❮
❯
Plays set in or centered on the Marcos dictatorship (these days, interchangeable in certain ways with the Duterte administration) all...
The experience of watching Ateneo Blue Repertory’s “Toilet: The Musical” (which concluded March 1 after a three-week run) approximated that of sitting in the middle of a Bornean rainforest, at three in the afternoon in May, to see some cool animals appear.
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.”
While ABS-CBN assembled its bevy of celebrities for its annual, highly publicized dress-and-glam-up festival known as the Star Magic Ball, the palatial Tanghalang Nicanor Abelardo of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) played host to an event of even grander and genuinely international scale.
Aicelle Santos, who just finished a yearlong stint as Gigi in the UK-Ireland touring production of “Miss Saigon,” won...
That relentless, thunderous crash you might have heard at the College of St. Benilde (CSB) Theater was the sound of the fourth wall being pummeled, then flimsily fixed, then pummeled again—in a vicious cycle that lasted almost three hours—in the mind-numbing production of Nonon Padilla’s “Larawan ng Pilipino Bilang Artist(a),” which ended its two-week existence Dec. 1.
Finally, “Mabining Mandirigma” sounds like an actual musical. Which is to say the current staging—the Tanghalang Pilipino warhorse’s fourth run...
(First of two parts) Under ordinary circumstances, the Cultural Center of the Philippines would have resembled a pilgrimage site of...
Calling the revered American critics and other detractors of the musical adaptation of Stephen King’s “Carrie”: This notorious Broadway flop recently had a three-weekend reincarnation in Manila as Atlantis Productions’ season closer—and boy, was it a bloody good production, pun intended.
Remember that story about the fair-skinned, virginal girl with the evil stepmother whose talking mirror has dreams of becoming a Miss Universe pageant judge? How about the one with the girl in supposedly eternal sleep, who can be awakened only by the kiss of a stranger? And the farm boy who scales a beanstalk and earns the ire of a giant apparently living in the stratosphere?
