PHILIPPINES THEATER REVIEWS

What's tricky with musicals is that sometimes the actors focus too much on polishing their singing and dancing and don't pay enough attention to their acting. There are only a handful of really good actors among the cast, who were enough to help the audience be engrossed in the story....

CATS is not your ordinary musical. In fact, it's a sung-through piece of dance theater, which was conceived for the West End stage at a time when Andrew Lloyd Webber had never yet had a huge hit, and the emerging art form was heavily identified with the American Theatre....

Sweeney Todd is a directorial triumph. Obviously, [Bobby] Garcia has full control of all the elements of the production. It's one cohesive endeavor that proves whimsicality combined with creative intelligence could be what memorable theater is....

Katsuri is an ingenious portrayal of the social ills that everyone is familiar with but never really acted upon....

Himala: Isang Musikal may be one of the best original Filipino musicals there is. It doesn't rely on the grand, lavish, and elite packaging of theater and simply delivers vulnerability and emotional storytelling....

This production of Neil Bartram and Brian Hill's a?oeThe Theory of Relativitya?? is a coming-of-age story that would surely remind you of how you were in your student years....

There are brief moments in the first act that make it difficult to hold your interest in the play, but the second act is much more fast-paced. As secrets are slowly revealed, the audience gets more involved in the story....

Passion keeps us thoroughly invested as the show's characters profess their passion and obsession towards love and being loved in return....

Right after the opening night of Upstart Productions' staging of George Furth and Stephen Sondheim's beloved musical comedy Company, we found ourselves asking a similar question with what the central character, Bobby, has been trying to answer: 'What do you get?'...

Aesthetics is said to be the science of beautiful in its myriad manifestations--be it sublime, comic, tragic, pathetic, whimsical, or ugly....

In its seventh season, the original Filipino hit musical from Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) titled 'Rak of Aegis,a?? which features the popular songs of the Aegis band, returns onstage from July to September this year with new famed artists to join its original and recurring cast...

The most striking observation about Mark St. Germain's two-character play a?oeDancing Lessonsa?? is that its main characters spend more time palavering and less time learning how to dance. The story revolves around a socially awkward young science professor who, one day, hires a professional dancer ...

'She's perfect!' That was our immediate reaction after seeing The Sandbox Collective and 9 Works Theatrical's restaging of a?oeDani Girla?? at the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium at RCBC Plaza in Makati. We are, of course, alluding to Felicity Kyle Napuli, who is gifted with such a pristine singing voic...

To manage everyone's expectations, 'Beautiful: The Carole King Musical' is not entirely about the life and music of the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter. Although Carole King's emergence into the popular music scene is what the audiences will follow from start to end, we feel that this show has more...

THE KUNDIMAN PARTY deserves this rerun, especially now we're on post-midterm elections. The play with music, a cultural-political drama, written by Floy Quintos and directed by Dexter Santos, has never been more relevant....

Back in Manila from his two-year stint as Thuy in the UK/Ireland and International tour of 'Miss Saigon,' Gerald Santos is now a certified crossover artist. In his homecoming concert last Saturday, May 4, at the Theatre at Solaire, Santos filled his repertoire with songs from musical theater and fro...

Stage plays are meant to entertain and leave the audiences in complete awe. However, only a few would surely engage the audiences to review their morals and examine their convictions. Such is the Broadway musical 'Spring Awakening,' produced for the second time by the Ateneo Blue Repertory (blueREP)...

Theater veteran Miguel Faustmann has been typecast as the go-to actor for old-man roles with an I-do-not-care-what-you-think type of attitude that eventually mellows down right before the end of the play. After taking on the role of Ebenezer Scrooge several times in a span of five years, playing Hen...

Acclaimed playwright Sarah Ruhl began her career as an avid consumer of other people's works. A church in Chicago was the unlikely venue of her first encounter with 'Angels in America,' where she gushed about Tony Kushner's work for its 'seriousness, endurance, political engagement, and language.'...

A prominent theater critic in New York once said in an interview that no producer has gone bankrupt betting on sentimentality. This statement is proven true here in Manila very recently with 'Ang Huling El Bimbo' being restaged, barely six months after it closed its sold-out initial run. The show's ...

Gone are the days when the opera is treated like an old-world passion and a cultural event where people are required to dress to the nines. The arrival of National Artists Guillermo Tolentino and Felipe Padilla de Leon's “Noli Me Tangere, The Opera” for the nth time in Manila was welcomed mostly...

Everyone knows the musical all too well. At least for those who were already breathing theater when The Phantom of the Opera opened in London's West End in 1986, and on Broadway in 1988....

Stay woke, as it were, while a new battle is waged and revisionist delusions are trending. On that note, leave it to war-crime apologists to rely on well-worn talking points to keep the beasts of old from rearing their noggin....

They say that history is written by the victors, its integrity dependent on who actually wrote it....

With elaborate props and costumes, crowd-pleasing acrobatics and fire dances, 'Nia and Anwar and the Whale Shark Tale' is a daring new Filipino musical that might possibly be the first-of-its-kind in the southern Philippines. Performed on an open-air stage at Gloria's Fantasyland, a theme park in Da...