‘Filipinas 1941’ goes to Zamboanga

Wednesday, 25 February 2015

‘Filipinas 1941’ goes to Zamboanga

By JC Nigado

THE “warning” is ancient, coming as it does from the early American occupation of the Philippines,
but still it strikes fear in the hearts and minds of some people. And to think it was immortalized in a racist, colonial song: “Don’t you go, don’t you go to far Zamboanga...”

            Recently, a Metro Manila-based photographer was invited by the Philippine Stagers Foundation (PSF) to cover its performances in the said premier city in the south; but when he asked permission to go on leave for a week in Zamboanga, his American employer in Quezon City promptly denied his request mainly for “security” reason.

            “Isn’t it too dangerous there?” the clueless foreigner wondered aloud, as though referring to something “fly-by-night” and “destiny manifest.” Small wonder because both the American employer and the Filipino photographer have never been to the place; hence, they’re only informed and influenced by the chilling power of hearsay. What a pity!

            However, the knowing cast and crew of PSF are flying to the same fabled city, on March 1, for several performances of the award winning and hit musical, Filipinas 1941, at the Zamboanga City Coliseum. The scheduled staging in Mindanao is not their first, and it runs until March 5. Then they’ll proceed to its next stop: Bacolod and Iloilo, like a second home on the western road.

            PSF president and artistic director Vincent Tañada continues undaunted with his mission in spreading the word: that Philippine theater is alive and kicking.  Well, at least PSF is, really, and it’s doing very good on its own. Credit it to what film and theater veteran Frank Rivera calls “the Renaissance Man” of the local performing arts. Anybody who disagrees must find someone else who can hold a candle to the talent and work of this marketing genius (in collaboration with marketing director Chris Lim) with “legal” sense. And yes, Virginia, he may be “full of himself” but the more important thing is he cares and shares rather generously – himself and what he has.

            As for the play itself, I’ve watched Filipinas 1941, on several occasions, always on invitation, in several places, and with diverse viewers, to see how each performance impacts a particular audience. From SM North EDSA, Quezon City, to St. Scholastic and Adamson University in Manila to Tanghalang Pasigueño in Pasig City to the huge Centennial Arena in Laoag City, Ilocos Norte, each mounting of Filipinas 1941 takes a different form, and sometimes function, to serve certain demographics.  The director and performers improvise, or revise, as the case may be, and as called for by the situation. A show for college students is different from the one that’s for a high school audience; also, the same show is further revised for elementary pupils in attendance.

            Indeed, a PSF play is never the same in any staging. Obviously, Tañada knows his demographics and he recognizes the need to play or to not play to the gallery, as it were.  More than the form, what concerns or worries him is the function of the play, as performed. The page is alive and dynamic on the stage, as it transforms and connects with the audience, especially in relating the present to the past. Most often, it’s a rousing performance every time, with the usual ring of success, a rare mix of artful craft and commerce.

            For the series of shows in far Zamboanga, PSF executive director and resident set designer Jeffrey Ambrosio has decided to redesign the stage setting by utilizing indigenous materials such as bamboos and palm thatches (pawid). Such creative resourcefulness to replace the more convenient, if expensive, fiberglass moldings and painted walls used in Metro Manila and the Bicol and Ilocos shows, since the cost of transporting these materials have become quite prohibitive. Nevertheless, the layered terrain onstage remains, to reflect the levels on which the play operates.

            Some say Filipinas 1941 is not the best musical in the PSF repertoire – that boasts of other award-winning plays such as Cory ng EDSA and Ako si Ninoy, but it is a worthy addition, and testament, to the best repertory theater in the country today. For instance, can you name another theater company in town whose currency includes revisiting any old play on the stage, barely on a day or a week’s notice?

            It’s no mean feat, I know, and not even the 48-year-old PETA or the CCP can pull it through. Talk about being “legitimate”...

JC Nigado

Tagurabong City, Philippines

25 Feb. 2015

‘FILIPINAS 1941’: PHILSTAGERS INVADE THE MOVIES, CONCERT STAGE

15 November 2014

‘Filipinas 1941’

Philstagers invade the movies, concert stage

A theater review plus by JC Nigado

Filipinas 1941 poster

THE Philippine Stagers Foundation (PSF) continues to nonplus the competition by making waves to challenge other pretenders.  Early this year Vince Tañada, PSF president and artistic director, and his inner circle of performers stormed the movies in Elwood Perez’s Esoterica: Maynila, a localized modern-day reworking of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (1309-1320?). The semi-allegorical film journeys through Manila’s current limbo, negotiating the extremes of the triune of existence – paradise, purgatory and hell as we know or we don’t know them.

            As such, Esoterica is a very busy film – ambitious, pretentious, twisted.  It’s like Kris Aquino, a nagging celebrity, who harbors no middle ground: either you like her or you don’t.  Anchored by Ronnie Liang, in a subdued turn minus the usual actor’s treacle, including his “narrative voice,” the film moves and runs its course helter-skelter until it falls flat, not on its face, mind you, but on its butt.  Now, there’s such a thing, as idioms and clichés are engaged and reinvented, just like in many of Perez’s licentious oeuvre.

            A word of caution: Don’t watch Esoterica: Maynila on a full stomach, an easy magnet for indigestion on nausea, as one theater and film veteran put it, after trying to ingest and digest the movie of framed images and ideas. And then, the “unframing” begins...

            On Monday, Nov. 24, the Stagers (stager is an archaic word for actor) will blast the Araneta Smart Coliseum to the rafters, as they break the concert ground in a reported one-hour-and-forty-five-minute celebration of Broadway songs, OPM and foreign pop and tracks of their own original musicals like Bonifacio and Filipinas 1941.

