Diarist Feature: 16th Gawad Buhay Awards

Fun night! Website version here.  

*     *     *     *     *

16th Gawad Buhay Awards: 'Hindi tayo kayang tapatan o palitan ng kahit anumang AI'

Several statistical milestones marked this year’s Gawad Buhay, the annual awards for theater handed out by Philstage to celebrate the best achievements among its member companies’ productions staged the previous year.

In the 16th ceremonies held July 28, 2026 at Aliw Theater, Pasay City, Tanghalang Pilipino’s (TP) Kisapmata became the first in the awards history to make a clean sweep of the production, direction, writing, ensemble performance, and all four individual acting categories.

Only two other productions had swept the individual acting awards, but neither won for ensemble performance. Repertory Philippines’ (Rep) Sweeney Todd dominated the musical acting categories in the 2nd Gawad Buhay, with Audie Gemora and Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo taking the trophies for lead performance, and Marvin Ong and Liesl Batucan winning for featured performance. The ensemble award for a musical was shared by Ismail at Isabel and Si Juan Tamad, ang Diyablo, at ang Limang Milyong Boto, both staged by Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA).

In the 5th ceremonies three years later, PETA’s Bona—adapted by Layeta Bucoy from the 1980 Lino Brocka classic—saw the acting quartet of Eugene Domingo, Edgar Allan Guzman, Olive Nieto, and Juliene Mendoza snagging their first Gawad Buhays; Outstanding Ensemble Performance for a Play went to TP’s Walang Kukurap, also penned by Bucoy.

Two of Kisapmata’s designers also set records. Joey Mendoza nabbed his third trophy for set design—having won for Rep’s Agnes of God and Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s The Last Five Years—and now ties Mio Infante’s trophy haul in that category. Infante was honored for Trumpets’ The Bluebird of Happiness, PETA’s Rak of Aegis, and 9 Works Theatrical’s American Idiot.

Third trophy

Likewise, Arvy Dimaculangan—a previous winner for The Sandbox Collective’s Every Brilliant Thing and TP’s Nekropolis—bagged his third trophy for sound design, matching Jethro Joaquin’s record. Joaquin’s wins were all for Rep productions: Hamlet, Equus, and Agnes of God; only TJ Ramos has more, with four, for Ballet Philippines’ Encantada, and TP’s Stageshow, Der Kaufmann: Ang Negosyante ng Venecia, and Mabining Mandirigma.

Kisapmata also earned the multi-hyphenate Guelan Varela-Luarca two new Gawad Buhays—one for directing, another for writing—complementing his previous wins for directing TP’s Batang Mujahideen and writing the scripts of Coriolano and Nekropolis for the same company. This year, Varela-Luarca shared the victory for Outstanding Translation or Adaptation with the TP Actors Company (AC), who co-devised the critically acclaimed screen-to-stage transposition of Mike de Leon’s 1981 film about a household seemingly unable to escape the authoritarian spell of its ex-cop patriarch.

Varela-Luarca’s double win that night also made him the third person in awards history to be recognized for directing and writing the same work: His predecessors are Rody Vera, who refashioned Rolando Tinio’s Filipino translation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice into Der Kaufmann, and co-directed that TP production with Tuxqs Rutaquio in 2013; and Chris Millado, who directed Balete for TP and co-devised the script with Vera, dramaturge Sabrina Basilio, choreographer Delphine Buencamino, and the TP AC in 2024.

For musicals, Pat Valera won for his book and direction of Dekada ’70—based on Lualhati Bautista’s novel—in the 13th ceremonies, while sharing Outstanding Original Score with William Elvin Manzano for a different work: Mula sa Buwan.

Kisapmata’s four-person cast consisted of the senior TP AC members affectionately referred to as the “fearsome foursome.” Playing the pregnant daughter Mila, Toni Go-Yadao won her second consecutive Female Featured Performance in a Play award, having won last year for Balete. She also became the first actress to win the category twice.

Marco Viaña, who essayed the role of Mila’s fiancé, was similarly a back-to-back winner for Male Featured Performance in a Play, having won that category last year for Balete. Counting his first trophy for TP’s Ang Pag-uusig—Jerry Respeto’s Filipino translation of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible—Viaña is now the most awarded actor in that category. Most notably, this latest accomplishment marked his fifth trophy overall—he also won Male Lead Performance in a Play for TP’s Katsuri in the 12th ceremonies, and shared Outstanding Costume Design with Paw Castillo for TP’s Sandosenang Sapatos in the 14th.

