Tag: Theater

ATLANTIS Theatrical Entertainment Group, which opened its 20^th Anniversary Season this year with the critically acclaimed Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, has announced the full cast of its next production, the Tony, Grammy and Olivier Award winning Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, which continues to run on Broadway.

CANADIAN-AMERICAN funny man Michael Thomas “Tom” Green is set to make Filipinos laugh as he makes a stop in Makati on his ongoing Asia Comedy Tour. The show will be held on April 13 at the ballroom of the City Club of Alphaland Place in Makati City.

HIMALA: Isang Musikal and Ang Huling El Bimbo each got 12 nominations for the upcoming 11^th Gawad Buhay Awards which honors the performing arts.

“ANGELS IN AMERICA is about life and hope in the face of death and despair, and about our interconnectedness as a community and how we need to find a way to discuss our differences by finding common ground.”

“CHAROT” is gay slang, one of the many fluid terms generated by popular lingo, often used as an interjection to express the flimsy nature of a statement and to which the appropriate response should be... charot, or char, its abbreviated expression. The word has permeated popular culture such that in television, radio, and social media, the term is used with impunity.

ATUL KHATRI was the CEO of his family-run IT business (Kaytek Computer Services Private Limited) but at the age of 43, boredom and a midlife crisis got to him and he started doing stand-up comedy — initially just to tick it off his bucket list, but he found that he had a real knack for comedy, Then, after 25 years in the company, he chucked it all in favor of making people laugh. Before he knew it, he had gone around the world, performing more than 400 shows.

SEVEN YEARS after the revolution, a nation once filled with hope but now confronted with the enormity of the task to rebuild a broken country woke up to the unique sound of the Eraserheads. The rock band, whose members came from the University of the Philippines, debuted Ultraelectromagneticpop! in 1993. This album would be the first of over a dozen. It also led to Ang Huling El Bimbo — a musical inspired by the music of arguably the most popular Filipino band of the ’90s.

SHE GLIDES onto the stage, lithe and nimble, and randomly distributes what seem like rectangular flashcards to members of the audience. There are numbers and words written on those cards. She instructs them to hold on to those cards and remember the numbers and words written on them.

THE producers of the national tour of M. Butterfly have announced that they are cutting the tour short, with the final performances to be in Cebu from March 14-17.

FOR its fifth year, the biennial Manila Improv Festival will feature 58 improv acts from all over the world, performing from March 27 to March 31 at the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) Theater Center in Quezon City.

WITH KIDS’ TV in a ratings slump, Nickelodeon is looking to increase its presence on the stage.

Dirty Old Musical (DOM), the musical about the “titos of Manila,” has been so successful that it is not just back for its third run with new cast members and new songs, but may even go on tour.

TWENTY-ONE years after it was first perfomred, Miong, the musical based on the life of Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, has returned to the stage as Repertory Philippines’ first production for its 82^nd season.

THEATER FANS from outside Metro Manila now have a chance to see a story of love, deception, and power as M. Butterfly is set to tour six cities this year.

RESORTS WORLD MANILA’s musical Ang Huling El Bimbo will return in March and this does not only mean giving a chance to those who missed it the first time around, more than this it is an opportunity to tweak the script and some songs, and to improve character development.

FRINGE MANILA celebrates its 5^th year as the Fringe Festival comes out of the peripheries during Philippine Arts Month. From Feb. 7 to March 3, Metro Manila’s open-access, multi-arts festival will once again present an inclusive program line-up that reflect the culmination of the five years of Fringe Manila.

OFTEN newspapers and online news outlets carry the president’s careless remarks on national issues which the Palace then dismisses as a joke. Last year, impersonator and comedian Jon Santos expressed used these issues to perform political satire, and this year he’s at it again.

GOOD news for those who missed it the first time it came to Manila in 2012 and for those who wish to see it — and its famous chandelier — again, The Phantom of the Opera is back in town.

PARIS — A mural by British street artist Banksy on a fire-exit door at Paris’ Bataclan theater, where Islamist militants killed 90 people three years ago, has been stolen, the venue said on Saturday.

THE NARRATOR enters and walks to audience members around the room as she gives out strips of paper. From the aisle, she walks to the third row on the left side and hands this writer one strip of paper on which was written “5. Things with stripes” in cursive letters. “Hold on it. I’ll explain later,” she says.

THE largest multi-arts festival in the country is back, but this year, the CCP Pasinaya Open House Festival will be held for a longer period — from Feb. 1 to 3.

FILIPINO slang that means “just kidding,” the word “charot” is conveniently used to lighten things up and make them fun with the aim of reducing serious discussions into jokes. But PETA’s new political show Charot will take matters seriously.

