At play with Audie Gemora

He has staged numerous plays ranging from the sweet and colorful Little Mermaid to the controversial and sensual Equus, and has mentored different generations of talent on both stage and television. He is the president of Trumpets and Stages, an actor, a director, a father, and everybody’s “Tito.” Here are 10 things you should know about Audie Gemora.

1. He was an average student in high school. But one day, he went from being the most unpopular kid in school, to being the “second most popular kid in school.”

“In the late ‘70s, nobody was into the arts. And our teacher at that time, an American lady named Ruth Butler, recruited me to be part of her high school musical. Ako naman, I didn’t have anything to do, I wasn’t really into anything, I didn’t have very many friends,” recalls Audie of his days in the International School. He said he hid out in the library most of the time, not because he liked books, but because he didn’t want people to see he had no friends. Until he was introduced to theater.

“We did a musical called Oklahoma and I played the kontrabida,” he says of his first-ever role at 15. “The response was just tremendous. Parang na-discover ko yung gift ko. Yun, tuluy-tuloy na, I became Drama Club president. Then after high school, I wanted to see if I was still good enough outside of school. There was the Manila Theater Guild, and that’s where I started, I did Grease. And again, ang laki laki ng response. So every step that I took just kept affirming that I had something special.”

2. On ego and the theater world: “There was a point I was just this very mayabang golden boy of Repertory.”

Audie: “Freddie (Santos) and I have had so many fights.”

Bianca: “Sigawan?”

Audie: “Oh yeah. I would submit to him as my mentor, but I would remember, two years older lang siya sa akin so di ako pwede masyado apihin. It was also largely because I was a lazy S.O.B.”

“Being an artist is very self involved,” Audie admits. “Everything revolves around you as a performer. Being an artist has a form of immortality, that you create something, you perform something and it affects people’s lives. They gather around you and idolize you. You get that feeling that it’s all about you. But it’s also the most insecure position to be in.

“I went to the States to study filmmaking in NYU. All of a sudden, this big fish in a small pond became this small fish in a big pond. It was like, who was I? That started my insecurity. Pagbalik ko dito, I knew I wouldn’t be happy just doing the same thing again. I was searching. I was really searching for something.” That was when some friends brought him to church, and that’s when his life changed.

3. Theater company Trumpets was born in 1991 out of a group of theater friends and a reaffirmation of faith.

“Friends led me to a church, and that’s when I became Born Again. Mari Kaimo, Freddie Garcia, sunud-sunod kami,” Audie recalls. “And of course being theater artists, our most immediate response was, how do we express our love for God? Eh di yung talent namin.” Their group actually staged two plays prior to putting up Trumpets — the comedy First Name and the musical Joseph The Dreamer. “I think it revolutionized Christian entertainment because up until that time, it was only kantatas or senakulos. This one was hip, modern, the music was Gary V and Ogie Alcasid, and we put in a lot of hip hop and comedy.” It was around 1997 when Stages, the events and talent management company, was put up. 

4. On art and religion: “Art is supposed to reflect life. That’s where my Christianity stops.”

“I guess I’m liberal in that sense,” Audie shares. “Being an artist is the license, the privilege, the anointing of God to be able to express what you see. You are supposed to reflect what you see in the world, and that’s a gift. I don’t think anybody has the right to stop it, ban it, edit it or censor it. If you don’t want to see it, you don’t have to. So it really scares me when the Church gets heavy-handed.”

He reveals there was a time that he left Trumpets for three years, because of the struggle between his being an artist and a man of faith. “I went back to Repertory and I found myself again. I had lost myself for a time, I lost the artist in me,” he recalls. “When you are supposedly a Christian theater ministry, there are things that are expected of you by the Church. But that’s precisely why I believe God got us to do this as artists. So we would be out of the box, because how can we reach out to people who would never be caught in a church to begin with, if we can’t be real? If we can’t speak of their issues and reflect what they’re going through, right?” He recalls a time someone questioned his staging of Little Mermaid because it was about a “demonic character,” and another time someone told him he couldn’t play his dream role, Sweeney Todd, because he was a killer. “I’m already in that frame of mind that I think it’s the Church that needs to expand its mind. Your testimony is how you live your life, it’s not the role you play.

“Yes, God is very important to me, but not in a way that people could dictate. I would have to find Him in finding myself first. In being honest to who I am, by being a good father maybe, learning to love properly. That’s when I found who I was as a Christian again,” he adds. Audie was once quoted telling the Church to “relax” during the issue of the controversial art exhibit in the CCP, and was also a vocal supporter of the RH bill. “Maybe that’s the reason bakit palaban ako sa ganyan, kasi pinagdaanan ko yung struggle na yan.”

5. Audie Gemora in numbers:100-plus: Number of plays watched

50: Theater productions done

4: Awards won for performing and directing (including Aliw Awards Best Stage Director for Noli in 2011)

2: Number of dogs owned. “They’re aspins (asong Pinoy), Skipper, who’s really furry, and Yuki, who looks like a Japanese Spitz. They say when they’re rescued that they love the amo more.”

