Early this year, Repertory Philippines became homeless as Greenbelt 1 was set on closing down for renovation in April. The country’s pioneering theater company, known simply as Rep, had been putting on shows at the Onstage Theater of that Ayala Center mall in Makati City for the last 20 years.

But as fate would have it, a Rep staff member had a friend working at Megaworld Corp., a developer of several malls, including the cluster found at the Eastwood City property in Quezon City. The connection led to Megaworld Lifestyle Malls head Graham M. Coates, whose two daughters Rachel and Becca happened to be alumni of Rep’s acting workshops and productions. It ultimately reached Kevin Tan, the vice chairman, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Megaworld Corp.’s parent company, Alliance Global Group, Inc. (AGI).

AGI, whose Newport World Resorts property houses the Newport Performing Arts Theater, turned out to be making grand plans of expanding its reach and mark in the industry. It then offered Rep a home by reconfiguring the cinemas at its Eastwood City Walk mall and constructing a theater specifically for Rep. Thus, the birth of Eastwood Theater, which was formally launched Oct. 5 to coincide with the opening of Rep’s third production in its ongoing season, “Jepoy and the Magic Circle.”

As Rep’s president and CEO Mindy Barredo Perez-Rubio stated in her opening remarks, “This was written in the stars. This just had to happen.”

Joy Virata, one of Rep’s living pillars who also gave a speech, said finding a new home in Eastwood City means “somebody up there loves us and we are doing something good.”

Institution

The feeling is mutual, as expressed by Tan in his speech: “We’re honored to have Rep because it’s an institution already. When you talk about performing arts in the Philippines, it’s really Repertory. It has created a legacy for the last 57 years, producing the best shows.”

He added, “We’re quite committed to the performing arts. We believe that this is the future of Philippine entertainment. We believe that the Filipino actors are very versatile in the way they act and sing. What’s needed is really a serious investment in the facilities and infrastructure to develop more this art form.

“That’s why one of the things that our company would like to do in the next five years is we want to develop what we’d like to call the Broadway of Asia. We’re actually building a place called Westside City up in the Bay Area. We’re putting there, among other things, the Grand Opera House, which is a 2,100-seater theater.”

“I’m so overwhelmed and so happy with this kind of support,” Virata told Lifestyle in an interview at the event. “It’s a great theater. We have to build up an audience again, but we always do that. We’ve built up an audience with all the places we’ve been.”

Rep started staging classical plays and Broadway musicals at the Insular Life Auditorium in Makati City after it was formed in 1967 by top theater figures led by Zenaida “Bibot” Amador and Baby Barredo. After more than 15 years, Rep moved to a theater at the Shangri-La Plaza mall in Mandaluyong City and stayed there for 15 years before relocating to Greenbelt in 2004.

Attracting new audiences

As the creative director of Repertory Theater for Young Audiences (RTYA), Virata said she finds “confusing” working with the new generation of actors and theater workers. “But I’m so lucky. I have a lot of young minds helping in the production, like with video. They provide the young thoughts, the young ideas because my ideas may be from 20 years ago. But they bring up-to-date ideas. So, I’m so happy.”

While “Jepoy and the Magic Circle” is set to run until February 2025, Virata has already started work on her next project for the children’s theater, “Alice in Wonderland.” Meantime, the ongoing 87th season still has one last production to stage this year, “Going Home to Christmas: A Jose Mari Chan Musical,” slated for a November opening.

“We are having a hard time penetrating the millennials and Gen Z audiences,” Perez-Rubio admitted to us, also at the event. “We’re still working hard on that because they have a different way of looking at theater. Because Rep, when it started, it catered mostly to the classics, Shakespeare, Greek tragedies and all the British classics.

“When Bibot passed away, my sister Baby, who’s on the artistic side, she didn’t know how to run Rep, so it sort of slid down. We lost a lot of our subscribers. She came to me and asked me, ‘Please help me put Rep back on its feet.’ That was in 2016, and I’m still here. My goal when I came into Rep was to find a home for Rep, and I found it. Mission accomplished.” INQ