The thing with musical theater royalty—those immortal, wildly popular pieces such as “Les Miserables” or “The Phantom of the Opera”—is that it either completely blows you away or it doesn’t. There is no middle ground.
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.”
In Manila, it’s easy to tell the people behind a show to have a rerun when the show turns out to be excellent. But that’s easier said than done: One considers not only a production’s financial success and viability, but also the artists’ schedules and the limited availability of venues.
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.
Nothing of magnitude happens in Tanghalang Pilipino’s “Manila Notes.”
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.
As a vehicle for delivering a bloody spectacle, Ateneo Blue Repertory’s “Carrie” struggles to make a devastating impact.
“Waitress”continues this thrust. It’s a sprightly musical that digs deep into the seemingly not-so-happy lives of the blue-collar townsfolk in America’s heartland.
Like an old dog who doesn’t like it when the furniture gets moved around, I’m not so keen on things changing.
It’s almost always better to be understated than overstated. The classical way of describing food on menus was what editors would call a head followed by a subhead. For example, “Adobo of Baby Pork” is followed by the descriptive title “Gently simmered grass-fed pastured pork simmered in a piquant sauce of palm vinegar and home-brewed soy sauce with heady notes of garlic and a brush of laurel.” More contemporary fine-dining restaurants have started using eccentric punctuation and whimsical names that give away nothing: “Walking in the Woods {game :: cheese :: agony}” and so on.
