NY Times gives Lea glowing review

Curtain-raisers:

• You know that a marriage between an actress and a foreign-bred guy is not working when she keeps coming back from abroad where she has vowed to live “for better or for worse” or comes home for good. Name names? Ruffa Gutierrez and Geneva Cruz. Add to the growing list another actress who is back — for good — minus the hubby. Back in the nick of time, that is.

• He’s one very “gifted” actor who can’t say no. Among his willing “victims” are an actress living in with a businessman, a TV host-actress also married and a TV-movie actress who said after a bout with the actor, “He made me feel like a virgin again.” Asked by his manager why he can’t say no, the actor threw his hands up and said, “Sila ang lumalapit sa akin, eh. Ano’ng magagawa ko?” Did he perhaps write “To serve humanity (especially womanhood)” under “Ambition” in the high school slum book? He’s heaven’s gift to women.

• A concert/TV “producer” in the US is “wanted” by several people (actors, singers and technical people) to whom he has issued bouncing checks. “He made us believe that he has a lot of money,” whined an actor-victim, “’yon pala manloloko siya.”

* * *

A few issues ago, Funfare Update published the “scoop” that Lea Salonga was performing at the uppity Café Carlyle which is, according to Funfare Update’s Big Apple correspondent Edmund Silvestre, “patronized mostly by New York City’s upper crust.”

The show is both critically and commercially successful.

“Those who have seen it have all fallen in love with Lea’s magical voice and stage presence,” added Edmund who sent me a copy of the glowing review titled At Home With Disney and Miss Saigon written by Stephen Holden for the New York Times.

Here it is:

A bright, utilitarian voice that sweeps across continents as it conjures the aspirations of the inner princesses in millions of nice young women from Manila to London: no, it’s not Celine Dion, but Lea Salonga, the demure 39-year-old Philippine star whose autobiographical show, The Journey So Far, opened a three-week engagement at Café Carlyle on Tuesday evening. Ms. Salonga is the vocal personification of what might be called the Broadway and Hollywood international style, which embraces Disney songs, Rodgers and Hammerstein ballads and the anthems of Schönberg and Boublil. Hers is a talent groomed to express inspirational generalities that please most of the people most of the time without taxing their emotions. Beyond an eagerness to please, impersonality is its signature quality.

The show-business history Ms. Salonga related in the agreeable tone of a friendly saleswoman helps explain the formation of such a sensibility. A child star in the Philippines, she made her professional debut at 7 in The King and I and starred in the title role of Annie. That track led her to the role of Kim, which she originated in Miss Saigon in London in 1989. Back then she was so innocent, she recalled, that the director, Nicholas Hytner, had to demonstrate the onstage love scenes step by step. She later played both Éponine and Fantine in Les Misérables. Her voice has been heard in Aladdin and in two Mulan movies.

Backed by a functional quartet under the direction of Larry Yurman, Ms. Salonga touched many of these bases on Tuesday, with some forays into Philippine music. Like most singers who rely on various degrees of declamation, Ms. Salonga was most appealing when she relaxed and sang a sweet, low-key rendition of Someone to Watch Over Me, accompanied by a single guitar. Especially in an intimate space like Café Carlyle, the cliché applies: Less is more.

(Note: The Journey So Far continues through March 27 at Café Carlyle, 35 East 76th Street, Manhattan; [212] 744-1600, thecarlyle.com.)

Martin and Gary’s As1 2010 hit in US

Feedback from Funfare Update’s “international DPA”:

Congratulations (again!) to Martin Nievera and Gary Valenciano for a successful As1 2010 tour, with two more performances slated for March 19 at Texas Hall, University of Texas in Arlington, Texas; and on March 21 at the Pasadena Civic Center, Pasadena, California. Martin and Gary would like to thank those who watched the concert in Washington DC, Connecticut, Tampa (Florida) and Reno (Nevada).

Those who watched agreed that it was the best Philippine concert ever, including Ambassador Willy Gaa, singer-actress Stephanie Reese, White House executive chef Cris Comeford, former US Embassy boss John Abram and Anna Puno (herself a concert producer).

Despite the threats of a snowstorm, the Connecticut show was a huge success. Thousands of Pinoys from New York, Boston and other places braved the freezing weather to be in Connecticut.

(E-mail reactions at [email protected] or at [email protected])