Repertory Philippines’ second production for its 50th anniversary is John Pielmeier’s “Agnes of God,” a play it had first staged in 1983 with Pinky Amador as Agnes, and Rep cofounders Zeneida “Bibot” Amador as the mother superior and Baby Barredo as the psychiatrist.
“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.
“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.
'Marcos, Enrile, Laurel, Virata–at Rep, we all somehow managed to co-exist despite the differences'
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.
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.
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.
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
Art Acuña, Pinky Amador, Topper Fabregas lead the cast of Atlantis Theatrical Entertainment Group’s production of “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches”—part 1 of American playwright Tony Kushner’s award-winning play on AIDS and homosexuality.
