A GAY friend of ours was explaining a new story concept for a musical about Kiko Matsing and Pong Pagong of Batibot fame in a modern setting. They are yuppies renting a room in a haunted, old house in a Quiapo neighborhood. They work for a call center in Makati City. One of them is a closet gay. We told him that story is not new anymore because there’s already the Tony Award-winning Avenue Q, to be staged for the third time by Atlantis Productions. He was insistent and promised to do a parody, calling it Avenue Quiapo.

Instead of having decent, logically hilarious and helpful neighbors like those in Avenue Q, Kiko and Pong are surrounded by criminals and ghosts. For his suspense-horror-sex-comedy play, the main theme song is “Batibot,” the censored version of the now-inactive New Wave band Alamid.

We wished him good luck and advised him to please catch the musical before it goes to Esplanade Theater in Singapore this October.

Because, by the time you’ve finished reading this, you should be prepared to beg or haggle for tickets from people who won’t accept your money, blood, bile and/or sperm for a seat. Like in its previous stagings last year, tickets for Avenue Q have become as scarce as rice and honest taxi drivers.

For first-timers, Avenue Q is the immensely hilarious musical from New York City ever staged by a Filipino theater group in a local setting in the last decade. We say “ever” because the last one we can recall having nearly the same impact was Ma-Yi Theater’s staging of Lonnie Carter’s The Romance of Magno Rubio at the Cultural Center of the Philippines sometime in 2003. The cast members are all Filipino-Americans, or Filipinos who spent more than half of their lives in the Big Apple.

At any rate, Avenue Q’s Philippine farewell run was not even on schedule, but the office of Atlantis Productions’ übercreative director Bobby Garcia was flooded with calls for a rerun after its second staging in 2007.

Why the clamor?

One local tabloid columnist simply described the experience: “Mga puppets na nagdyu-dyug-dyugan, nakakaloka [Puppets screwing each other. Makes me crazy.”] Avenue Q is simply for everyone—at least those old enough to vote. There are no class barriers here because even those who read the tabloids in barber shops and smoky billiard halls from Paco, Manila, to General Santos City can watch and relate.

Millions of unemployed Filipinos with a college degree or simply the legions of unemployed can see themselves in the musical. (How they’re going to afford the tickets is not our problem.) The issues being tackled are the same problems that Filipinos in their 20s and 30s face, or that of any other struggling career-oriented individual in any other sleepless city aiming to be another Big Apple. The parallelism is staring the audience in the face.  Avenue Q has been staged in major cities in Canada, London, Sweden, Finland and Israel. 

Avenue Q is about Princeton, some regular guy from the countryside who graduated last school year, who goes to the big city and rents a place in a neighborhood whose inhabitants seem to have the same career-related problems as him.

At the beginning, Princeton the unemployed sings, “What do you do with a B.A. in English/What is my life going to be? /Four years of college and plenty of knowledge/Have earned me this useless degree....” The role has made Felix Rivera the new heartthrob-must-see “it” boy in the local theater scene. We are assured that he will make Filipinos proud before the diverse audience in Singapore. Aiza Seguerra, playing the has-been child star-turned-building administrator Gary Coleman, is also a revelation. The pop star is very much at home in musical theater.

Avenue Q is about being a closet gay and proudly coming out of the cage; being Japanese and married to an unemployed American comedian; being a has-been actor at 15 years old and ending up working as a building caretaker-administrator; being a monster or black or Jew or Filipino or Japanese in a society of racists; being laughed at for one’s misfortunes, and vice versa.  On a more positive note, it’s about knowing the wonderful career opportunities on the Internet, especially from the multitrillion-dollar porn industry.  

Avenue Q is about having wild, long and loud sex that wakes up the neighborhood in the middle of the night all the way through dawn.

All these stories are retold by puppets that somehow bring us back to Sesame Street. There were articles in the past that described it as “Sesame Street meets Rent.” Then again, the brilliant playwright-composers Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, the same heads behind the less witty Altar Boyz, earlier denied any reference to the two.

In an earlier review, critic Ben Brantley of The New York Times compared the character of Princeton with Tony of West Side Story, only Princeton has a very wholesome happy ending.

Our gay friend, after watching the musical in its jam-packed opening on Friday the 13th, said he’s more inspired to do Avenue Quiapo, with a few revisions. Pong Pagong and Kiko Matsing will be fired from their call-center jobs because they have a tendency to sing their lines—using gay slang. After a few days of being bums and soul-searching, they venture into selling pirated DVDs.

We bid him good luck again, and for those who haven’t seen Avenue Q, there will be no pirated versions. Reassuringly, every staging done by our local actors—whether here or in Singapore—is surely worth watching again and again.

The Atlantis Productions version of Avenue Q is being staged at the Carlos Romulo Theater, RCBC Plaza, until August 22.

Produced by the Singapore Repertory Theater, Avenue Q in Esplanade will have the original Filipino cast members composed of the ever-credible team of Joel Trinidad, Seguerra, Rivera, Frenchie Dy, Rycharde Everly, Teenee Chan plus Carla Guevara-Laforteza as Lucy the Slut and Kate Monster.

****

For the June 18 show, call 0917-8432252 for ticket inquiries. For June 19 and 20, call Ticketworld at 891-9999. For the June 21,  2 pm show, call 722-8464 and, for the 8pm, 913-1570. For Sunday at 3 pm, call 0920-9326067, and for the 8pm, call 0917-8534323 and 0906-3414545.

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