News is out that the Manila Metropolitan Theater (Met) will re-open April 27, 2021 as part of the celebration of 500 years of Christianity in the Philippines.
If the pandemic worsens, reopening date would be reset to December.
My ties to the Met remain very personal.
I have very close ties to singers who sang at the Met, namely soprano Concordia Manalo (Lucia di Lammermoor, 1948) and Maestra Mercedes Matias Santiago (La Traviata), Eleanor Calbes and Gamaliel Viray (Pearl Fishers) and many others.
I don’t know exactly when I first set foot at the Manila Metropolitan Theater.
In the early ‘70s during my early college life and my first job at Graphic Magazine then at the Port Area, the Met was just a strange-looking decrepit building along Plaza Lawton (now Liwasang Bonifacio). At the time, it was then part-time motel, sometimes gay bar, a boxing arena, and a squatters’ colony.
At the back was Mehan Garden near the City Hall. With all the goings-on in the area, it was hard to imagine the Met as a temple of the arts. With all the denizens of the underworld converging in that place at night, it was more like a local setting of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The Met only acquired a face (at least for this Bicolano) when then First Lady and governor of the Metro Manila Authority Imelda Marcos had it restored in 1978.
In 1979, the Met opened to the public with world-acclaimed soprano Montserrat Caballe featured in a recital with pianist Lorenzo Palomo.
It was at the Met where I witnessed an interesting sideshow between Lino Brocka and Rolando Tinio
It was at the Met where I witnessed an interesting sideshow before the concert of the distinguished Spanish diva.
Before the concert, during intermission, director Lino Brocka (who would become the National Artist for Film) threatened to throw ice cream at Rolando Tinio (who would become the National Artist for Theater). This was an offshoot of a film festival controversy, where Tinio and everybody else in the film fest jury raved about Celso Ad. Castillo’s Burlesk Queen and dissed Brocka’s entry, Inay.
I begged Brocka not to make a scene. Caballe was a music icon, and an ice cream-throwing scene in the middle of art songs and arias would surely make headlines all over the world.
On that same year, I watched my first live Tosca at the Cultural Center of the Philippines with no less than Placido Domingo in the lead tenor role.
At this time, I was still based in Albay.
That was in 1979. After listening to Caballe and Domingo, I knew that my exploration of the arts could happen only in the big city.
In 1980, I left Albay with my family and accepted a job in the CCP media office while moonlighting in several publications to augment my meager income.
Once I was settled in Manila, the Met was just an arm’s away. In its PR office were Boy Abunda and playwright-to-be Floy Quintos. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves orbiting around the Met grand lady, Conchita Sunico, then the theater’s executive director.
The Met in ruins during the war in 1945 (Photo from author)
After six years at CCP with a new CCP president (Bing Roxas) coming in from President Cory Aquino’s circle, I decided it was time to leave CCP as a regular employee.
The live performing arts held a special fascination for me and just like that, my life as impresario took shape. While still at CCP, I managed to mount the Met debut of Romanian diva Nelly Miricioiu, with no less than the Manila Symphony Orchestra under Sergio Esmilla, Jr.
That was in 1984 when I was still with the CCP.
In 1986, after I left CCP, I moved on to the Manila Metropolitan Theater as freelance impresario. Tita Conching (Sunico) allowed me free use of an office space there in exchange for promoting Met shows. Using another Met office space was Rolando Tinio and his Teatro Pilipino. I found myself in the frequent company of Tinio.
In time, I realized that the Met and I had common woes: we had no solid funds to mount our dream productions.
Just to keep the Met alive, Tita Conching decided to rent out office spaces to the staff and crew of the TV variety show Vilma Santos.
It was a bizarre sight of classical musicians mixing with japayuki applicants whose audition music could be heard on the second floor
The theater also had to rent out space even to recruitment agencies sending “japayukis” or Filipino entertainers to Japan.
It was a bizarre sight of classical musicians mixing with japayuki applicants whose audition music could be heard on the second floor where an audition for Mozart’s Requiem was going on.
I recall Maestro Herbert Zipper telling Tita Conching to do away with the TV show of Vilma.
Tita Conching simply replied: “Maestro Zipper, I have a theater to maintain and employees to feed. If you promise to maintain this theater and feed my staff regularly, then I’d do away with that TV show. But right now, the rentals are all we have for revenues. You have all the right to protect Mozart but I also have to protect my employees.”
It was a classic repartee between art and commerce which reminded me of a scene from Nick Joaquin’s Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, where the spinster sisters Paula and Candida were forced to take in boarders, advertise piano lessons and sell rats’ tails just to keep body and soul together.
Meanwhile, my Met concert season was off to a good start despite the lack of sponsors. My successful debut at the Met as impresario featuring La Miricioiu with the MSO in 1984 left me in a dreamy state. (As it turned out, Miricioiu’s Met debut eclipsed Caballe’s earlier Met recital, with critic Rosalinda L. Orosa describing the Romanian diva as “gift from the gods” on a front page review of the leading broadsheet the Philippine Daily Express.)
