Joel Trinidad tries his hand at stand-up comedy

MANILA, Philippines - Rob Becker’s Defending the Caveman holds the record as the longest running one-man comedy show on Broadway and has sold eight million tickets worldwide in over 35 countries and staged in more than 16 different languages. Now the smash hit about the battle of the sexes is being produced in the Philippines with performances at 7 p.m. tomorrow, Feb. 13 and on Feb. 14 at the Insular Life Auditorium in Filinvest, Alabang.

The star of the show is theater veteran Joel Trinidad who says the play is an extended version of stand-up comedy, something he admits he’s never done before.

“That’s the reason I accepted this job. I love the challenge that comes with this role. I wanted to push myself,” says Joel.

The first difficult step was memorizing the lines. “It was brutal,” says Joel. “I basically had to deal with a 33-page monologue. So I had to master the lines by sections.” 

Joel says he has memorized even longer dialogue but there were other characters onstage he interacted with. This time, he’ll be alone onstage. As any theater person knows, acting is reacting. It’s difficult to do that when you’re the only performer.

“In this play, if you stop, the audience will know that you forgot your lines,” he explains.

Joel needn’t worry. Along with other invited guests, I watched him at a rehearsal and he managed to pull it off. Although some of the material covered American-based topics like baseball and fishing, the show’s comedy had universal appeal as it dealt with male-female relationships. The punch lines worked and the play didn’t feel like a boring 90-minute monologue.

As for the title of the play, Becker’s concept is that much of the behavior of primitive man (and woman) has evolved into how their modern male and female counterparts handle similar situations. So the set looked like they were taken from the popular TV animation that was turned into a movie, The Flintstones.

It took Becker three years to finish writing the play based on his observations on the differences between men and women. His experience as a stand-up comic helped a lot in getting the job done.

Joel started memorizing the script last Dec. 15 shortly before leaving for the States to get married in Las Vegas. After he had finished working on several pages, he was informed that there was a new version of the script so he had to put his memorization on hold only to be told much later that they were going to use the original script after all.

Oh, did I mention that Joel got hitched after many, many years of bachelorhood? His bride is also a stage actor, Fil-American Emerita Alcid, who was based in New York before she accepted Joel’s proposal. She has appeared in the US tour of Miss Saigon as Gigi and played the lead role of Kim in a New Jersey production. They were married last Jan. 2 in a wedding chapel of Planet Hollywood in Vegas with his parents, Noel and Lally Trinidad in attendance.

Although the production was not allowed to change anything in the script, the copyright holders allowed Joel to use his wife’s name, Emy, in the play. Since one of the show’s performances will be shown on Valentine’s Day, I asked him how he usually celebrates the special occasion.

“I don’t like going out on Valentine’s because of the heavy traffic but I still believe in sending flowers.”

Joel’s recent theater credits include Avenue Q and The Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

The latter is memorable during the play where he proposed to a very-surprised Emy onstage. We’re going to see more of Emy as she tries to make a name for herself in the local entertainment scene.

(For tickets to Defending the Caveman, call 215-0788, 891-9999 (Ticketworld) or text 0917-2094832).