Thanks to Kisapmata, Viaña and Varela-Luarca now belong to an elite company of theater artists—alongside Millado, Ramos, and lighting designer John Batalla—with five competitive Gawad Buhays. Only four others have more: Vera remains the record holder with 11 trophies, while Vincent de Jesus, Cris Villonco, and Myke Salomon have six apiece. Salomon won his sixth trophy this year for his musical direction of Barefoot’s We Aren’t Kids Anymore—an honor he shared with first-time nominee and winner Farley Asuncion—and is the most awarded person in that category, having previously triumphed for the jukebox musicals Rak of Aegis, 3 Stars and a Sun, and  Ang Huling El Bimbo.

Inarguably, the most meaningful win of the night belonged to Jonathan Tadioan, who took home Male Lead Performance in a Play for portraying Kisapmata’s tyrannical patriarch Dadong. Tadioan’s win was long overdue: This was already his 14th acting nomination and 15th overall (he was nominated two years ago for directing Sandosenang Sapatos). No other individual had amassed as many nominations without winning. Think Peter O’Toole and Glenn Close at the Oscars.

Tadioan’s nominations also represented nearly two decades of consistently acclaimed work with TP and the Cultural Center of the Philippines. His first for lead actor was for the Virgin Labfest play Pamantasang Hirang, back when the festival entries were still considered for the awards during the 1st ceremonies. The 13 other acting nominations that followed included his convincing turn—at 29 years old!—as Arthur Miller’s 63-year-old Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, now Pahimakas sa Isang Ahente by Tinio, in 2014; and Mitch in Flores Para Los Muertos—Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire in Filipino—in 2009.

Anti-climactic

How anti-climactic, then, that Tadioan wasn’t physically present for his much-awaited victory—made even sweeter by the fact that he won alongside his wife, Lhorvie Nuevo-Tadioan, who took home Outstanding Lead Actress in a Play (and her second trophy overall, following her featured turn in Batang Mujahideen).

Yet, this absence was also an apt reminder of what the filmmaker David Fincher once said: Awards are just icing on the cake. It’s the work—in other words, creating meaningful art—that matters more.

Among TP’s fearsome foursome, only Go-Yadao was present during awards night; the Tadioan couple and Viaña, with Varela-Luarca, were in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, representing the Philippines in the 2026 Asian Playwrights Meeting. Numerous representatives thus took turns trooping to the stage to accept Kisapmata’s 11 wins—the most by any production—though Tadioan still managed to “personally” accept his award via live phone call.

“Magkita-kita tayo lahat diyan pagbalik namin!” Tadioan said, his voice filtering through a phone held to the microphone by TP production manager Chi Navarra.

In a way, the highly informal manner in which Tadioan accepted his award was entirely in keeping with the atmosphere Gawad Buhay has cultivated over the years. Writing on Facebook two years ago, critic and founding awards juror Gibbs Cadiz mused that, while he once imagined Gawad Buhay to be “like the Tonys, where theater people dressed up and came in their glitzy best on the biggest night in their honor,” he now completely understood “the laidback, chummy, casual vibe that has come to define” awards night, which is “more in line with the spirit of community and camaraderie—more than competition”—that Gawad Buhay has “aimed for from the beginning.”

Chill homecoming

Indeed, this year’s ceremonies felt closer to a chill homecoming than to those fancy, splashy televised awards shows, though a humble red carpet still welcomed attendees who braved the monsoon rains and flooded streets of Metro Manila. (To this end, I must say the Aliw Theater felt too cavernous for this ersatz homecoming, with the attendees scattered all over; I much preferred the more compact offerings of, say, the PETA Theater Center from the 2023 ceremonies.)

The evening’s most memorable segments likewise unfolded with a similar mood. Topper Fabregas, who played the iconic Donkey in Full House Theater Company’s Shrek the Musical and won Male Featured Performance in a Musical, was visibly surprised that he won, a bewildered expression stuck to his face the entire time he made his way to the stage.

Shiela Valderrama, Gawad Buhay winner for Philippine Opera Company’s Passion, and her daughter Simone were both in terrific voice as they sang Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland’s famous mash-up of Get Happy and Happy Days Are Here Again.

“What else does one say except for… what the f*ck?” said Sam Sewell, who evidently did not expect to find herself onstage accepting the final award of the night—Outstanding Production of Existing Material for a Musical—for Come From Away, which GMG Productions co-produced with Stages Production Specialists, Inc.

All-timer speech

And without a doubt, Marynor Madamesila delivered both the funniest and most heartfelt speech of the night—an all-timer, in my opinion—after winning Female Lead Performance in a Musical as one of the Siamese twins of Sandbox’s Side Show.

