Terence Blanchard, the jazz trumpeter making opera history
Washington, United States | AFP | Saturday 12/7/2019 – 09:44 UTC+8 By: Maggy Donaldson A top-tier jazz trumpeter and Spike Lee’s go-to…
The Tony and Olivier Award-winning “Spring Awakening,” with music by Duncan Sheik and libretto by Steven Sater, is billed as a “rock musical.”
Three years ago, Philippine Educational Theater Association (Peta) put on a show that aimed to make Shakespeare more accessible to the Filipino youth by transplanting the Bard’s dated English to the hip language of rap. The play was “William,” and it was a gamble that handsomely paid off, in both the pedagogical and theatrical sense.
Not the man himself, of course, who turns 90 in March and whose theater pieces have long endured a reputation for being technically difficult. The critic Richard Corliss said it best in Time magazine: “His melodies [are] meant to challenge the ear, not soothe it,” and “his lyrics are often so complex, they have to be heard twice.”
They were on a roll. Then they vanished. Now they’re back.
There was a time when the musicals of Repertory Philippines were actually highlights of their seasons—for instance, Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo’s refreshingly scaled-back “Jekyll and Hyde” in 2012; or Jaime del Mundo’s romp of a production that was “The Producers” in 2013; or even 2009’s “Sweeney Todd,” which, while too “safe and bloodless,” as Inquirer’s former theater editor Gibbs Cadiz wrote, was nevertheless “expertly sung, technically polished [and] thrilling in moments.”
The second and third installments of “This Is War,” a four-part series of dramatic readings by the Company of Actors in Streamlined Theatre, were a study in contrasts—contrasting Jameses, that is.
From start to end, “Madagascar: A Musical Adventure” looks polished and effortless, progressing from scene to scene with professional ease....
“Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, 2” which opened Oct. 10 for a three-month run at the cavernous Newport Performing Arts Theater in Resorts World Manila is not exactly how people would picture a musical based on a children’s fairy tale.
It’s 2018—one more year before the second decade of the new millennium wraps up. So, one simply must question the existence of a jukebox musical like “All Out of Love,” especially since its Filipino contemporaries happen to be shows as nuanced and painstakingly crafted as the recent hits “Sa Wakas,” “Rak of Aegis” and “Ako si Josephine.”
In Dulaang Filipino’s “Alyas July,” which had a four-day run this week at College of St. Benilde-School of Design and Arts Black Box, playwright Eljay Castro Deldoc turned the scheming politicos of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” into scheming company members of a college theater troupe trying to get through a technical dress rehearsal of “Julius Caesar.”
