Making a musical

If you couldn’t imagine making a musical out of a dark 1980s art film about a brooding small town misfit who concocts an elaborate hoax of faith healing and Marian apparitions, you should not have missed the world premiere of Himala: The Musical, which ran at the CCP’s tiny Tanghalang Huseng Batute.

A big part of the show’s fascination comes from understanding how the material was transformed from screen to stage, how song and dance numbers emerged from the fabric of the all-too-familiar narrative. It’s a good position to take as an audience member – especially if you’ve seen the film on cable a hundred times – because then your doubts about the musical-ity of the cinematic material became an interesting parallel to the skepticism of the characters who challenge the authenticity of the miracle at the heart of the play. This made the pay off at the end immensely rewarding.

A similar play on expectations animates the worldwide hit Mamma Mia!, the patchwork musical based on hit ABBA songs. Members of the audience in New York, London and Las Vegas invariably burst in applause or let out audible gasps of appreciation whenever they discover how their favorite ABBA songs – with their wildly disparate subjects, cultural references, and musical genres – are successfully pigeonholed into the contemporary narrative of a young woman trying to figure out who her father is among the three men her mother dated when she was made. While you’re not encouraged to react similarly while watching Himala: The Musical, the rewards were just as satisfying, especially with such a talented creative team (led by director Soxy Topacio, who does an impeccable job) and cast in full control of their material.

Although Himala lacked the conventional romantic leads and pastoral setting of traditional musicals, its Broadway-style numbers abound and satisfy. There were a couple of heart-rending numbers from Elsa’s mother (played magnificently by Dulce) who laments her daughter’s self-destructive predilections. A moving solo replaced the famous "Walang himala!" speech. There’s a comic makeover scene, reminiscent of Evita, in which the Lourdes devotee-outfitted Elsa is dolled up in Mater Dolorosa, Senor Nazareno (or is it Santo Niño) gear. Most memorably, there’s a raunchy number from the prostitute Nimia (a perfectly cast Isay Alvarez) and her band of unattractive townie bellas ridiculing Elsa’s hypocrisy, wherein she sings: "Ako ang tunay na birhen/sa lahat nagpapakita!"

A couple of expository numbers could be dropped (for instance, a well-written but unnecessary lovers’ duet between Chayong and her lover), the spoken lines tweaked (as in the case of an awkward, belated exposition at the cemetery when Elsa and Nimia are reunited over Chayong’s grave) and some bridge music needed to be written to cover the gaps between scene changes, but overall the musical is already precociously well-developed. Few of the songs are bound to be stand alone hits – many don’t have choruses – but the lyrics and music are uniformly good, even prodigious in developing an interesting texture for such a dark and uncommon material for a musical. Himala favors comparably well in relation to some of the bleaker, more innovative musicals in the US, including Jason Robert Brown’s Parade (about a Jewish businessman who is lynched by a racist mob), Addam Guettel’s Floyd Collins (about a Kentucky farmer who gets trapped and dies in a cave), and Marvin Hamlisch’s The Sweet Smell of Success (based on a film about the malevolence of a New York gossip columnist).

It goes without saying in a country as musically talented as ours that the cast was first rate. Dulce, Alvarez and Germany-based tenor Eladio Pamaran were overqualified for the 150-seat theater, but they gamely agreed to support this tryout run in anticipation of a much bigger future production. May Bayot, making her professional debut as Elsa, clearly had the vocal and acting chops for the part but needed to develop more grace onstage and rethink the trajectory of her character’s self-awareness and control over the events. She successfully registered Elsa’s big epiphany after Chayong’s suicide, but didn’t seem to convey the smaller changes in her character throughout the hoax. Although the nature of the material is such that the characters in the play do not fully understand Elsa, it is crucial for us, as audience members, to have a special knowledge of her if we were to sympathize with the play’s lead character. In fairness to Bayot, I saw the opening night performance, with its attendant novelty and jitters. Perhaps she would have already grown into the role by the time you read this.

I must confess that my response upon hearing of this project was not skepticism but excitement. Finding material for musicals that is suited to the form and has commercial appeal is a notoriously difficult task that Philippine theater is particularly bad at. We pay hundreds of dollars on royalties for Broadway musicals when, under our nose, are hundreds of resources like Himala that are perfect for the stage: Bagets, Palengke Queen, the Carmen Rosales-Rogelio dela Rosa singing-under-the-mango-tree films, Annie Batungbakal, Barbie: Maid in the Philippines, Apat na Maria, to name a few.

With Himala, Tanghalang Pilipino, which scored critical and commercial success in their non-musical adaptation of another film, Lino Brocka’s Insiang, has wisely taken a giant step in exploring the process and viability of salvaging landmarks of popular culture for the legitimate stage, especially in the vernacular, which could really use an infusion of both good commerce and enduring art.