“Sabi ko kanina, dahil I’m ‘neurospicy’ and mentally ill and sleepless, isipin ko na lang na panalo na ako, so kung sino mananalo, panalo ako with her—tapos nanalo ako!” Madamesila said, alternating between overwhelmed, panicked, hilariously self-aware, and genuinely emotional and grateful. She went on to thank her mother—a “stage mom pro-max” who once took out a prayer book backstage to calm her down during a pre-performance panic attack—and expressed her hope for theater to enjoy the same scale and vitality it has in Manila in places beyond the capital region, reaching “the grassroots and the little kids.”

But the most consequential parts came early in the night. First, PETA executive director Anj Heruela delivered Philstage’s annual report, where she revealed that the last two years have actually witnessed a steady uptick in the number of individual performances staged by member companies since the industry’s post-COVID reopening—from 325 performances among 26 productions in 2023 to 717 performances among 28 productions in 2025. These shows also “reached” 235,452 audiences in 2025—a 23 percent increase from 2023’s 190,048, according to a graphic from that presentation.

After discussing these statistics, Heruela asserted the need to continually refine the systems in the theater industry, not least by ratifying a code of ethics and establishing a review and classification board.

“Professionalization is not the enemy of art, but what makes it viable and sustainable” Heruela said. It is how “we protect our artists” and how “we protect our productions.”

A bit later came the presentation of Outstanding Original Score—one of 28 competitive awards up for grabs. That category had only two nominees: The Necessary Theatre and WHYNot Manila’s production of David Hare’s Via Dolorosa, set to haunting, evocative music by Gabby Ramos (on oud, Nigerian udu, guitar, kalimba, and sampler) and Dexter Lansang (on cello); and TP’s original Pinay Pop musical Gregoria Lakambini, composed by Nica del Rosario and Matthew Chang, who also penned the lyrics with book writers Eljay Castro Deldoc and Nicanor Tiongson.

Gregoria was a deserving winner, if only for giving the world that gorgeous romantic earworm Buwan, Buwan (available on Spotify). But Chang’s acceptance speech—brief and breathless—was the subtext-laden jolt of electricity the room likely didn’t see coming.

“Hindi tayo kayang tapatan o palitan ng kahit anumang AI (artificial intelligence),” Chang declared, to rapturous cheers and applause.

At any other time, Chang’s words could have been just another impassioned affirmation of the artistic spirit; an urgent call to action to safeguard the fragile, human dimension of art against the rampant, irresponsible use of AI; and a plea to reverse what lately feels like the inevitable dumbing down of an entire civilization.

But this wasn’t any other time: Chang’s speech was, one can safely presume, directly in response to—and in support of—the industry-breaking article by TheaterFansManila.com managing editor Frida Tan regarding “authorship, attribution, and the future of Philippine musicals,” to quote the title.

Murky authorship

Published only two days before awards night, Tan’s article investigated the murky authorship of Tulog Na: The Musical by Studio A Productions (not a Philstage member company, it should be clarified). Or, to be more precise, what appears to be its non-authorship; no composer or lyricist has been publicly identified and credited by the company, when these individuals should be “inseparable from the identity of the musical itself.”

Initially claiming it was composed by “an in-house creative team,” Studio A later told Tan that a certain JR Dee is supposedly behind the music and lyrics of Tulog Na. Since then, the company has been vague and non-responsive to further questions, including to Tan’s request to profile Dee—whom no one in the theater community seemed to know, and curiously had no digital footprint as far as a “publicly documented artistic background” is concerned.

To go by the lengthy discussions on Facebook and Reddit, the article has ignited suspicions that AI may have possibly played a role in the creation of Tulog Na, which was a sold-out play before becoming a musical (and about to star the comedian Pokwang, no less). Chang himself was interviewed by Tan, pointing out that the very absence of a public credit for a composer naturally “raises questions about authorship and creative transparency.”

Tan’s razor-sharp concluding points are well worth reiterating and reprinting: “If we stop asking who wrote the music and lyrics… we lose the ability to recognize the human beings behind the work and the creative labor they have given to it. At a time when our creative industries are being reshaped by technology, preserving that humanity is more important than ever. Every musical should have a human being attached to its music and lyrics, not just privately, but publicly.”

Empasis on “reshaped by technology,” I might add, capped off with a knowing, frustrated wink.

So far, the suspicions regarding AI use have remained on the discussion boards, with noticeably few theater artists being vocal on the matter. The article shares and reactions, however—especially from many artists themselves—suggest that louder and more heated conversations might be taking place far beyond what is perceptible to general observers. If anything, Chang’s speech only brought those conversations into as large and public a space as possible, at precisely the right time.

Facebook Theater Reviews, 2023–2024

All written when I still didn't know if I'd ever have the time to pursue theater reviewing regularly again.

