Nobody planned this martial law-themed triple bill, but it happened. The website version here.
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'Bongga', 'Sayaw', 'Desaparesidos': You laugh, cry, then it hurts
The cast of Desaparesidos.
History, when it happens, never really announces itself. Oftentimes it unfolds alongside the smallness of everyday life. One minute, you’re watching the evening news over dinner; the next, you’re witnessing reporters scramble for safety on live television as gunfire erupts in the Philippine Senate.
Three shows I caught this past weekend collectively captured that mundanity of living through historical moments. Coincidentally, all three—Bongga Ka, ‘Day!, Sayaw ng mga Ilaw, and Desaparesidos—were set against the backdrop of the first Marcos presidency. And in the way each engaged with that specific stretch of history—in large part determining each one’s effectiveness as cultural works—they somehow invited reflection on one question: What’s a dictatorship when you’re actually living through one?
Bongga Ka, ‘Day!
For Bongga Ka, ‘Day!: The Annie Batungbakal Musical at Newport World Resorts, the dictatorship is something that’s happening elsewhere, and to other people.
Penned by Liza Magtoto and set to songs of the band Hotdog (as musically directed and rearranged by Vince Lim), this new musical fancies itself an uncomplicated story about a simple girl with straightforward ambitions. The titular character, a fashion house despatsadora in 1979 Manila, dreams of becoming a big-shot designer—and believes her best chance at fulfilling that dream lies inside the legendary Malate district disco Coco Banana. Impeding her journey up the social ladder, apart from her inherent lack of privilege in life, are the disco’s snooty regulars who’d rather not have anything to do with her.
Critic Vladimir Bunoan describes the musical as a Filipinized Cinderella, and that’s an apt assessment. It’s a proper cosmopolitan fairy tale, though Magtoto’s book is too long, too noisy, and ultimately shallow. If you’re looking for serious narrative stakes, you’re in the wrong place.
Shallow isn’t always bad, though, especially when the material lands a production that matches—and even magnifies—its frivolity. Sleek and slick, this premiere staging helmed by Chris Millado is easily the most seamless of all the jukebox musicals that have opened at Newport post-pandemic.
Millado has choreographer Stephen Viñas to thank for whipping up one exhilarating disco fever after another with his tireless dancers. The music-making is exuberant; the Manila Philharmonic Orchestra under Rodel Colmenar’s baton sounds fabulous. And the look of this production is frequently inspired: Ohm David’s set working in tandem with Bene Manaois’ projections to maximize the gaping verticality of the stage, and with Hershee Tantiado’s costumes to evoke the general mood of a bygone age.
A stunning opening image involves towering tiers of flashing TV screens dwarfing the ensemble in disco-ball helmets, calling to mind the extraterrestrial proclivities of Little Shop of Horrors or We Will Rock You—and suggesting that what follows might be a landscape too alien for our heroine, or some viewers, to handle.
Through nifty stagecraft, the fashion house where Annie works transforms into the Coco Banana, and once she’s inside, the show goes for brazen outlandishness. It’s one eye-popping spectacle after another, an endless visual feast of screaming colors and outsized personalities. The point appears to be less about period-specific accuracy than the in-your-face silliness of it all.
Everything peaks in the Act I finale, set to BADAF Forever—a Pinoy disco Pride anthem, if there ever was one—that echoes the outrageous excesses of Damien Chazelle’s film Babylon. (At this point, it must be said that John Batalla’s careless lighting often leaves you at a loss as to where to look, or who’s speaking or singing.)
Magtoto’s book teems with skin-deep subplots, but you forgive them because of the actors.
KD Estrada, as one of Annie’s love interests, cuts a suave hippie figure, the ease with which he now carries himself onstage a far cry from his stumbling first stab at professional theater three years ago in Walang Aray.
Sam Concepcion, as another love interest, is in full beefcake and dream-boy mode.
In near-throwaway parts, Gerhard Krysstopher (as Annie’s gay bestie) and Franco Ramos (as a high-strung client of Annie’s fashion house) are comedic aces.
And John Lapus is a hoot as Coco Banana’s literal gatekeeper, playing the quasi-ballroom emcee as the embodiment of RuPaul’s immortal golden rule: “Make me laugh.”
