Category Archive for: teatro

kultura

Cherie Gil, world class

<…> as with many women, Callas also just wanted love. And this apparently, was her failing. Seeing her teach this master class though, is a testament as well to her spirit. She was stereotype, yes, she was diva, as expected. But too, she’s a woman who knows not to rest on her laurels, and instead actually wants to share it. That soft spot is what’s startlingly overwhelming about her persona.

Cherie portrays Marie

One realizes two things in watching Master Class. First, that the struggles of woman, image and otherwise, public figure or private, are the same in many ways, and that as you empathize with Callas’ story, you realize how sisterhood lives, beyond death, across races, despite differences. Second, that you do not know a world class Filipino performance until you watch Cherie Gil do this play.

read all of it here!

kultura

N.O.A.H. survives the flood

a version of this was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, in the Arts and Books Section, September 21 2009.

There is nothing like a Christian musical for kids that can get any adult-with-a-heart clapping with glee and stomping her foot to the beat. Trumpets’ N.O.A.H., No Ordinary Aquatic Habitat surprisingly did just this. I had braced myself for a born-again musical, i.e., one with a lot of preaching and conventional praise songs. Yet, despite some of these, Trumpets still managed to surprise me, what with its wit and humor, and even more so with some political consciousness – in a Christian musical? God forbid!

In N.O.A.H., while God might have been everywhere and anywhere, speaking to Noah from the heavens, he was also quite political. Case in point: when the flood finally cleans up the world, the narrator (Sam Concepcion) doesn’t just talk about the literal trash and decadence that was washed away, he also mentions corruption and politicking. Add to this the fact that one of the antagonists who first appears onstage looks like GMA, complete with the hairdo and the mole, as well as a placard that screams “Vote Me!” and you’ve got a whole lotta politics going on here. (more…)

kultura

on The Male Voice

a version of this was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer yesterday, June 8 2009, Arts and Books Section.

It begins simply enough, with four chairs, four small tables, and two clothes racks onstage. The moment the actors begin the first monologue “I Am Man” though, it becomes clear that this is going to be more complex than that stage and its four actors.

Because there is more to making a powerful and revolutionary play than just being inspired by the Vagina Monologues, and reconfiguring it to highlight man’s “humanity”. There more to the project of New Voice Company’s The Male Voice than just telling the individual stories of countless men to pinpoint their existence as affected members of family and society. There must be more to this than that cliché of an ending: men will choose to be part of the solution, instead of the problem. (more…)