Ang Pag-uusig by Tanghalang Pilipino

March 4, 2023

In the currently running 3rd run of Tanghalang Pilipino's Ang Pag-uusig at the new CCP Blackbox, it's hard to ignore the hashtag Men Talking realness of it all. When it premiered in 2017, the show was a/the most piercing approximation of Dutertismo, as I wrote in my yearender then. Now, in a post-Duterte and post-MeToo era, one somehow ends up rooting for Abigail Williams and her posse; to paraphrase my friend Nikki Francisco (in her review that reminded me just how essential the elements of kindness and joy are to good theater criticism), the show finds a thousand ways to call Abigail a whore, yet nobody's calling John Proctor a man-whore??

Anyway, the joy for me in watching this run is mainly in witnessing four of our most dependable theater actors lead an ensemble composed of many new names; I've been watching these four onstage for a full decade now, I realized. Marco Viaña, I first saw in the Virgin Labfest riot of a play Kafatiran (2011). Two years later began my string of Viaña-Jonathan Tadioan productions, the two always, always delivering: as Antonio and Shylock in Der Kaufmann (2013); Biff and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (2014); Astrov and Vanya in Uncle Vanya (2016); Lisandro and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (2016); Coriolanus and Menenius in Coriolano (2019); George and Toto in Katsuri (2019). Antonette Go's steely Yelena in Uncle Vanya will always be my woah-who-is-that moment for her, while Lhorvie Nuevo's gender-bent Janjalani in Batang Mujahideen, where she conjured pure terror out of silence, remains clear in my mind's eye three years since the pandemic shut that production down. In a way, Ang Pag-uusig feels like both a culmination of sorts and an apt grand welcome back to the theater for this foursome; on that stage, they are serving, they are eating, they are fathering and mothering, doing work that is simply worthy of the loftiest superlatives. In Nuevo's case, she has now played Elizabeth Proctor, Abigail, and Mary Warren--can any other actress in the contemporary, global history of theater claim to have done that?

*     *     *     *     *

Nekropolis by Tanghalang Pilipino; Sari-Saring Soneto: An Evening of Shakespearean Sonnets in English and Filipino at Areté Ateneo; Walang Aray by PETA

April 23, 2023

Never thought I’d get to see an academic essay adapted into a play, but here we are, with Guelan Luarca’s latest, Nekropolis, which draws from, by my count, at least two.

The title itself should be a giveaway to anyone familiar with the academic literature: It’s a direct reference to Achille Mbembe’s landmark essay Necropolitics, which, in a nutshell, explores how power, often political, is used to determine who gets to live and who gets to die (or live in a state of non-life, or be exposed perpetually to the risk of death). Luarca, bless his brain, has somehow distilled into this textual triumph of a play not only Mbembe’s essay, but also its forebears—Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopower, the Panopticon, the whole “Discipline and Punish” shebang—as well as its most relevant progeny to the Philippine setting—Vicente Rafael’s portraiture of Duterte as the “Sovereign Trickster,” how the monster made grotesque humor his vehicle for deciding who didn’t deserve to live under his watch. In other words, three “generations” of scholarship, and along with them, the patriarchy, the revolution, the Philippines as a non-world, as refracted through the mess of the last seven years and the lives of the designated-undeserving-to-live (e.g., the non-straights, the drug users and “addicts,” the ones with mental health issues, the tibaks and “enemies of the state,” etc.).

Which is to say, a disclaimer, first of all: Part of my “day job” has been on the drug war, drug use, and the politics of drugs under Duterte. So I actually entered this play a bit apprehensive, loaded with my self-made expectations of what the play might be about or how it might deliver or whether or not it would even go deep into the scholarship. And what I saw—or more accurately, heard—floored me. Luarca’s text is rightfully ambitious, conceptually challenging, yet also very, very lucid in its dramatization of Foucault-Mbembe-Rafael, and its questioning of what comes after the three—the kinds of worlds we build in our quest to destroy the existing ones, the kinds of lives we lead when death and fear are normalized—goes so, so hard on the sociological, the playwright is frankly a social scientist now.

Which brings me to the production itself, now closed after only a four(?)-day run by Tanghalang Pilipino, directed by Charles Yee. Sa madaling salita, I don’t think it could ever catch up to what Luarca has laid out in his text, or what the text demanded of the production. What I saw could be messy at times, unclear at times, yet also dramatically lucid enough, though never quite enough, that I’m far from pissed off as to totally avoid making this unsolicited post (I actually think it should run again and for longer, regardless of its virtues). Shout-out to Mitzi Comia, far and away the clearest performer of them all (even in Ang Pag-uusig two months ago, it was already impossible to look away whenever she was onstage); and to Antonette Go and Sarah Monay’s perfect, fleeting, “gusto kitang—(yakapin?)” moment. Also, Arvy Dimaculangan’s sound design—a triumph in itself, the underworld made audible, dread rendered into an aural way of life.

