Shamaine Centenera-Buencamino and Ana Abad Santos taking a final bow (Photo by Vincen Gregory Yu)
‘Miranda & Yolanda’ runs until May 3 at the Power Mac Center Spotlight Black Box Theater, Ayala Malls Circuit, Makati City.
Let me echo what just about every other reliable reviewer has already said: Miranda & Yolanda, the Floy Quintos twin bill, is a fabulous time at the theater. This is your cue to scramble for a ticket.
To borrow from Vladimir Bunoan, this twin bill only further cements production company Encore Theater’s position as “steward” of the late Quintos’ legacy. I’ve always maintained that, at this point in modern Philippine theater, any production of Quintos’ work is automatically an event in itself.
However, with Miranda & Yolanda—a double one-act affair comprising Evening at the Opera and Ang Kalungkutan ng mga Reyna—it’s not only because these are Quintos’ plays. More important, these are Quintos’ plays being staged by artists who knew him best.
Joshua Cabiladas and Ana Abad Santos in ‘Evening at the Opera’ (Photo by Irvin Arenas)
Evening at the Opera returns with original cast members Ana Abad Santos and Frances Makil-Ignacio, 15 years since introducing their characters at the Virgin Labfest in 2011 (I saw them as part of the following year’s Revisited set). It’s a similar case with Ang Kalungkutan ng mga Reyna, starring Shamaine Centenera-Buencamino, who originated her role in the fourth Labfest in 2008. All three actresses are in magnificent, mesmerizing form.
Shamaine Centenera-Buencamino in ‘Ang Kalungkutan ng mga Reyna’ (Photo by Irvin Arenas)
Both plays are being steered by another Quintosian collaborator: Dexter Santos, who directed all the premieres of the playwright’s new work in the final decade of his career—Grace, The Reconciliation Dinner, The Kundiman Party, Angry Christ, Ang Huling Lagda ni Apolinario Mabini, Ang Nawalang Kapatid, Collection.
Cast of ‘Evening at the Opera’ at curtain call: Joshua Cabiladas, Ana Abad Santos, and Frances Makil-Ignacio (Photo by Vincen Gregory Yu)
Suffice it to say, the entirety of Miranda & Yolanda—the title so named after the protagonists of each play—feels distinctly animated by Quintos’ singular voice. You can hear the playwright in every delectable line spewed by this parade of tragic-comic creatures of the stage. In other words, these productions have succeeded in distilling the very essence of his work, almost like he was still here—irrefutably here—with us, laughing and crying and having a ball alongside us. In the sense that, for a couple of hours in the dark, it has given the playwright back to us—ear for biting satire and “observant eye for the defining tropes and mindsets of the zeitgeist,” as Gibbs Cadiz put it, completely intact—this twin bill is a precious gift.
After watching both plays, I was struck most of all by how Quintos managed to anthropomorphize so eloquently the folly of vanity: This, I believe, is the unique thread tying the two, as staged and embodied by the people behind this presentation. In Evening at the Opera, we bear witness to the narcissism of Miranda (Abad Santos), the unhappy wife of a corrupt provincial politician; how she has used public funds, partly to spite her boorish husband, to bring a high-brow Italian opera with a price tag of P20 million to her rural town. In Kalungkutan, we must contend with the delusions of a president (Centenera-Buencamino) who has declared martial law and installed herself as monarch, her first move a literal, farcical makeover that reviewer Rikki Lopez has accurately described as a lost episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Dictator.
How unhinged these characters are—how conceited, detestable, out of touch—but also, how painfully, unmistakably human.
Shamaine Centenera-Buencamino (third from left) and the cast of ‘Ang Kalungkutan ng mga Reyna’ during curtain call (Photo by Vincen Gregory Yu)
SUBHEAD: You leave it with just the slightest lump in your throat, realizing you may have witnessed a possible vision of 2028 and beyond
Kalungkutan is especially resonant today: You leave it with just the slightest lump in your throat, realizing you may have witnessed a possible vision of 2028 and beyond. I have it on good authority that, at the time of its premiere, the play was widely mistaken to be about former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (Totel de Jesus wrote as much in TheDiarist.ph last week). Now, in Miranda & Yolanda, Centenera-Buencamino’s monarch is brash, vulgar, uncouth; clad in shades of green, and, at one point, attempts to punch an underling. You half-expect her to launch a Zoom meeting and issue death threats to other politicians there and then, or perhaps greet the Chinese president in Frankenstein Mandarin. Has she also pilfered billions of the people’s money? Assumed the post of Education Secretary with utter incompetence?
That right there is Quintos as oracle, the great chronicler of our troubled times rendered in the palpable present tense by theater practitioners who have his genius tattooed in their DNA.
We used to wait with tempered excitement for the next Floy Quintos play. Thankfully, at least now there’s Encore Theater to soften the fact of the playwright’s gaping absence.
‘Miranda & Yolanda’ runs until May 3 at the Power Mac Center Spotlight Black Box Theater, Ayala Malls Circuit, Makati City. Tickets are available via the directory at https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DP5RYUmhU/.
