REVIEW: Tanghalang Pilipino's 'Pingkian: Isang Musikal' is a marvel of daring stagecraft
Warning: This review contains spoilers.
Nobody else is doing what Tanghalang Pilipino is doing. The resident theater company of the Cultural Center of the Philippines just had a glorious run last year, boasting two deftly inventive productions wrestling with the recurring sorrows of our nation: Balete, a drama chiefly based on F. Sionil José’s works, and Pingkian: Isang Musikal, an Emilio Jacinto musical biopic. The two productions made the company a runaway winner at the 15th Gawad Buhay Awards, copping a total of 17 prizes.
TP’s 39th season, in many ways, continues that thematic infrastructure, offering three musicals all hewn from the storied lives and legacies of Filipino revolutionaries. And what better way to open a new season than with Pingkian?
The award-winning historical musical is a sweeping and hypnotic look into the life of the eponymous Filipino revolutionary at the tail end of the Spanish colonial period and the unfolding of the Philippine-American War. The story starts with Jacinto (played with tenacious command by Vic Robinson) finding himself in a nearly fatal state after sustaining a gunshot in an encounter with Spanish forces while leading his troop to Majayjay, Laguna in February 1898. Frail and held captive by the enemy, he begins to hallucinate his country’s fractured past and possible futures, and how it erodes his own.
It is clear from the outset that playwright Juan Ekis isn’t concerned with conventional plotting, a biopic default (on stage or otherwise) that a particular fraction of the audience will surely cavil about. Thus, from the telling introduction, Pingkian unravels as a propulsive and prophetic fragments of personal and broader histories, heightened by the sense of danger and delirium at the production’s center. It is a perceptive interrogation of the nature of the Philippine revolution, exploring both its urgencies and failures.
The musical is helmed by the same artistic crew, while most of its core cast are returnees, save for Tex Ordoñez-De Leon, who replaces Bituin Escalante in the role of Josefa Dizon, the young hero’s mother. There are also a few additions to the ensemble. Recalibrations in the text and music, including a new duet between Jacinto and Jose Rizal (played by Kakki Teodoro), are done as well. The outcome is just more of the same, though this isn’t necessarily to the musical’s detriment.
Historiographical insight is put to good use here: Ekis insists on his non-linear method, resulting in plenty of dream sequences, precisely because of Jacinto’s lean biography and the fact that he lived a brief life, succumbing to malaria at age 23. Like a shrewd translator searching for meaning and intention past what’s said and written, Ekis mines Jacinto’s works to deconstruct his myth and access his subconscious, which fascinatingly provides Pingkian its primary draw and a kind of mythohistorical allure. The playwright fixates on history’s interstices, the missing parts ripe for introspection in lieu of the neatly rigid and certain, which allows for a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Although Pingkian features standout performances, particularly from Robinson and Gab Pangilinan (who doubles as Catalina de Jesus, Jacinto’s wife, and the turncoat Florencio Reyes), it is the kind of staging best viewed through its ensemble work. It is in these company displays that the production’s exuberant inventiveness and sheer artistic collaboration are truly expressed. This is where director Jenny Jamora turns the feverish digressions of Ekis’ text into a tensely gripping drama, and brings it to a level that’s almost cinematic. This is where Jomelle Era’s choreography conjures a spectacle, from eerily still tableaux to nearly pantomime slo-mo, illuminated by GA Fallarme’s projections, which functions equally as physical setting, interstitial information, and a vessel to locate the audience into the characters’ psyche.
Above anything, it is through this aspect that composer Ejay Yatco’s uncompromising music separates Pingkian from present-day theater’s jukebox terrain, boldly capturing the political essence of the material’s vision, as it interrogates the titular character’s genius and hubris in equal measure. A significant number early into the musical perfectly evokes that singular dexterity, when the fervent revolutionaries huddle to determine the contents of The Katipunan’s guiding manifesto, later known as The Kartilya. The segment is performed in lyrical rap style, in which the document’s words are reworked and restructured to invoke a lexicon of revolution seen from the vantage points of the colonized and the working class. This is Pingkian at its most potent.
Past its immediate sheen of social commentary, what’s crucially impressive in this staging is its refusal to be beholden to hero worship, to the kind of swift salvation that has constantly put the country under colonial and autocratic regimes, from the Spanish friars and governors-general of the 16th century to the Dutertes and Marcoses of today. There’s a portion in the First Act where Jacinto and Andres Bonifacio (played by Paw Castillo) are subject to scrutiny and possible expulsion from The Katipunan following allegations of corruption. Ekis banks on this artistic treatment throughout, removing the Supremo and the Brains of the Katipunan from their pedestals to wrestle with the follies of the revolution and its attendant figures.
What remains is a sober and mournful understanding of a protracted struggle towards liberation and national consciousness, and the specters of a colonial past that will always form part of who we are as Filipinos, for better or worse. The delirious vignettes, punctuated by sparse humor, are a radical insistence on imagined futures as much as they are an unflinching gaze into our frantic history. Which is to say that Pingkian is a sonically audacious work of theater with a hypnotic emphasis on form. It also spits bars.
Pingkian: Isang Musikal will run until Oct. 12 at Tanghalang Ignacio Gimenez, CCP Complex, Pasay City. Tickets are available via TicketWorld and Ticket2Me.