Btw, the play can also be funny: The words “reactionary,” “neoliberal,” and “cretin” figure in heated dialogue, and the way they’re each thrown—I cackled. Not too long ago, someone—I can’t remember who now—said, and I paraphrase, ang sarap i-dissect ng utak ni Guelan (I do remember the original quote being more sexually explicit, but I digress). But anyway—agree.

As for the rest of the weekend: Sari-Saring Soneto at the Ateneo was a welcome, chill reunion with the largely Atenean theater crowd (my personal fave among the performers? Miren Alvarez-Fabregas, epitome of emotional coherence; we still need to see her Yocasta on the physical stage!). And a second dose of Walang Aray at PETA, a.k.a. please give Jon Abella and Shaira Opsimar all the awards. It really makes a world of difference when both your leads can, you know, lead. Opsimar’s reading, twice done, of “spy?” Living in my head rent-free.

*     *     *     *     *

The Reconciliation Dinner by Dulaang UP

May 23, 2023

(Quote-sharing Emil Hofileña's review)

Emil’s review of The Reconciliation Dinner, now heading toward the final weekend of its second run, nails so much of what I found great and not so great about it when I first saw it in UP Diliman last year. As sociological analysis, I thought it’s rather superficial, like a research article that didn’t bother doing a thorough literature review, and hardly had anything novel or insightful to say about Marcos, Robredo, and the whole red-versus-pink schism. But maybe that’s an unfair expectation, especially since the play seems pretty clear about where it’s coming from and whom it’s for. In other words, it’s far more comfortable—and much, much stronger—with the familiar; that is to say, with the dramatization and fleshing out of human foibles and relationships, and the insane yet all too rational notion that friendships should always come first, the whole country be damned. The whole cast eats this production up, but I must mention that Frances Makil-Ignacio makes an entrance and lands a first line of dialogue that had me laughing so hard, and Stella Cañete-Mendoza, well… one can only use the phrase “performance of a lifetime” so many times before it gets old, but that’s really what she’s giving here.

*     *     *     *     *

Virgin Labfest 18 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines

June 22, 2023

Hello, it’s me again, with some notes on Virgin Labfest 18 nobody asked for. Initially planned to do a full review ala 2015/16/17/19/20, but not enough time/brain space/drive to do it, so just these… scribblings, lifted almost verbatim straight out of my phone’s Notes app. Gibbs has pointed out that this year’s edition is probably the strongest we’ve had in years—and I agree wholeheartedly: Walang tápòn is the Tagalog expression. Well, okay, fine, in terms of the 12 new plays, it’s an 11/12 for me, but that’s not the point. The point is that a case could probably be made for each of those 11 plays (some stronger than others, of course) to be part of the 2024 Revisited section, when in previous years it was usually a case of picking from a pool of like four or five. So, bravo, VLF 18!

My top two:

For me, the top two plays and/or productions of this festival are pretty clear: Ang Awit ng Dalagang Marmol by Andrew Estacio and Dominador Gonzales: National Artist by Dingdong Novenario. In my notes, I wrote, “no notes.” Because both are sharp as hell, funny as hell, mounted like they weren’t “lab” productions (in the sense that Labfest is supposed to be a lab, though I’ve never bought this argument; see Guryon ng mga Tala, Fangirl, Mula sa Kulimliman, and now these two).

Estacio’s play, held together by Nazer Salcedo’s direction, is a wondrous balancing act of backstage farce and meta-historical-intellectualizing. You kind of expect it to topple towards excessive in either direction, but almost miraculously it never does, and in the process becomes an absolutely delirious and much-welcome hate crime (not derogatory) against dramaturges. Adrienne Vergara’s performance alone is case enough for this play to be Revisited; Vergara and that piano—it’s a match I’ll never forget.

Novenario’s play, we’ve seen before as a reading in 2020 (the online, COVID-ized edition). Even then, it was a riot. Now we have been gifted with the real thing—fully mounted, all its snark and wit and cattiness within reach. What I love about this one, above all, is its verisimilitude, in the sense that it really unfolds the way passive-aggressive conversations between these certain archetypes unfold. Of course, I mean Writers (capital W, derogatory). And unfolds with a meandering, seemingly aimless quality to it (but aimless and meandering only if you’re not paying full attention, because my god, how it all comes together quite marvelously in the end—thematically, narratively, what have you). This is a playwright at the peak of his powers, in full control of his craft, and 101 percent grounded in the milieu within which he writes. At some point, the play takes a swipe at spoken word artists that had me shouting, “Oh my god,” and really, the balls to do that. You can also cast this play using real-life people (wink wink) and it would work just as well.