            Already, PSF has booked 14,000 of its captive audiences in schools around Metro Manila, and more tickets are being sold out as the date approaches.  Oh, God, the Devil in Nanding Josef of the CCP’s Tanghalang Pilipino must be salivating and gnashing his teeth, from ear to envious ear.  Can you, or anybody else for that matter, beat that madding and maddening crowd for an audience?

            At any rate, “how dare” Tañada and his whole caboodle of wannabes to be treading sacred grounds where even angels, good or evil, fear to tread. One could almost hear others unable to match the Stagers’ daring and dealing power surely howling, amidst the nonstop ringing of cash in their mendicant mind.  There are many CCPs in the country!

            Well, after the hollering, the Stagers’ singing starts – with or without Plus One!

            By the way, it’s not true that the Cultural Center of the Philippines is cash strapped.  The whole act, according to some CCP insiders, is a Grand Charade, to cover up something or some things.  They said, it’s been going on since Day One, 45 years ago, when Gloria Diaz won the country’s first Miss Universe crown in 1969.

            The entire CCP complex is often booked in advance, one way or the other, they added.  The culture of corruption in this “smallish” government agency is such that even the “clueless” Commission on Audit cannot audit or commit itself to do anything about it.

             So, who’s raking in the rakish money at the CCP – the other Corruption Center of the Philippines?

            Now, let’s go back to the enterprising Philstagers and their ongoing musical on tour. The invitation to watch Vince Tañada’s Filipinas 1941 came with a cautionary text via cellphone: “It’s commercial!” The subtext being: “Please don’t take it seriously...” Coming from the writer-director-producer himself, the advance “excuse” was an unveiled attempt at modesty and humility.

            However, there’s nothing modest and humble about Tañada’s production of Filipinas 1941. Starting with the multi-level set, which looks simple and minimalist to the untrained eye, but is actually an expensive fiberglass of layered “stone walls” that frame the play’s dramatic terrain of parallel narratives. Then, the story begins its three-hour run; an epic spectacle spaced in historical context, fractured by war, and set to functional music.

            “Wala ka man... Wala ka maaaan...” the four leads sing in solo or in quartet, and the house hums to a melodious chorus, proof positive that Pipo Cifra’s music is effective and on target with the right emotion being played out in scene after scene.  But...

            What the script lacks in narrative structure and plot development, the dynamic performance of the entire cast more than makes up for an entertaining and involving show all around. In a sense, the attraction of Filipinas 1941 lies precisely in its flaws, flashing up and bright like familiar failures in a hurry.

            Observes an attentive theater veteran: “Filipinas 1941 is one of the better productions of Philippine Stagers Foundation.  It is much, much better than Nestor Torre’s Katy, the local version of Piaf and Aida; more engaging than Chris Millado’s take on Mario O‘Hara’s Stageshow; and can be compared to the Resort World’s Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

            “A spectacle; big, big cast; costumes galore; creative lighting; parang painting ni Sanso ang set. Acting is generally okay, as usual.  The four leads are outstanding, particularly the two girls – Adele (Ibarrientos) and Cindy (Liper), and Patrick (Libao), who is the most subdued among them.  Also mentioned is Vince (Tañada), who still occasionally plays to the audience or fans!

             “Chris Lim’s take on Douglas MacArthur is special and novel.  Energy all over is comparable to PETA and Kambayoka of yore.  Script is mishmash though and full of clichés, even the ‘twists’ are pang-komiks.  Para kang nanonood ng Sampaguita or Star Cinema movie (pang-fans).

            “Some scenes are indulgent.  Music, as always, is parang orchestra ang arrangement – thick, full, vibrant and apt, pero hindi ma-recall ang melodies sa first sitting.  The play is epic in length.”

            Need I say more? Indeed, some nominations are in order, but certain choices bear watching.  I’ve seen PETA’s Rak of Aegis (twice), Priscilla (twice) and other musicals this season, but it would be hard to beat the lead performances of Cindy Liper and Patrick Libao.  Then there’s Chris Lim’s parody of the US military, symbolized by MacArthur, in an impressive featured role, an ironic satire of a flawed character whose politics is steeped in blood and cold cash.

            At any rate, Rak of Aegis, despite its hackneyed storyline, would give every musical in town not only a run for their money but also for well-deserved awards. Note the fluid set as it creates a “character” that drives the play’s narrative eloquence.

            Nevertheless, Filipinas 1941 stands a fighting chance in any thorough theater appraisal. For one thing, the fusion of fact and fiction serves to entertain and instruct not only about people, places and events before, during and after the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II, but also about the real role of America’s involvement and its imperialist design up to the present.

            Ultimately, the self-proclaimed (“I shall return!”) hero, Gen. Douglas MacArthur is finally “exposed” as a fraud and mercenary.  The play’s epilogue informs us that on Jan. 1, 1942 Commonwealth President Manuel L. Quezon paid MacArthur $500,000 in exchange for his wartime services. (MacArthur was subsequently dismissed by US President Harry S. Truman after his stint as commander in chief of the United Nations in the Korean War, 1950-51. – JCN.)

            Like any other PSF production, Filipinas 1941 carries the company’s hallmark: “To entertain, perchance to educate.”

            Anyone who disagrees with this vision is a disservice to the basic and bigger cause of theater and show business as a whole.  In fact, the successful union of craft and commerce is where the Philippine Stagers Foundation has upstaged, if inadvertently, the competition, many of which are in direful straits.

            Art as the universal leveler, needless to say, is rendered relevant by the sustained and sustainable admission of large mass audiences to its fold, for it to thrive and prevail.

JC Nigado

Tagurabong City, Philippines, 2014