“How’s the house outside? Are we very full? Marami nang tao?” It’s noon on a Thursday and actress Pinky Amador is getting ready for a different kind of show. Her students, the Theater Arts majors at Meridian International College, have spent the past week working on “MINT Knows Monique Wilson,” a lecture session featuring the theater actress. Monique was scheduled to arrive any minute.
It is late afternoon in a dance studio in Makati, where the cast of Atlantis Productions’ “Piaf” is winding up rehearsals for the day. The play, which premiered Friday night at the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium of RCBC Plaza, has occupied the mind of its lead star, Pinky Amador, for a good number of years.
In Atlantis Productions’ “Piaf,” audiences are greeted by a room made of wide, drab, wooden panels and crumbling shutters that reach the rafters, a visual metaphor for the vast, high-reaching yet damaged life of the play’s titular French chanteuse.
COUNT THEM—22 productions in just the first five months of the year, from the small two-character drama (“Red”) to the all-stops-out musical extravaganza (“Ibalong,” “Katy”). Local theater is at its most prolific and exciting in years; and so, before the last days of summer ring the curtain down on the old season to usher in the new by June—and with memory the only antidote to the ephemeral nature of theater—we thought we’d look back and salute the performances that lit up the stage and occasioned cheers in the previous months.
When “Katy” opened on Jan. 27 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, not only was it the first local production to raise its curtain this year, it was also a harbinger of sorts.
Supertyphoon “Yolanda” showed the best and the worst of social media. In the immediate aftermath, at least, there was none of the irreverent humor that Filipinos are known for, we who make fun of anything and anyone, even and especially our own misfortune. The enormity of the tragedy was such that not even the worst kibitzers on social media had the guts to post any wisecrack.
“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.
It is not easy being an Asian-American actor in the United States. It is an uphill struggle. Successes are few and far between (think “M. Butterfly” or “The Romance of Magno Rubio”). Many are called (hundreds and hundreds audition) but few are chosen.
And they do seem to be enjoying themselves on stage in this pleasant, witty–if not exactly rip-roaring–production
Rep stalwarts pay tribute to the company’s legendary founder, who would have been 83 last Feb. 7