The others:

As for the 10 other plays: There’s Zheg Arban’s Room 209, first of all. I’m not too crazy about this one, though I do think it is directed and mounted with clockwork precision (bravo, Delphine Buencamino!). My discontent lies mainly in how this play talks way more than it dramatizes, and what it talks about is a whole lot of what we already know—hazing is evil, etc., etc. And so it doesn’t really bring anything new in terms of insight, which renders the expectation of dramatization weightier here (and which, again, it does not satisfy fully). There’s also an expository quality to it that works only when it is being ironic (e.g., talk of loyalty vis-a-vis the protagonist being confronted over “not squealing”); otherwise it’s all just dull and uneconomical use of words. And in terms of plumbing the depths and horrors of toxic brotherhood, hypermasculinity, and violent frat- and military-adjacent cultures, the play can’t help feeling like budget-AKO (Alpha Kappa Omega, Guelan Luarca’s adaptation of Mike de Leon’s Batch ’81 that premiered under Tanghalang Ateneo in 2019). Thus, Gino Ramirez’s monologue, for example, feels unearned because with insufficient dramatic precedent, though performed terrifically. Anyway, I’m nitpicking: as a first play, it makes you excited for what the playwright will write next. (And since we’re nitpicking: Not too keen on how the actors playing the torturers are made to portray the dead in the ending, because that unnecessarily removes dramatic culpability.)

Next, Jerry O’Hara’s O’Donnell, a.k.a. Waiting for Godot if Godot were death in the World War II camps. As directed by Issa Manalo Lopez, the approximation of despair and grime and all manner of disgusting is perfect. Yet, watching this, I was also reminded of what Teju Cole, in his arts criticism collection Known and Strange Things, writes about repeatedly, that you can only subject the viewer to so much despair and horror before they become desensitized, and what transpires before them risks becoming dull, repetitive, even performative. It’s fully the intent of the play, of course, but I also can’t help wishing it met us a little more halfway?

Next up, you know how band fandom people use the word “bias” to pertain to their favorite band members? Well, my bias in this festival is M. Manalastas’ script for Ang Tuyom. Almost like it was written by the smartest guy in the room, the way it renders trauma, hurt, and familial pain into something at once corporeal yet abstract, distant yet also ever-present. Conceptual shit like this is no joke to pull off, and to Manalastas, I say, more plays, please! The production, on the other hand, I’m not quite enamored with; feels quite rough, raw, unpolished, like a thesis play (which I suppose is what labs really are).

On to Juliene Mendoza’s 10 to Midnight: Mendoza, brilliant actor (so good in Dekada ’70 for starters), now quite the up-and-coming playwright, and one who appears to be specializing in the intricacies of brotherly ties (idk, I’m basing this off of this play and his Multiverse from 2020)? What I loved about this play is the refreshing unexpository(?)… unexpositional(?)… anyway, that word, quality of his writing. You know he's doing exposition, but you marvel at how the lines do not sound like exposition. That’s sophistication. And with that, captures the tender heart beating within fraught, fraternal relations in troubled families. Sarah Facuri as director: mistress of efficiency!

The Ate Reg play now—or as it is properly known, Chuck Smith’s Regine: The Fairy Gaymother. Chuck and I were workshopmates at the IWP in La Salle in 2017 (nilindol on the last day lol) so that’s disclosure enough. I say, replace the Regine and you’re good to go. Because as it is, those scenes stand out in their unevenness compared to the rest of the play. Because otherwise, the trio of Tex Ordoñez-de Leon, Ron Capinding, and Adrian Lindayag are hella tight. I particularly love, love, love the celebratory, life-affirming quality of the writing, its assertion of the many forms of coming out, its recognition of fear and self-doubt as parts of the journey to self-actualization. You shine in your own terms, is what it says, and there couldn’t be a better ending.

