Fever: Baguio’s night of love songs and poetry

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines — The Baguio Writers Group (BWG), a community organization committed to celebrate Cordilleran literature and nurture the souls of Cordillera-based writers, is on a feverish rush early in the year.

Being romantics at heart, the members, led by president Jennifer Patricia Cariño, are producing the fundraising concert Fever: A Night of Love Songs and Poetry on Feb. 6 at the main dining hall of Hill Station. The restaurant is housed in the venerable Casa Vallejo, upper Session Road, Baguio.

Concert proceeds will help underwrite Taboan, a regional writers conference in May that will have writers, teachers and students of literature and writing as participants.

Featured singer is Lissa Romero de Guia, who starred in Miss Saigon in its run in Germany and has appeared in Baguio productions like the tribute to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Open Space’s Jesus Christ Superstar. Her assisting artist is blues-jazz guitarist Ian Paolo Acosta, described as “one of the undiscovered talents who breathe youth and vitality into the local music scene.”

An added feature of the BWG activity is a letter-writing booth. It is dedicated to helping the inarticulate or shy write love letters to their beloved. This will be staffed by former BWG president Padma Perez and Nash Tysmans. Senior BWG member Toottee Chanco-Pacis will bake the small, heart-shaped rum cakes to go with the ghostwritten letters.

Lissa Romero-de Guia (left) performing as Eva Peron in a past production. Singer, songwriter and guitarist Ian Paolo Acosta (right).

Perez said, “We will write letters for all kinds of love. We can cover the platonic as well as the erotic. The letters will be handwritten with good penmanship on stationery by BWG members who can write letters in English, Ilokano or Tagalog.”

She added, “The price for a letter or poem will vary depending on the length.” The letters with cakes may be collected at Mt. Cloud Bookshop, also housed at Casa Vallejo, on Feb. 13.

Chanco-Pacis assured that her cakes’ size and icing will be so designed that “they will not make a mess on the letter.”

Romero-de Guia, who happens to be wed to filmmaker Kidlat de Guia, is a new BWG member, but immediately volunteered her talent.

She said, “I love singing for a good cause. Like writing, singing is about being completely present within a personal human experience, then sharing that experience with others. Somehow, there is a wholeness that one feels when singing for others. ‘Service is its own reward,’ the saying aptly goes. In other words, nakakataba ng puso.”

She trained in singing with Heribert Feckler and Raymond Sepe in Germany and at the HB Studio in New York under Helen Gallagher, an Emmy and Tony Award winner.

Together with musical director Ben Tapang, senior BWG member and retired the University of the Philippines Baguio professor who once led its official choir, she and Acosta have divided the program into Broadway and jazz songs. Each set will be preceded by a poetry reading of original compositions by the group’s members.

Tapang said the repertoire includes, among others, If I Loved You, Someone to Watch Over Me, the duets of We Kiss in a Shadow and All I Ask, I Don’t Know How to Love Him, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Misty, My Funny Valentine, The Nearness of You, Fever, Night and Day, Cry Me a River, It Had to Be You.

He continued, “I love this repertoire as I grew up and grew old with most of them. With this music in the background, they were sort of playing while I was in love. Well, except for the more recent West End musicals!”

When she was presented with the idea of love songs paired with poetry reading and love letter writing, Hill Station’s Mitos Benitez exclaimed, “I love it! I have always wanted to feature Lissa. And Lolo Ben (Tapang’s nickname in Baguio)? I love it even more!”

Benitez has prepared a special menu for the event from soup, salad, entrée to dessert and tea with special love-themed names to them.

In the past, BWG produced another fundraiser that featured Jacqui Magno, Gou de Jesus, On Call (a group that sings in four-part harmony and a regular at the bar of The Manor, Camp John Hay). Proceeds went to its writing workshops and an ailing founding member.

(Tickets to Fever: A Night of Love Songs and Poetry are available at Hill Station and Mt. Cloud Bookshop.)