We live in this, the best of all possible worlds!" hymned the optimists of the French Enlightenment of the 18th century. Voltaire, writer, philosopher and iconoclast of the first order, wrote Candide to demolish their illusion. He observed the social maladies of his time and wrote acidic satires to expose them. Voltaire’s young hero is taught by his mentor, Pangloss, to see the world with rose-tinted glasses, but experience teaches him to see it with crystal-clear lenses and all the warts don’t make a pretty sight. Says Pangloss toward the end of the novel: "All events are linked together in the best of all possible worlds; for after all, if you had not been expelled from a fine castle with great kicks in the backside for love of Mademoiselle Cunegonde, if you had not been subjected to the Inquisition, if you had not traveled about America on foot, if you had not given the Baron a great blow with your sword, if you had not lost all your sheep from the good country of Eldorado, you would not be here eating candied citrons and pistachios."
If Voltaire were resurrected after three centuries in our day and age, what would he have to say about our generation? Would he be impressed by our tremendous advances in science and technology? Would he not say that we have only enlarged our capacity for mass destruction? That the weapons of war have indeed gone farther than Candide’s sword? Only human nature has remained unchanged. The lust for money, for power, remains the same.
These dark thoughts were induced, no doubt, by the gloom of Lent as much as by the chaos in the country and in the outside world today. The immediate cause of these thoughts on Voltaire is Ballet Philippines’ Candide Overture, splendidly choreographed by Edna Vida.
Lifting the pall of Lent and bringing some cheer into a season of sorrow might also be the reason for Repertory Philippines to stage Dave Freeman’s comedy A Bedfull of Foreigners.
Rep’s third play on its 64th season is the sort that gives me the heebie-jeebies and makes me curse my stars for making me a moonlighting critic. If it makes me roll on the floor clutching my belly, I’d praise it to high heavens. If it is execrable, I would gleefully tear it to bits. The problem lies when it’s neither here nor there – you know, when it’s in between. Then it becomes a tough job to write about it.
I know that director Zeneida Amador will not settle for anything less than the highest standards of excellence and that her committed crew of players have worked on the production as busily as a one-legged dude in an ass-kicking contest. That my buddy Herbert and the rest of the audience at the William J. Shaw Theater are laughing their heads off every other minute should prove that the efforts of Bibot and her players are paying off.
Why do I feel alienated from their merriment? A critic needs to establish his objectivity. He has to consider his emotional and mental state and the possible reasons for his reaction or lack of it. Is it all the junk food he has been eating of late? Constipation? Flatulence? The weather? The unpaid bills piling up? His sense of humor wearing thin? Senility?
Let me focus on the plot of A Bedfull of Foreigners. Is there anything wrong with it?
It is the Festival of St. Wolfgang in late August in a French village near the German border and the peak of the tourist season. At the run-down Hotel Heinz, the all-around handyman, Karak (Miguel Faustmann) who passes himself off as a retired member of the French Foreign Legion, a man of questionable nationality – Bulgarian, Hungarian, Swiss, Lapp, Australian, Mexican, Cossack – is cleaning up the last vacant room. Proprietor and manager, Heinz (Arnel Carrion) anticipates the amorous conquests he will make among his female guests. His hotel is a rat hole. The joint is falling apart – the electric wiring, the plumbing, the radiator – all are badly in need of repairs and keep Karak on his toes.
Enter the guests who are all booked by mischance in the last vacant room: an English couple who has made their way to the village the longest way – by motor car – Stanley and Brenda Parker (Noel Rayos, alternate: Michael Williams and Anna Liza Zialcita); Helga (Liesl Batucan), the German wife of British husband Claude Philby (Jeremy Domingo) who shows up at the hotel with French paramour Simone (Ana Abad Santos-Bitong), a striptease artiste.
All sorts of farcical complications ensue as in the Roman comedies of old – mistaken identities, the use of disguises, the recognition of a long-lost relation. These are all old hat but when done perfectly, they still work.
Is Rayos or Williams funny when he pulls down his trousers and shows off his underpants? Is Liesl a riot as a Nazi dominatrix? Is Ana a scream when she is in a nun’s habit with her bare ass open to the four winds? Their audience goes wild with "Hah-hah-hah," "Hih-hih-hih," "Hyuk-hyuk-hyuk." How come I can do no better than "Ho-hum"?
Nonetheless, I am moved by these young artists of Rep who will do anything for art’s sake and bring some laughter into our sad, sad world even if it means exposing their bums.
No similar sacrifice or exposure is required of Maestro Ruggero Barbieri, the musicians of the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra and the dancers of the Ballet Philippines in mounting the "PPO Concert Series X: Ballet and Music."
One would have expected the opening number of the program to employ the combined forces of the PPO and the dance company – Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story: Symphonic Dances. But, no, it is the next number, Candide Overture, also by Bernstein, which is danced with fluid eloquence by the members of Ballet Philippines.
The highlight of this concert is unquestionably the definitive account of Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto, Op. 38, by piano wizard Jovianney Emmanuel Cruz and the PPO.
After all the travails and torments suffered by Voltaire’s Candide, the hero rejects his tutor’s philosophy that "everything happens for the best in this the best of all possible worlds" and adopts a new credo based on plain self-sufficiency and an innocent joy – in the words of Candide – " in cultivating our garden."
To retire from our uncivilized society and fly from the madding crowd and plant my symbolic garden – one of sun and sand, surf and sea, supping on shellfish and sea weeds – am I asking too much to be a beach bum?