The next three, quite madaldal, inching their ways toward foregone climaxes and conclusions. Jules Pamisa’s Mga Halimaw rin Kami, an otherwise engaging and relatively refreshing take on the Duterte EJKs, seems like a giddy kid the moment it reaches its big reveal, and then it swiftly, abruptly ends. The production does know what it’s doing with Chrome Cosio, though, the way the perfect, ongoing Season 3 of The Other Two does with Josh Segarra. Shenn Apillado’s Hawaii, Here We Come (or Kung Paano Ako Naging Leading Lady in Malacañang) also makes a similar, if more glaring, late-act stumble, and becomes more an inorganic back-and-forth the further along it goes. And Layeta Bucoy’s Tuloy ang Palabas is the latest in the playwright’s apparent obsession with dead (literal or metaphorical) women(?) (I will never forget *dead* Angeli Bayani being wrapped in tape head to foot in that one play.) Anyway, this new play—lush, appropriately quasi-operatic, appropriately baroque, like one of those gilded church frames. But it also feels not so confident that we’d get that Rissey Reyes’ character is already dead (it makes a point to repeat that again and again, including in the published synopsis) (Structural comparison: Evening at the Opera). And also, as directed and performed, there’s a monotonous quality to it that somehow made me think the dialogue is metrical?? I’m just spewing thoughts here.

For Ophalain Serrano’s Hukay, I don’t really have much insight to give (told you this isn’t a proper review). It’s short and sweet, which is what any Labfest play should aim to be at the very least, but, so what happened was, okay so there’s some problem with enunciation the afternoon I caught this play, and so I totally missed the part where the actors said that *thing* Andoy Ranay is burying is a horse, and so the whole time I was like, oh, so they’re burying a man, and then when that whole horse flying in the sky ending happened, I was like, hmm, is this a metaphor for how these men can only pangangabayo in their dreams, in the stars, in the galaxies, because they can never pangangabayo on earth? Anyway, that *thing* was absolutely NOT a horse-sized corpse!

Okay, lastly—so I did say I was 11/12 okay with this festival, and the only one I didn’t like was O, a play about the female orgasm that was clearly written by a man, and I don’t wanna be any nastier so I’ll just end here. See you next year!

Some awards (lol):

Best Scripts: Ang Tuyom, Ang Awit ng Dalagang Marmol, Dominador Gonzales: National Artist

Best Director: Delphine Buencamino, Room 209

Best Ensemble: O’Donnell

Six Essential Performances (alphabetically): Jao Catarus, Room 209; Tex Ordoñez-de Leon, Regine: The Fairy Gaymother; Bombi Plata, 10 to Midnight; Opaline Santos, Ang Tuyom; Joel Saracho, Dominador Gonzales: National Artist; Adrienne Vergara, Ang Awit ng Dalagang Marmol

*     *     *     *     *

Laro by Barefoot Theatre Collaborative

June 24, 2023

Okay, last Manila theater-related post in a while: The currently running production of Floy Quintos’ Laro, directed by John Mark Yap for Barefoot Theatre Collaborative, is flat-out terrific! I say this as someone who left the 2019 version of this show liking only half of what I’d seen. In other words, the glow up is very real. It’s not just that this current Laro is impeccably cast (the more I think about the casting, the more I love this show). It’s also that, even at 2.5 hours, I’d call it impeccably paced; you hardly ever feel the production sag, so astute are its rhythms. Maybe also aided by Quintos’ rewrites, the production feels more strung together as a series of 10 vignettes, each one spilling into the next more seamlessly to create quite the Pride Month tapestry.

More admirably: The second act, the one with all the *nasty* stuff, has been rendered more urgent than the usually more accessible first! There seems to be this weird thinking that this second half is too exploitative, too dirty, too dark, to the point of being repetitive, if not inessential—a thinking that, to me, betrays a disturbing myopia toward the specificities of modern queer politics. Because now, this second act is even more essential, more piercing and unflinching in its critique of #gays; in other words, more resonant. We have upstanding, “good” gays being revealed to be pedophiles; “straight” cousins; Vic Fabe-ish “content creators”; losyang twink models and the losyang patrons who support them—and Yap’s production generously gives each of them breathing room to be fleshed out.

And so this cast of riches: Gio Gahol (as the policeman) is ever-reliable, and Phi Palmos (as the drag queen) literally brings down the house (it was his one-person show the afternoon I caught this). But there are also, for me, two fine discoveries in Jeremy Mayores (as the student, quietly heart-wrenching) and Noel Escondo (what comic timing as *that* vlogger!). Jojo Cayabyab fully makes sense of his cray-cray English-spouting pilantropo role, he is to Act II what Palmos is to Act I; Al Gatmaitan nails the preening, “good gay” role with shades of (legendary actress) in a muted nervous breakdown; and Andre Miguel will be my casting bias here, because he is just eerily spot on as a skinny, bronzed, Vogue-ish model who is actually cuckoo deep down. Love, love, love the musical interludes here, too, and maybe in the well-earned next run, we’ll have padám.

*     *     *     *     *

Anywhere We Sing Is Home by the Cultural Center of the Philippines

September 10, 2023

Post-the CCP 54th anniversary concert Anywhere We Sing Is Home, my only pressing thought was that Arman Ferrer should star in a revival of El Filibusterismo the musical asap. His perfectly calibrated Awit ni Isagani was, for me, the haunting highlight of the night.

