Of the 20 songs by Sugarfree featured in “Sa Wakas,” the jukebox musical woven around the music of the late great pop-rock band that’s on its last weekend at the Peta Theater Center, nearly every other number has been a chart-topper, or at least a staple of the radio- music TV loop for years.
The red flags come up early in Repertory Philippines’ production of “The Graduate,” the screen-to-stage adaptation (running until April 28 at Onstage, Greenbelt 1) otherwise directed with customary gloss and professionalism by Jaime del Mundo.
There is, as always, the dim view: “Tourism,” says American author Don Delillo, “is the march of stupidity. You’re expected to be stupid. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don’t know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it … You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.”
National Artist for Literature F. Sionil José, in a recent column, called it “the ancient problems of our theater”—the lack of resources, say, and more gravely, the continuing lack of audiences, which was the prevalent lament during the sparsely populated National Theater Festival held in November this year at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
By native, we mean, of course, original Filipino material, which for much of this year seems to take a beating from either a general lack of visibility or the lackluster quality of many new homegrown offerings.
“La Bella Confusione” was the original title Federico Fellini wanted to give his film that eventually became “8 1/2,” which then became the unacknowledged basis for the 1982 Tony-winning Broadway musical “Nine” that has music and lyrics by Maury Yeston and book by Arthur Kopit (with assist from Mario Fratti’s Italian play “Six Passionate Women”).
The playwright’s name above the title? It’s rare in these parts, where stellar billing routinely goes to the actors and, on occasion, to a few star directors.
When he introduced Gantimpala Theater artistic director Tony Espejo at the Philstage Gawad Buhay! awards night last year, which honored Espejo for lifetime achievement in Philippine theater, writer-director Jose Javier Reyes recalled how he first met the honoree:
It’s only a ponytail that separates man from beast in ‘Jekyll and Hyde,’” went the opening line of Ben Brantley’s blistering review for the New York Times of the Frank Wildhorn-Leslie Bricusse musical when it opened on Broadway in April 1997.
Paulina Porizkova is the face of Avon Cosmetics’ latest “breakthrough anti-aging miracle,” Anew Genics.
The Philippine Educational Theater Association’s Filipino production of “King Lear,” directed by Nonon Padilla and running until March 4 at the Peta Theater Center, opens with a familiar scene arrestingly re-imagined.
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