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.
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