*     *     *     *     *

Pingkian: Isang Musikal by Tanghalang Pilipino

March 21, 2024

There’s a number in Tanghalang Pilipino's Pingkian—the new musical centered on Emilio Jacinto—that’s key to appreciating the brilliance of the entire thing. It happens quite early, in the middle of Act I, when the story’s fledgling revolutionaries come together to compose what would become The Kartilya, the guiding document of The Katipunan. The whole number is basically just the words of that document set to music, but the words and phrases have been cherry-picked, translated, rearranged, simplified—elegantly, intelligently—essentially ’re-composing’ the Kartilya into something seemingly newly spoken in this day and age. At this point, it becomes clear this musical has no interest in conventional plot; in its place, introspection, a progression of ideas as opposed to so-called story. Adopting the cadence of the streets, that number gradually evolves with each certain beat into a kind of rap huddle, performed by common men and women evoking history and revolution through language they know best, reenacting heroism and its follies through their own grammar.

In the entirety of this 2.5-hour production, that number is its surest point. It’s when the show’s firing on all cylinders; when all the talent and skill and hard work that’s evidently been put into its making are in full, glorious display, cohering into a galvanising spectacle of modern, Filipino musical theatre. You realise you’re in good hands; you know you’re watching something special; a shared realization forms between you the viewer, those performers onstage, and the creatives behind the scenes, that what you’re watching is the shit. And they know they’re the shit.

I’ve been going to Manila’s theatres for 15 years now, and let me tell you, nothing compares to the feeling of seeing a show ooze confidence and know its worth. I’m thinking of The Room Where It Happens in last year‘s Hamilton, Totally Fucked in BlueRep’s Spring Awakening in 2019, Kayumanggilas in 2015’s Kung Paano Ako Naging Leading Lady, the climactic battle in 2014’s Ang Nawalang Kapatid, Sinta with the bubbles in Rak of Aegis, to name just five examples. For the full three-and-a-quarter minutes of Ang Kartilya, the whole of Pingkian becomes the stuff that standing ovations were made for.

Shoutouts to Jenny Jamora’s direction (the same mastery of imagination that floored me in her 33 Variations back in ‘15); Jomelle Era’s choreography and GA Fallarme’s projections conjuring the show’s physical and psychological terrains; Marco Viaña landing that heartrender of a monologue; Juan Ekis’ why-or-why not-or-why distillation of revolution; and, of course, Ejay Yatco’s music here, which is simply a body-of-work best. And a special shoutout to Vic Robinson—if you’re Ilonggo, you cannot not see him in his leading turn here as Jacinto. If not in this current soldout run, then in future reruns that are guaranteed to happen. I don’t make the rules, but also, Ilonggo bias aside, the man’s singing the hell out of this role.

Finally, Bituin Escalante’s hair alone in this production should win her all the awards.

*     *     *     *     *

Balete by Tanghalang Pilipino

September 15, 2024

Between Pingkian last March and the newly opened Balete, it’s truly been a banner year for Tanghalang Pilipino. I can cavil about the latter’s ending, but really, it’s the one, small imperfect spot in an otherwise terrific production. Largely devised from an F. Sionil Jose novel and an existing Rody Vera script based on the novel, this play is above all a marvel of stagecraft. People become the set and soundscape, and movement is the main narrative driver, and the result is an astoundingly cohesive union of theatrical elements evoking the grand sweep of the novel as a literary form (an all-too-rare occurrence, imo). More than anything, the play is an act of remembering, as a son tries to make sense of the feudal monstrosity that was his father, who once lorded over the landless in the not-yet-solid north. It’s ‘haunting’ in the most anthropological sense made manifest on the stage, not only in the spectral comings and goings of the poor people that marked the son’s early life, but also in the constant presence of poverty and numbing hardship at once proximate yet alien to his lifeworld. And so it must be said: It makes a world of difference when a production, and the people behind it, is grounded in the reality of those it seeks to portray; when a production actually genuinely empathizes with its characters, and does not treat them like mere play things in a silly game of dress-up. Everyone involved here delivers topnotch work, and this triumph is, for me, made sweeter by the fact that the design team is almost all (relatively) new names to the scene! Marco Viaña barks, Toni Go counts in Hokkien, Lhorvie Nuevo asserts she’s no thief, Tad Tadioan makes the most hilarious sounds, Gelo Molina wins a medal for “best in eating,” and the great Nonie Buencamino—well, you’ll just have to see for yourself the wonders he makes out of his role(s). Running until October 6 at the new CCP Blackbox.