Lorenzo

Poppert Bernadas

Being the first ever Filipino saint, one would expect that every Filipino Catholic would know by heart the story of Saint Lorenzo Ruiz. I have to admit that all I know about him was that he died in Japan after being tortured for not renouncing his Christian faith. As for the rest of his story, well, I have no idea. So I had high hopes that Lorenzo, the new musical about the life of the first ever Filipino saint would increase my knowledge about Lorenzo, not just as a saint but as a man as well. Produced by Christopher De Leon’s Green Wings Entertainment Network, Inc. and boasting a creative team consisting of director Nonon Padilla, librettist/lyricist Juan Ekis, Paul Dumol and Joem Antonio, and composer Ryan Cayabyab, an original musical like Lorenzo is a much needed addition to the Philippine theater scene amid the deluge of productions staging licensed material from abroad.

The show I was able catch featured Poppert Bernadas who was the understudy to the role of Lorenzo. Poppert, a good friend of mine, is one of the original members of the Ryan Cayabyab Singers and I am very familiar with the strength, projection, timbre and impressive range of his voice. I last saw him perform as part of the chorus in Katy! a couple months back but it’s a different matter altogether if he could be as effective as the lead. Surprisingly, Poppert was able impress everyone by his portrayal of Lorenzo who seemed to be tormented throughout the whole musical. I eventually struggled to imagine the Lorenz Martinez who played Lorenzo for most of the run because Poppert owned the role during that matinee performance. It’s also hard to believe that Poppert has managed to overshadow his co-star OJ Mariano who is one heck of a vocalist to start with. Another surprise revelation for me was Sheila Valderrama who played Lorenzo’s wife, Rosario Ruiz. I felt that her song earlier in the production, about the abandoned wife who still has faith in her husband’s good nature, set the tone for the rest of the musical.

Alas, while Lorenzo started great musically for me, the stage direction throughout the production left me baffled. I felt that there was too much happening on stage for me to fully get into the material. I do understand that everything that was on stage had some underlying meaning to it and that every prop and action was littered with metaphors and symbols. For example, there was one scene in act three when four dummies were hoisted, then descended into rings made up of hula hoops, then guards rip something off the dummies’ chests and threw that stuff on to the stage, and then unhoisted the dummies, put them in garbage bags, thrash them violently before eventually packing them into balikbayan boxes. I knew that director Nonon Padilla intended this sequence to mean something but it was hard for me to make sense out of everything that I saw. I don’t want to think that I wasn’t intelligent enough if I fail to grasp everything what he was trying to convey although I managed to interpret a thing or two once in a while. One thing that perplexed me completely was when Rosario sitting inside a balikbayan box atop a trolley was being pushed across the stage.

When discussing this musical with some other people, they told me that this was typical of Nonon Padilla. For those who are familiar with his style and who would be able to figure out what he was trying to communicate, Lorenzo would be yet another stroke of his genius. But for someone like me who is a relative newbie in theater, the extraneous stuff on stage ranging from the contemporary dancing, changing of seasons effects, to the Gundam (which looked impressive by the way), took away from the actual storytelling of the whole production. I felt that if there was more restraint, the symbols presented like the balikbayan boxes would stood out more and would’ve had a lot more profound impact on me.

I knew that keeping myself bothered with the stage direction would distract me from the other elements of the musical so I decided to focus on the music more. As expected, Ryan Cayabyab created great new music for this production and as I’ve said before, it was the  songs assigned to the Ruiz’s that really appealed to me with their sweeping melodies that were performed with such rawness, grit and emotion by Sheila and Poppert. There was also a very exquisite a cappella by the quartet of friars composed of Juliene Mendoza, Rhenwyn Gabalonzo, Miguel Mendoza and Brylle Mondejar that was difficult to pull off since no one was giving visible cues to them. The truly rock music was given to the Japanese characters portrayed by Brezhnev Larlar and Noel Rayos. But I felt that they rendered it too farcical that it somehow caricaturized the portrayal of the Japanese and made them vehemently and one dimensionally evil. Throughout the show, Noel was bound in a wheelchair because days before the opening, he injured his leg due to an accident with stilts that his character was supposed to wear. I also wondered for the most part if ever Camille Lopez-Molina would get to sing at all. One of the country’s leading sopranos today, Camille played the role of the reporter interviewing OJ’s character Laurence, and it was only towards the very end that she got to sing her show stopping operatic aria.

Christopher de Leon

So did I learn more about Saint Lorenzo Ruiz by watching this musical? I learned that he was on the run from Spaniards in here, got whisked off to Japan by chance and wasn’t really truly active in spreading the word of God there. I found it amazing that a lot of the events that happened in his life that led to his sainthood weren’t really made by his own choice. It made me think deeply on how all this got him to be the patron saint of Filipinos who work overseas.

Lorenzo is still a work in progress and this run at the SDA Theater serves to test the production as it heads over to the Cultural Center of the Philippines by July 2014. I do wish that I’ll be able to catch it once again by that time and see for myself if they were able to make the storytelling tighter and run smoother.