When I continued the series as a Met tenant, it dawned on me that classical music could be viable only with solid sponsors. This, even as all my Met concerts ended in standing ovations, from Miricioiu to Rowena Arrieta, William Wolfram, Cecile Licad and Antonio Meneses and on to Jovianney Emmanuel Cruz.
My last concert collaboration with Tita Conching was the MSO with Maestro Zipper, in Mozart’s Requiem and Strauss’ Metamorphosis.
MSO had a hard time surviving but Zipper would not be daunted
At the time, MSO had a hard time surviving but Zipper would not be daunted. He was showing me results of his fundraising effort and all I saw were a few token checks not enough to keep an orchestra alive.
I will always remember how Tita Conching helped keep the culture landmark alive at all cost, even as she lay in her deathbed.
Tita Conching’s ties to the Met dated back to the 1940s, particularly during the Japanese Occupation when she was still a member of the group VSAC (Volunteer Social Aid Committee), the other members of which included educator Helena Benitez who would be senator, Nenita Barrios (Manzano), Trophy Ocampo and Pilar Campos.
During the war years, according to an earlier Met account by former CCP vice president Nick Tiongson, the VSAC of Tita Conching ran a hospital for the wounded, organized a community kitchen for the hungry, and managed a secret mail service for Manila residents and their relatives held captive in Capas or Cabanatuan. To support their volunteer services, the VSACs mounted several opera productions such as La Traviata and Cavalleria Rusticana, and pageants such as the Four Seasons, with participants who included Totoy de Oteyza, Cecile Yulo, Chloe Cruz and Josefina Sabater.
Zipper’s last Met concert, Mozart’s Requiem, in the late ‘80s was itself ominous. The concert was an artistic success but it did not resuscitate the MSO. The donations didn’t come and the patrons’ cash pledges never materialized.
Years later, the MSO found another life in the young talents of the violinist-conductor Basilio “Billy” Manalo, who earlier was one of the MSO’s original soloists.
With the Manila Metropolitan Theater’s reopening this April (most likely virtual), I can look back with pride on its early years.
When it opened on December 10, 1931, about 1,670 music lovers were in attendance and listened to the country’s first and most celebrated violin prodigy, Ernesto Vallejo, play Albeniz’s Tango. Soprano Montserrat Iglesias sang two arias from Samson et Delilah, and the Manila Music Academy under Alexander Lippay played the Coronation March from Meyerbeer’s The Prophet.
There was a talking picture (this was the era of the silent film) with opera singer Tito Schipa of the New York Met singing selections from Martha and the Spanish ballad Princesita.
The Met’s golden age peaked in the 1930s, with the visit of Italy’s top diva Amelita Gulli-Curci and violin legends
The Met’s golden age peaked in the 1930s, with the visit of Italy’s top diva, Amelita Gulli-Curci, and violin legends Jascha Heifetz and Frtiz Kreisler, among others.
Among the outstanding operas mounted in the late ‘30s and the early ‘40s was Gounod’s Faust, staged by the Compania de Opera National under Bonifacio Abdon as director. Verdi’s Rigoletto was presented by the Musical Philippines Inc., under Jose Mossesgeld Santiago-Font as director; Puccini’s La Boheme was staged by Jovita Fuentes, while Tosca was directed by Ramon Tapales, also of Musical Philippines, Inc.
(The pianist and conductor Regalado Jose told me that during opera rehearsals where he served as run-through pianist of Jose Mossesgeld Santiago-Font, he only took the bike from San Juan to the Met and the ride was less than 30 minutes.)
Faust was a landmark opera production at the time because it starred the country’s foremost bass baritone, Jose Mossesgeld Santiago Font, who was the first and so far the only Filipino bass baritone to sing at La Scala di Milan. Santiago-Font also sang Ramfis in Aida, opposite Angela de Gonzaga in the title role, also at the Manila Metropolitan Theater.
In the late ‘80s, I watched Chinese pianist Fou Ts’ong (a close friend of pianist Martha Argerich) also at the Met, as well as several opera productions —The Pearl Fishers (with Eleanor Calbes, Frankie Aseniero and Gamaliel Viray) and Mefistofele with bass Carlos Chausson in the title role, Francisco Aseniero as Faust and Jeanne Cook as Marguerite and Elena.
For me, the Met will always be the cultural landmark where I was entranced by Caballe and Miricioiu, where I pacified an angry Lino Brocka, and where I got to work with Maestro Herbert Zipper, Tita Conching, Boy Abunda and Floy Quintos, among others.
Even in this pandemic, I keep hoping the Met will have the chance to be reunited with its live audiences from past and present generations.
Epilogue
Violinist Ernesto Vallejo who also performed at the Met opening in 1931 was killed by Japanese marines in Tanauan, Batangas, in 1945 along with his wife and children.
Conductor Herbert Zipper died in Sta. Monica, California, on April 21, 1997 at age 92. Never Give Up, a documentary on his life, was a finalist in the Oscars. It was only after watching Quezon’s Game that I learned he was a survivor of the Dachau concentration camp and had to escape to the Philippines to evade the Nazi hunt.
Conchita Sunico, the legendary Met executive director and 1935 Miss Philippines—died August 1, 1990 at age 76.
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