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The sad thing about Atlantis Productions’ final show for the year, “The Addams Family,” is that it closed too soon—Dec. 1, after a mere three-weekend run.
“Spectacle” is the word that best describes “Wicked”— and that’s putting it mildly.
“August: Osage County,” the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play by actor-writer Tracy Letts, is set in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a speck of a town of less than 4,000 people somewhere in the Great American Plains. The state is just north of Texas, so it’s perfectly acceptable to assume that they must speak in a sort of Southern accent there.
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.
A mere kilometer from the Magallanes MRT station, in a nondescript building called Whitespace, a play of diminutive scale rages with astonishing explosive power, one that ravages the robust human façade and inflicts damaging blow after blow upon the fragile emotional soul.
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?
Musicals based on movies are a tricky concoction, mainly because it’s rather impossible to predict that balance between faithfulness to the material and new creative input that would guarantee a respectable adaptation, if not a first-rate hit.
There is much to praise in Red Turnip Theater’s “Rabbit Hole”—one of the trifecta of “beautifully depressing,” emotionally searing shows playing in Manila this month, the other two being the exquisitely mounted productions of Han Ong’s “Middle Finger” (by Tanghalang Ateneo) and Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years” (by 9 Works Theatrical).
The Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Little Theater better be sufficiently insured. Last we heard, the roof had been blown to pieces by a vocal supernova in the form of Sheila Francisco, in her first solo concert dubbed “Once in a Lifetime,” directed by Roselyn Perez.
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.