Muddled politics
Honestly, it’s all a fun time at the theater. Then you remember the bigger context, and suddenly the musical’s aesthetics and politics are thorny, muddled, suspect.
It’s useful to remember that the real Coco Banana was not only epicenter of Manila fashion and one of the nuclei of the socialite party scene during the Marcos years; perhaps without meaning to, it was also a glimmering exemplar of the contradictions of the era. Coco Banana was not only where “artists, drag queens, diplomats, journalists, show biz celebrities and members of Manila’s 400” gathered, as Jerome Gomez writes; it was a haven for forgetting the dictatorship, if only for a few hazy hours—and if you could actually afford to.
Bongga Ka, ‘Day wants you to focus exclusively on that glitzy inside—or, when thinking of Annie’s plight, her linear efforts to get in and her eventual triumph at doing so. One is reminded of lyrics from the opening song of Cabaret, another musical set in a fraught historical juncture: “We have no troubles here/ Here life is beautiful.”
Tellingly, the only overt reference to the dictatorship—and the real state of the nation back then—is treated like a nuisance. In that scene, agents ostensibly from the Metrocom nab an unnamed individual. Then, the scene is casually brushed aside, like a tidbit that needs scrubbing from memory, and the musical reverts to fun-and-games mode.
That brushing aside speaks volumes: You aren’t supposed to think about any of that. Instead, viewers should just wallow in the good vibes, in the show’s mellow incarnations of the Manila Sound and its rambunctious disco spirit, or, for those who lived through the era, its generous dollops of nostalgia. The fairy tale is what we’re all meant to be invested in.
Rather inadvertently, then, Bongga Ka ‘Day becomes a perfect present-day representation of Marcosian escapist art. It asks that you take all of it at face value and ask no further questions. The main conflict here is supposed to be just Annie’s journey up the social ladder—never mind that some of those waiting for her at the top—or inside Coco Banana—are the likes of the Marcoses and their cronies, whose unmitigated plunder of the country would have been the broader structural reason Annie and her family had a hard time transcending their socioeconomic limitations in the first place.
Estrada’s character pays homage to Pinoy musicians working abroad, while Concepcion’s flight attendant is introduced in a montage about Filipinos who can’t help “coming home” again and again to Manila—never mind that the reason for this existential need for many Filipinos to find greener pastures abroad was also largely manufactured by Marcos Sr.’s rule. There’s even that bit about Annie’s sister being more “reasonable”—she’s studying to be a doctor—but one can’t help thinking that, in a few years, she, too, would probably migrate abroad, likely to America, as part of the brain drain during the dictatorship.
In a sense, this brand of denialist escapism extends to the production’s assertion of its leading lady. No name in local theater is probably hotter right now than Atasha Muhlach’s; hers is the casting decision that launched a thousand online debates.
So, how is she as Annie? In a word, passable. She evinces promise as a stage actress, but in all aspects of musical theater performance, she is nowhere near the level that the industry typically requires of its leading ladies. I use “typically”—because for some reason, many have been bending over backwards to justify Muhlach’s casting, sometimes to infantilizing effect. Think of all the fantastic musicals anchored by a leading lady that you’ve seen of late: Muhlach is far from any of that, and stating this fact isn’t being mean. (On that note, the production’s insistence that Muhlach underwent the entire audition process is a hole they probably didn’t expect to dig for themselves: Are we seriously to believe that Muhlach was already the best those auditions could find?)
When I saw Bongga Ka ‘Day on its Sept. 25 gala night, First Lady Liza Araneta Marcos was guest of honor. Before the show started, Millado went onstage to welcome and thank her for always being a supporter of the arts (just like her mother-in-law, I suppose).
Then it was time to have a jolly good time at the theater with this Filipino Cinderella musical. For nearly three hours there, all of us in attendance were at the Coco Banana.
Sayaw ng mga Ilaw
Meanwhile, at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) complex, Tanghalang Pilipino’s new musical Sayaw ng mga Ilaw tells of the dictatorship from the point of view of those who could never afford to gamble a night away at Coco Banana.
