World’s fair

Floy Quintos’ St. Louis Loves Dem Filipinos was not originally a musical, but a straight play later set to music on the suggestion of dance critic Basilio Villaruz. Directed by Dulaang UP mainstay Alexander Cortez, St. Louis The Musicale may have received mixed critical reviews, but it was a certified box office hit, running for over a month at the Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero Theater at the UP Diliman.

We were finally able to watch it on its second to the last weekend run, as many in the cast were to move on to other commitments after acceding to a final weekend show.

In a Sunday morning matinee, Quintos himself had to play the role of Gramps, the Filipino who was part of the first wave of migrant workers to the United States, giving an added twist to the production.

As actress Banaue Miclat has noted, Cortez, who had first cast her in a lead role at UP, the director has an eye for spectacle, and this is very much evident in St. Louis with its well choreographed scenes, riveting choruses, splendid stage design.

We’ve heard it said that the play had repeated SRO crowds, such that there have been suggestions that a venue larger than the Guerrero theater would be considered for future runs. The historic AS theater, though, has the right atmosphere and old academe elan fit for St. Louis Loves Dem Filipinos.

Most of that Sunday morning crowd we were with consisted of students. There was an actress or two also in the audience who loudly applauded the comic scenes provided by Antonio the Igorot, played by Raffy Tejada, who resembled the filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik.

Anyone who strayed into the theater – of course after presenting a ticket at the gate – might have gotten a random glimpse of what life in UP is like.

The play may have been three hours long but it hardly felt like it, with the scenes well paced and blocking never awkward nor a sore sight. The cast, a worthy combination of veteran stage actors and young thespians mostly from the State University, were naturals in conveying the conflict present in the Filipino ethnic delegation that were sent to the St. Louis exposition, a blend of comic chutzpah and latent political undertones.

Miguel Castro in the lead role as the Bagobo chieftain Bulan could be the atypical Pinoy in the US whose illusions are broken down until all that’s left is a hobo and drunkard, indeed merely a shadow of his old princely self. His emoting eyes with that faraway look may have been a bit overdone at times, but this may be what the role called for. Sometimes he reminded us of other persons with similar faraway expressions.

Another standout was Leo Rialp as the sympathetic foreigner Niederlein, whose distinguished demeanor could not have been mere put on. There were elements of the homoerotic, however, in Niederlein’s song about the missing Bulan while he holds the Bagobo’s scarf "in his hands, in his heart," but I guess the playwright and director could not help it.

Richard Cunanan, as the exploitative American Worcester who brought the indigenous act to Missouri, is also worthy of mention, yet neither is his role outright condemnable because he believes what he is doing is also for the good of the natives.

This is the crucial difference between the musical and the ordinary straight play, as both Quintos and Cortez point out in their program notes – Antonio Africa’s music all the more brought out the characters’ human side such that not everything is black and white, rather a corridor of gray areas amid the high inspired notes.

Without music, it might have been merely a political play about turn of century racism and the delicate balance of Fil-Am relations; with music, St. Louis transcends didactic strategies and becomes a parable of the Pinoy abroad, specifically in the great US of A.

It makes us reflect, too, on our forefathers and varied ancestors who first took the boat across the ocean to work in the fields and canneries of North America.

Comic relief is provided, aside from the aforementioned Igorot Antonio, by Maude, the fat woman from the circus, who sang but whose singing did not signal the end of the play, contrary to that popular saying.

At times, we thought it a bit extraneous if not superfluous, those scenes with Maude, but later we realized that this was essential to the development of the Bulan character. The fire in the plantation had a lot of drama to it, too, with the anti-racist radical ethic very much UP. You got to take it on the chin, boy, as Gramps himself sang to the young Fred, and first-timers anywhere can only do as much.

Alex Cortez has e-mailed Banaue in New York to say that at the rate it’s going, St. Louis would break the record of number of performances of a single Dulaang UP play, with playdates in other UP campuses slated. This can only be a good sign in these cynical times, when people turn to the magic of theater for some respite.

Curtain call is a feeling unlike any other, when the lights come on and the applause rings all the way up to the rafters of the old theater, and cast and audience come face to face – but who in that flicker of a moment really is the watcher, who the watched? Could some shift in roles have occurred in midstream? And where would we all be without the magic of theater, the only means left for people like Bulan to find their way home.