THE Cultural Center of the Philippines’s Tanghalang Pilipino (TP) is about to stage a play that seems familiar in the context of current politics.

START 2019 right with a bellyful of laughs and a side of existential crisis thanks to US comedian Liz Miele.

BusinessWorld asked some of the country’s artists, and art champions about their outlook for Philippine culture and arts for this year (and beyond). The answers were as varied as their practices.

LAST YEAR’s theater scene was lively and jampacked. This year is shaping up to be just the same, if not more.

A tale of two Butterflies.

SILENCE, slowness, and finesse are characteristics that are typical in Japanese films and plays. Manila Notes -- an adaptation of the play Tokyo Notes -- won’t be any different.

THE FIRST round of workshops for 2019 by Atlantis Theatrical will include an Acting Masterclass with award-winning international theater, TV, and film actor Pinky Amador, but there will also be classes for beginners.

IT’S TIME once again to brave the heavy traffic of the Metro and watch the annual Festival of Lights at the Ayala Triangle Gardens, now on its 10^th year. This year’s lights show will be accompanied by the music from the Walt Disney Co. in a show titled Reimagine The Magic: A Festival of Lights.

ATLANTIS Theatrical Entertainment Group this week will open a sweet musical — literally and figuratively — about the bitter realities of abusive relationships and the stresses of the everyday life. The Broadway musical Waitress will feature lots of pies, singing, and a whole lot of positive attitude.

HISTORY, comedy, drama, and a classic epic fill up Repertory Philippines’ 82^nd season, running from 2019 to 2020.

“FULL OF chocolates and strawberries” is how award-winning actress Joanna Ampil described her character Jenna in the upcoming musical Waitress, as if she were a pie flavor.

MELANIA and Donald Trump will be visiting the Philippines on Oct. 26 and 27.

WHAT DO Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born and Resorts World Manila’s All Out of Love have in common? Besides their good music, both show the perils of the entertainment industry.

THE Langgam Performance Troupe (LPT), a contemporary performance company and research lab established in 2012, has unveiled its acting workshop series designed to enhance the creativity of participants which could be used on stage and off.

THIS MONTH, film and TV actors Ricky Davao and Rina Reyes return to the stage in Tanghalang Pilipino’s (TP) Filipino adaptation of Georges Feydeau’s classic farce, A Flea in Her Ear, on Oct. 18-21 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP).

HOW DO you keep yourself restrained when there’s a party on stage and iconic ABBA songs are playing? This can be the biggest challenge one encounters when watching the ongoing run of Mamma Mia! at The Theatre at Solaire: controlling your desire to stand up and dance and sing along with the cast.

CONSIDERED one of the oldest female stand-up comedians in the world, Lynn Ruth Miller, hauls her brand of comedy over to the Philippine capital for a two-night show on Oct. 18 at the Relik Bar in Bonifacio Global City in Taguig, and Oct. 19 at the Union Jack Tavern in Makati City.

THE PHILIPPINE Educational Theater Association (PETA) is devoting its 51^st season to shows that tackle the current state of the nation: the extrajudicial killings, the rise of trolls and fake news, and historical revisionism, among other topics.

WHILE it has concluded its run, the Manila staging of Henry David Hwang’s M Butterfly isn’t ready to hang up the costumes, the intrigues, and the scandalous love story of Rene Gallimard and Song Liling, as its producer Jhett Tolentino announced that they will be taking the butterfly on tour next year through five cities in the Philippines.

THERE I GO AGAIN, making assumptions. Unsure of what I was watching, I judged the opening number “Come Look at the Freaks” of Atlantis Theatrical’s Side Show as a rip-off of the crazy popular, P.T. Barnum apologist of a film, The Greatest Showman. As the silhouette of actors doing Bob Fosse-like moves filled the stage, I told myself rather snidely, hmm, I’ve seen this before.

AFTER HAVING produced the successful musical, Eto na! Musikal nAPO!, 9 Works Theatrical is teaming up with Sandbox Collective for its next production, which is the total opposite of its jukebox musical: a straight play without props, costume changes, scene transitions, and intermission, and with only two actors on stage.

NEW YORK — Neil Simon, the prolific and Pulitzer Prize-winning US playwright celebrated as the king of comedy who won more Oscar and Tony nominations combined than any other showbiz writer, died on Sunday. He was 91.

THE music is queen in Gee Gee at Waterina, ang Musikal. The 11 songs, composed by Jesse Lucas, aid in the storytelling and add to the visual spectacle of the one-act play on stage.