain call at gala night of Master Class.

Master Class may be about Maria Callas, but Philippine Opera Company’s (POC) revival of this play somehow renders any prior knowledge of the preeminent American Greek soprano unnecessary. This is a good thing.

 

Written by the late Terrence McNally, the play imagines a literal master class run by Callas sometime in the 1970s, during the final decade of her life, when she no longer performed in opera.

Here McNally finds the perfect occasion for breaking the fourth wall: His Callas—by turns caustic and wistful, temperamental and tender—converts the entire theater into her lecture hall, addressing the audience directly throughout the play with a wink in her eye, even as the ghost of her prematurely aborted career haunts the proceedings.

Three lucky students become her (un)fortunate victims, their one-on-ones with La Divina, as the opera star is lovingly known, furnishing much of the drama and forming the skeleton of the play. Callas torments, goads, and guides these aspiring performers—not necessarily in that order—while the audience sits in the dark watching McNally’s version of this singular artist supposedly at work and at her most vulnerable.

The conceit is rather straightforward; as one discovers fairly early on, the point of the play is the leading role itself: a star vehicle that all but guarantees success for whoever is brave enough to take it on—and wrestle with its self-indulgence.

This time in Manila, it’s Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo, coming after Jay Valencia Glorioso and the late actresses Baby Barredo and Cherie Gil (with whom POC last mounted Master Class in 2008, followed by a rerun in 2010). Watching Lauchengco-Yulo during opening night on May 15, I was struck by how her Callas felt so at home within the kilometric list of theatrical performances dotting her resumé. I mean this to be the highest compliment.

Lauchengco-Yulo is a master of paring characters down to a distinctly human scale, such that they feel undeniably—and unremarkably—flesh and blood. Whether as the bipolar Diana in Next to Normal or the neglected filmmaker’s wife in Nine, the conflicted psychiatrist in Agnes of God or the hyper-religious fanatical mother in Carrie, Lauchengco-Yulo has this precise ability to make it seem as though her characters’ hurts and hopes, their anxieties and anguish, are all emanating from some sacred, immeasurable core. She makes these creatures of the stage feel like they’ve come off the page entirely to exist right next to you.

Her Maria Callas is no different: The intimidating, tyrannical carapace hardened through the decades by the diva’s reputation is largely gone. Instead, the fire and fury all come from within, articulated plainly and directly through a voice that resists even a single, strained decibel. “If you can’t hear me, it’s your fault,” she tells the audience in her opening monologue. “You’re not concentrating.” Theatergoers should consider themselves warned.

More important: Lauchengco-Yulo extinguishes the need for viewers to actually know who Callas was. The actress speaks with a slight accent, but as the play progresses, the question of whether hers is the best impersonation of the soprano swiftly becomes a nonissue. (Admittedly, knowing the basic facts of Callas’ life makes for a more insightful viewing experience, as one understands the script’s references to her past roles, her rivals, or her lover Aristotle Onassis.)

Full-blooded creation

But who needs Callas when you have Lauchengco-Yulo’s full-blooded creation right there—someone plausibly as domineering and daunting and catty, and as secretly wounded and grief-stricken, as the real person? In this vein, I am reminded of Cate Blanchett’s narcissistic and manipulative conductor in Todd Field’s Tár from 2022—a product of fiction so richly imagined, lots of people actually thought the film was a biopic.

It follows, then, that the best parts of Master Class—when the production feels truest and most believable—are those when Lauchengco-Yulo has us viewers in the palm of her hands; when she is alone in front of us—her captive, spellbound audience—speaking to us directly, as if we really were her students eagerly awaiting her every word and, on more than one occasion, bearing witness to her most private sorrows and insecurities. This is Master Class at its most convincing: the actress and the whole theater in communion.

Unfortunately, this also means that whenever everyone else in the production intrudes on the spotlight, the whole affair becomes disturbingly less sincere; even Lauchengco-Yulo—at least, on opening night—is helpless against the ensuing tsunami of artifice.

The main problem with the production directed by Jaime del Mundo is that it appears to be afflicted with some kind of intermittent amnesia. It repeatedly forgets that it is supposed to be a master class, with the fourth wall broken and the idea of a “staged performance” chucked in the bin. Specifically, all three actors portraying Callas’ students keep doing the most, to use the modern slang; they are visibly “acting,” where Lauchengco-Yulo is effortlessly unembellished and present in this make-believe-and-therefore-real master class. They seem oblivious to the fact that the audience are supposed to be there with them, thus shattering the illusion initially summoned by the play’s conceit.

In consequence, the culminating sequences of the play’s two acts struggle to land their emotional payoffs—the first way more than the second. In these scenes, Callas retreats into the past and brings the audience along for the ride; prompted by a student’s performance, she starts recalling pinnacle moments in her life and career, the play—in such meta-theatrical fashion—ceasing momentarily to be a real-life master class, the notion of the tangible classroom now dissolved as the viewer is plunged headlong into the yawning abyss of Callas’ mind and soul.

Clash of technique and sensibility

It pains me to say that the first act, in particular, is an arduous slog: We spend almost the whole time with the first student played by Alexandra Bernas, her entire interaction with Lauchengco-Yulo’s Callas a strident clash of technique and sensibility. As a result, the segue from real to imagined happens sloppily, and Lauchengco-Yulo’s act-ending monologue feels jarring, like a placeless psychological breakdown.

Act II fares better, in large part because the students played by Arman Ferrer and Angeli Benipayo at least sing their parts with sweeping emotional ferocity. Still, neither of them are able to fully make you believe they aren’t only pretending to be students of this master class. In fact, among the actors orbiting Lauchengco-Yulo, only Del Mundo, who doubles as the stage hand, comes across as someone who really exists in her world.

The look of this production is generally cohesive, though the balance of the sound—most crucial in the scenes where Callas is speaking while a student is singing—needs serious recalibration. D Cortezano’s lights manage to fulfill the play’s operatic ambitions, especially when Callas dives into her monologues: For the second act, Cortezano bathes the stage in feral blood red, and the effect is haunting. Joey Mendoza’s set is a realistic spare stage dominated by a wall of vertical, light-hued panels imbued with an interlacing pattern, like the surface of a woven basket—but, at the end, the wall rises to reveal a backdrop of an opera house’s interior, with Callas standing before the multi-level house as if she were looking into the stage and bidding us viewers farewell. It could be a stunning final image, were it not for the strangely overexposed printed backdrop.

I could say the same for the production as a whole. There’s a stunning central performance in it—strong enough that it allows the play to reach the heights of gay fantasia—but only if that performance were left alone. Even the best professors are only as good as their students.