100: Number of opening night gifts in his collection. “Like for Footloose, I got a cowboy boot. For Les Mis, I got a troll dressed as Javert.”

120: Approximate number of hours it takes to prepare for a play. “Around one month, four hours a day, and then eight hours a day during production week.”

6. He has a modern-day family. “My son has a mother and two sisters.”

“I saw this kid walking around the lobby of Meralco Theater. I said, who is this? Whose kid are you?” Audie recalls the time he met Richard. “He was like the Trumpets baby because his tita worked in Trumpets. He was being brought there a lot and I just fell in love with him. It was at that point in my life when I had achieved everything… And I always had this fatherly instinct in me. When the boy was there, we just gravitated towards each other and it became an instant bond. It’s amazing.”

Since Richard was two, it was Audie who would go to their house to be a surrogate dad to him. Until 2009 when Richard was nine years old. “I said, ‘Son, it’s time to live together.’ So I went back to the house and took the whole family.” He says that Richard is starting to show interest in theater, but as of the moment he’s much more into sports. “You’d think at 13, mag-uumpisa na yung problema. He would tell me about classmates and what they were getting into, and he’s not into it. I’m just so blessed. Ang bait bait na bata.”

7. He is called the King of Philippine Musical Theater, and was once actually in a five-year relationship with the Queen of Philippine Musical Theater, Menchu Lauchengo-Yulo.

“That started in Repertory, and we weren’t even acting together. She’s very pretty, and we were barkada,” Audie recalls. On how they were able to remain friends after: “I love Menchu! I think we just both recognized that we were not for each other. But we remain very close.”

“Nangyayari kasi sa theater, nagsasama kayo madalas, so you will get drawn to someone. In Trumpets, we have so many theater couples, and a lot are married now.”

8. He once headed the Talent Center division of TV5, but despite being a mentor himself, realized it was not for him. “I realized hindi ako showbiz, I’m a theater person.”

“I had to follow the artist around, talk about their love life, think kanino pwede ipares, pano magkakaroon ng intriga,” he explains. “Sometimes you get lost and you think, ‘Wait, where does talent come in here?’ At one point it wasn’t even about the project anymore.”

On the difference between an artist and an artista: “I don’t mean to demean artistas, and I hope I can make the distinction well so nobody gets offended. I think when you’re an artist, the most important thing for you is your craft. That you spend an awful lot of time perfecting your craft and getting good at it, and the popularity or the adulation of people is a result of the work you put out. In showbiz, it’s the complete opposite. You are now dealing with a different market, and so it is personality-driven, looks-driven and youth-driven.

“You can look at any talent center of the three networks. There’s a big bench of talent there, and a lot of the talented ones aren’t being used. For an artist like me, that’s hard to take,” he shares.

“Pero dito naman ako bilib with artistas. Tatanggapin mo yung script ngayong araw, tapos magsho-shoot na. Because you don’t have the process of creating your character, you just need to now have a library of emotions that you just have to pull out.”

9. He is now taking his craft to the next level. Audie is putting up the Talent School of Academics and The Arts.

“Playshop was a summer workshop we developed in 1993. We wanted to make it different, so we were the very first to offer Musical Theater, Hip-hop and Modeling,” Audie recalls. “As many as 2,000 students would enroll and parents would tell us why not have it all year? We then put up Musicademy that was year round, but nobody enrolled. I always had it at the back of my mind that it was an unfinished formula.”

Fast forward to 2013, and as fate would have it, this June, their school is opening. “It’s progressive. We will have dance, literature, theater, visual arts and music. Then that’s parallel to the academic, which is science, language, math, and other subjects. Those are the two pillars, and in the middle we have our Art Integration Program. We will use the arts to teach the subjects. For example, if you’re teaching the solar system to kids, you put them in a dance and they form the solar system. Its experiential, they realize the movement, rather than just memory work. Or for example history, instead of struggling through voluminous books of Noli and Fili, experience life at that time with theater. So you come to appreciate the characters of Rizal as real people. The possibilities are endless.”

He strongly believes that if it weren’t for that happy accident of getting recruited for theater in high school, he probably would’ve become a bored haciendero. “I don’t want that to happen to other kids. I want all children that will go to our school to have the opportunity to develop all their talents.”

10. More than the awards or the titles given to him, the biggest compliment he has received is: “Uy, yung anak ko nag-Playshop.”

“I hear stories of parents saying their children gained confidence or came out of their shell after taking our classes, and that just gives me so much fulfillment,” Audie says with a big smile. 

On making a name in Philippine theater: “It’s definitely flattering, it’s an affirmation of my body of work. It’s also nakaka-pressure because you have to live up to it. More than the awards actually, yung respeto ng tao is something I really, really value.”

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As I transcribed and wrote this piece on Audie, I looked over the course of his life and career and sincerely learned two things. First, that it is okay to do things that are out of the box, to define things differently from the way convention defines it. And second, that it is okay to lose your way. Because with the right mindset, you will eventually find yourself on the path where you were meant to be.

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E-mail me at askiamsuperbianca@yahoo.com or message me on Twitter @iamsuperbianca.