Musical marvels
In case anyone has doubts about the health of original Philippine musical theater, two current productions, one good, the other great, should go a long way toward dispelling them.
The Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA)’s Skin Deep follows the lives of seven people who spend a month at a “beauty resort” owned by the ominously named Beau Batoctol, a doctor whose technological wizardry is astounding. Written by Vince de Jesus, the play gleefully satirizes this culture of ours that valorizes physical beauty at the expense of traits invisible to the naked eye. Batoctol (played with an unnervingly clear-skinned charm by Melvin Lee) has one stated objective: to produce “a flawlessly confident Pinoy.” The seven folks who submit to Batoctol’s guidance try to be just that.
Skin Deep’s greatest strength is its humor. De Jesus, himself one of our leading composers, shows off a fine talent for whipping up hysterically funny dialogue in a hip and breezy Taglish. (I’d like to give you an example, but many of the best lines would make a streetwalker blush.)
The performances are consistently solid. Phil Noble plays Pipay, a vain and aging florist, with a tart sassiness that allows room for vulnerability. Red Anderson is endearing as Tsonggo, a tall and handsome model whose sole liability is an accent that gives away his promdi roots. Robert Seña is Ciso, an ubër-macho male who browbeats his wife into trying to be more beautiful while all the time refusing to acknowledge his budding homosexuality. Watching Seña’s reckless abandon is one of the play’s great pleasures. With Noble and Anderson, he kicks off the second act with a smashing song-and-dance number highlighted by athletic and hilarious spins and turns. As Amor, an older woman who stays youthful by getting nips and tucks about as often as other women get their nails done, May Bayot–De Castro steals the show. Down-to-earth and blunt to a fault (with Bisaya accent to boot), Amor wins our hearts by having completely accepted who she is.
In fact, it is the play’s sublime irony that the person who has had more things done to her body than anyone else (she wins a beauty pageant called “Miss Artificial Beauty”) is the most at home in her own skin. Alas, it’s a surprising insight that goes unexplored. Which leads me to the play’s main shortcoming: an overeagerness to moralize. It wants us to agree so strongly that beauty should be more than, well, skin-deep that it sacrifices some of the story’s dramatic force. After everyone has their makeover, predictably enough, no one is fulfilled. Pipay finds himself no more attractive to the young men he hooks up with. Tsonggo puts on a veneer of sophistication, but everyone misses the charming bumpkin he used to be. Ciso’s morphing into a slick version of himself, complete with name change, makes him even more insufferable. The play works better as a series of vignettes than as a sustained narrative. The episodes in the first act in which the characters undergo their prescribed exercises while flippantly shooting the breeze are the play’s best moments.
But then perhaps we need to take into account the kind of audience the company reaches out to: mostly students. “Educational” is what the “e” in PETA stands for, after all, and the young may be particularly vulnerable to the insidious marketing messages that abound in today’s consumer culture. (The proliferation of skin-whitening products alone should give one pause.)
As for the music (composed by Lucien Letaba), there are more hits than misses. A few songs feel out of place, perhaps because everyone needs to be given a turn in the limelight. The sad, slow songs in particular tend to drag. But most are more delightful, and the playful songs are best, such as Do You Recognize Me?; the opening number involving the chorus (“Konting bawas, konting dagdag, konting tahi, konting tupi”); or Pipay’s song to the good doctor (he gives Batoctol an extensive laundry list of procedures he wants, before the refrain, “Konti lang naman, di ba?”).
It’s great that the production brings together immensely talented performers, but the risk is that their talents are underused. Isay Alvarez, for instance, plays the stereotypical martir wife, a role that demand little of her acting skills beyond constantly contorting the morose beauty of her face into a pout. Bituin Escalante gets a little more leeway, playing an urbanite who’s just a wee bit defensive about being dreadfully obese. But she, like Alvarez, is capable of much more than the material demands.
Still, the show has irrepressibly ribald humor, good songs, and solid performances from some of the country’s best musical talents. To watch this kind of talent you’d expect to pay a pretty peso, yet PETA charges no more for this show than it does for its previous ones. In the end, it’s a great value, and that makes Skin Deep an even more compelling choice for an evening’s entertainment.
Musical” might not be the best word to describe Dulaang UP’s production of Orosman at Zafira, but whatever it is, it is mesmerizing theater. A play written in the 1850s by Francisco Baltazar (or Balagtas), perhaps our best-known Filipino poet, Orosman at Zafira tells the story of internecine strife that roils three kingdoms in the Philippine south. Like other triumphant adaptations of classic material, this production’s version of the story feels ancient yet resoundingly new.
Where to begin detailing this production’s marvels? Let’s begin with its wondrous neo-ethnic music of composer and singer Carol Bello. Perhaps best known as the lead singer of world-music band Pinikpikan,
The actors and dancers add to the aural richness, wielding jaw harps and bamboo clappers. But these instruments double as weapons of war. Zelim, one of the three pashas, wields a lute-like instrument fashioned (or deformed?) into a bow to fire bamboo arrows. Another pasha is killed with a clapper shaped like a dagger. Some women wear kubings in their hair only to cut and strike with them later. It’s all of a piece with the play’s meditation on the corrupting power of violence.
First-time director Dexter Santos also plays choreographer, and his moves are constantly riveting despite the performers being mostly amateurs. The set pieces — dances of war that take the place of real fighting yet evoke their grace and savagery — are downright electrifying.
As for the main cast, all of them range from good to terrific. The best performances of the evening I watched: Ricky Ibe smolders as Boulasem, whose suspicion and treachery ignite the cycle of war. (Significantly, his is a non-singing part.) Tao Aves sings the part of Zelima the narrator with a wounded sorrow; the daughter of Zelim who recounts the story as if it were a terrible memory she can’t shake, she gives the play a suitably epic resonance. Cris Villonco remarkably imbues Zafira with believable frailty and strength, making her character the young innocent who plunges headlong into the passion and madness of love and war.
As for the material: I’m not all that familiar with the komedya, the native dramatic form Baltazar hewed to (though with important twists) in writing his story. The program credits Anril Tiatco, as well as Patrick Valera and Katte Sabate, with extensively rewriting the playwright’s original text. Some scenes were deleted, some added, their sequence rearranged; lines spoken by one character were given to another; characters were expunged. Overall, the attempt to bring the play into the present and make it speak to this generation seems animated by a fidelity that is respectful but not slavish, a spirit that fills the best adaptations of classic works. The subject matter seems awfully current: ambition, violence, love (both romantic and familial), vengeance, honor and, ultimately, the human cost of war, its necessity and tragedy. (Notably, women play a large part in the story, yet there is a striking absence of mothers; this is perhaps a comment on the nature and source of the spiraling violence.)
The remade text feels perfectly natural: the language seems a formal, stately and old Filipino, and the writers who have adapted the play make no concession to accessibility. The performers sing and speak it the way it should: with utmost conviction. It is not easy on the ear. But the words become part of the play’s strange and beautiful music, as if it were some ancient language that is in turns opaque, mysterious and breathtaking.
It has its flaws, though all minor. The exposition is a bit too long, creating some lulls in the first half hour. The blocking of dialogue could be more creative; once in a while two characters merely stand stiffly and face each other. As good as the dancing is, and as game as the performers are (mostly students and members of Dulaang UP), one wonders at the possibilities if, say, the corps of Ballet
But that’s probably just me being greedy. From what I’ve seen, Dulaang UP’s Orosman at Zafira is the first truly outstanding production of 2008.
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Skin Deep by PETA runs until March 9 at the PETA-Phinma Theater,
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