THOUGH THEY’RE about one and the same story, Trumpets’ long-running warhorse musical “Joseph the Dreamer” should not be confused with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s industrial-strength “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
A quick listen to the music is all it takes to distinguish the two. Lloyd Webber’s “Joseph” is ironic, secular and saccharine. Trumpets’ version, based on a cantata by Cam Floria and reworked into a Broadway-style musical by Freddie Santos, is nothing if not reverent, its pious intentions splashed across the stage in primary colors.
A big-tent revival posing as a musical? You’re justified to give the concept wide berth. To its credit, though, “Joseph the Dreamer” has no apparent pretensions to high art, only sincere intentions.
This is not the show to go to for thespic craft or dramatic spectacle. Santos’ staging is light as a minuet, and there’s no use protesting that the very biblical story of jealousy, attempted fratricide and seduction demands at least a multi-movement symphony.
On its 17th year, “Joseph” has undergone retooling to appeal to even younger audiences, and the result, which runs until Sept. 30 at Cinema 4 of SM Megamall, is a fun, enjoyable romp.
Franco Laurel is the new Joseph, succeeding the likes of Audie Gemora, Carlo Orosa and Gary Valenciano. Alert, boyish and possessed of a sweet tenor, Laurel is ideally scaled to this frisky “Joseph,” which runs for less than two hours and is mounted with a marked MTV, urban bent—without the swearing, of course.
“Joseph the Dreamer’s” overt devoutness can only be played by actors with enough affinity for this material. That much can be intimated from Laurel and the rest of the cast’s performances, which glow with a joyful, genial sincerity, cynics be damned.
(“Joseph the Dreamer” runs 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. on weekends until Sept. 30 at SM Megamall Cinema 4. Call 6354478.)
Upbeat Beckett
When it opened for a mere four-day run last June at CCP’s Tanghalang Aurelio Tolentino, French director Alain Timar’s radical reinterpretation of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” met, not unlike its source material’s debut on the world stage decades ago, with considerable grumbling and bafflement.
“Where’s the angst?” was a common refrain. Beckett without the absurdist gloom was a bogus Beckett. What had become of the artistic shorthand for the irrationality and pointlessness of life as we knew it?
The cause of all this hubbub was Timar’s decision to do a Filipinized “Godot” that embraced what some people thought was an antithetical element to the existential Beckett: the Pinoy’s gallows humor, his sense of defiant happiness in the face of death and senselessness.
In Timar’s “Godot, Wer Is U?” (translation by the redoubtable George de Jesus III, who also did “Orfeo sa Impiyerno” based on Tennessee Williams’ “Orpheus Descending”), Vladimir and Estragon, two tramps living by the riles, now sounded more hopeful than they ever did.
The rest of the world seemed as barren, except for the tree that mysteriously flowered in Act II, but these characters didn’t seem as sour, hopeless or doleful as generations of Godot productions have made them out to be.
Sacrilege, indeed. Or could it be that the brooding “Godot” we’ve all come to expect was as much a foreign construct as Timar’s? Certainly, the artist who once famously said, “Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear, and does not make clear,” never once deigned to explain what his cryptic play was about. (John Gielgud called it “a load of rubbish.”)
Beckett’s works were all about inhibiting action, definition, explanation. That meant other artists were free to make of “Godot” what they could, and if Europeans numbed by years of war and the Holocaust thought it symbolized the basic Sisyphean nature of life, who would argue otherwise?
But here was Timar offering another take: that in the Filipino’s unflappable resiliency, the waiting itself was a form of hope, and that hope thrived as much as pain behind the laughter.
Timar ran the risk of condescension with this “Godot’s” particular viewpoint. Yet in his staging, which saw four superlative Tanghalang Pilipino actors (Paolo O’Hara, Bong Cabrera, Cris Pasturan and Paolo Rodriguez) rip apart “Godot” and reassemble it into a startlingly fresh contraption, no whiff of fetish or exoticizing could be gleaned.