Adapted by Juan Ekis from Cheeno Marlo Sayuno’s children’s story, with original music by Krina Cayabyab, Sayaw ng mga Ilaw runs for a breezy 80 minutes under Jonathan Tadioan’s direction. And, well, I’ve never stanned a musical harder.
On the surface, the show seems to be about the kid Laya’s journey to becoming a pandanggo sa ilaw dancer—but really, it’s what happens to her father that is the whole point.
It’s 1981: Martial Law has just been lifted, and Laya’s father is a construction worker in the movie palace being rushed for the first Manila International Film Festival. Any Filipino who knows their history could predict the ending.
To be clear, Sayaw ng mga Ilaw is not the best musical around—Cayabyab’s music can be repetitive and inessential, and towards the end feels like it’s all barreling down in one nebulous avalanche of song. In fact, the musical’s strongest parts are the book ones, or those not in song.
But any show with balls of steel such as this instantly earns my respect: For in the very complex of buildings built by Marcos Sr. and coopted by his wife Imelda to perfume her image as patroness of the arts and architecture—and right under the nose of this current Marcos administration—the designated National Performing Arts Company is staging a musical centered on one of the biggest controversies of the dictatorship, which became emblematic of the administration’s moral depravity. Spoiler alert: The collapse of the Manila Film Center, and the subsequent media blackout, is a major plot point. Laya’s father dies in the tragedy, paving the way for the musical to zero in on worker exploitation and the silencing of journalists. Most important, the musical makes Imelda’s “edifice complex” into a specter that cannot be ignored from beginning to end.
Real star
That’s all realized through an economical marriage of performance and design. Ynna Rafa emerges as the production’s real star, as Laya’s sister, a campus journalist stirred to social consciousness by her father’s death. And playing their mother—a golden-voiced though far too expensive-looking Shiela Valderrama.
Two sequences stand out: The first, a breathtaking union of set, lighting, and projection design (by Marco Viaña, D Cortezano, and Justin Santiago, respectively), that recreates the horrific collapse at the Film Center—and conjures the illusion of concrete cascading like a gushing river—using only billowing gray cloth, dim lights, smoke effects, and clever video.
In the second—the musical’s best scene—we join Laya and her family early in the story as they wait for a jeepney home late at night, her mother antsy and still not used to the absence of curfew. They marvel at the relentless construction around them: all glaring lights and groaning machinery in the near distance. Nothing is yet undone. Their silence, though, betrays not so much faint hope as calm resignation: In their lifetime, they would probably never attain the kind of life that would put them in the company of such opulence. The dictatorship goes on, and so do their lowly lives.
Desaparesidos
Finally, the third show was a staged reading: Guelan Varela-Luarca’s adaptation of Lualhati Bautista’s novel Desaparesidos. Here, at last, was the dictatorship at its most real and most violent. Worlds apart from the glamorous nights at Coco Banana, in the distant rural towns and small barangays, activists fought back against fascism’s deathly grip and waged the people’s war. This, in a way, was what the dictatorship wanted erased: genuine resistance.
Desaparesidos is about two New People’s Army activists, their time in the armed movement, and later on, after the fall of the Marcoses, their confusing return to civilian life. Consequently, it is about how families are formed and/or broken apart by fascism—and thus, about love—the many, sometimes undesirable forms it takes, and the different gradations it assumes.
It’s hard to believe the original staging of this play was a full decade ago already (I saw its 2018 restaging in the then-newly opened Areté in Ateneo, and was promptly blown away by its sheer theatricality and its visceral power.)
For this reading produced by Scene Change, co-directors Varela-Luarca and Kat Batara had assembled what’s essentially a dream cast: Marco Viaña and Sheenly Gener as the activist couple at the story’s core, Maliana Beran as their disillusioned daughter, Toni Go-Yadao as a fellow activist’s wife who ends up becoming the bridge between past and present, to name just four actors.
Watching this reading—and this cast—I couldn’t help wonder how many in the audience had caught the play back then. That was the year Marcos Jr. nearly won the vice presidency; the year Duterte sanctioned the burial of Marcos Sr.’s remains at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.
Ten years later, look where we’re at. A new generation of theatergoers has come of age—and a new, fully staged production of this masterpiece, more urgent than ever.