What the play did was hold a mirror before us, and what it showed we already knew in our gut: Buoyancy, for better or for worse, was our life jacket. Westerners moped, we laughed. Something, too, must be “existential” in that.
“Godot, Wer Is U?” returns to CCP this month as part of TP’s 20th season. See it for its commanding performances, Gino Gonzales’ outstanding set design, and the profound power of Beckett’s enduring creation, this time dipped in Filipino muck.
(“Godot, Wer Is U?” runs until Oct. 1 at CCP’s Tanghalang Huseng Batute. Call 8323661, 8321125 locals 1620/1621, 8919999.)
Frills and frippery
Floy Quintos knows a thing or two about the Filipino penchant for frills and frippery. For 10 years now, he has directed “StarTalk,” a TV show that has done its fair share of scandal-mongering as well as fluff reportage on celebrities from the worlds of movies, politics and even religion.
Now Quintos, who is also a noted playwright-director, has come up with “Shock Value,” a Dulaang UP production directed by Alexander Cortez that unblinkingly sends up the excesses and inanities of the industry he moves in.
Quintos’ insider perch gives “Shock Value” the punch of eyewitness testimony. Ostensibly about the fall from grace of Matt, a brash anchorman caught up in a sexual indiscretion, the play becomes, with each successive scene, an audacious exercise in blurring reality and illusion, all wrapped up as glitzy ersatz entertainment.
Nothing in “Shock Value” is what it seems. The audience becomes part of a live studio crowd observing the taping of TV shows, with Matt’s meltdown giving the medium the excuse to go to town with ever-more outrageous ideas for ratings glory.
A pinnacle moment comes near the end of Act 1. One year after the scandal, Matt has disappeared, and newscaster Dita Mañalac-Guevarra (Frances Makil-Ignacio alternating with Stella Cañete—figure out who’s Mel Tiangco and who’s Korina Sanchez between them) intones that Matt is rumored to have gone to Tibet to live with monks and seek Nirvana, but may also be in Bangkok where he has become a showgirl.
Matt’s life is simultaneously being reenacted in the drama anthology “Huwag Mo Akong Tularan... Kailanman.” Out comes the teen heartthrob Elbert Gomez at this point, playing Matt as a transvestite. He is swathed in a Thai headdress and costume and trailed by a bevy of similarly garbed dancers, all of them gyrating to a Thai tribal-techno version of “I Will Survive.”
Act 2 can’t top that priceless moment, even as it offers a more elaborate sleight-of-hand. News that Matt is living on a remote island becomes the occasion for furious competing coverage by two networks, followed by a vacuous “Summer TV Special” complete with nubile babes and breakdancers on the beach.
Fleshing out this complex, layered work is a challenge to the large cast, not all of whom deliver.
Among the successful ones are Andoy Ranay (playing Matt as a pillar of rot, ruthlessness and pre-fab earnestness); Missy Maramara, Cañete and Makil-Ignacio, Justin de Leon, Natasha Cabrera; and various show-biz types played by Nikki Ventosa, Jacinta Remulla (a scene-stealing debut as child star-turned-bold star Little Tweety Girl), and Faust Peneyra (who also did the versatile set design aside from playing Elbert Gomez).
The choreography, performed by a peppy ensemble, is by Dexter Santos.
Quintos’ affection for the alternate universe of celebrity-hood is obvious, but so is his clear-eyed grasp of its dangers. Though “Shock Value” could use a bit more archness and grit—its likability threatens to swamp its cynicism every time—it does prompt hair-raising thoughts. Given the way TV is going, virtually every grotesque, farcical trick served up by “Shock Value” is hardly improbable anymore.
Between the cosmic uncertainties of “Godot, Wer Is U?” and the tawdry certainties of this play, “Shock Value” is the genuine downer.
(“Shock Value” runs until Sept. 17 at Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero Theater, Palma Hall, UP Diliman. Call 9261349, 9818500 locals 2449/2450).
E-mail the author at gcadiz@inquirer.com.ph
