‘Mabining Mandirigma’ is for the voting youth

Dr. Nicanor Tiongson's "Mabining Mandirigma" is unusual in a number of ways. For one, it claims to be a steampunk musical, a production made of cogs and songs that are, at times, infodumps telling the story in a way that musicals can only convey.

It also cast the very female Liesl Batucan, a two-time Philstage Gawad Buhay Awardee for "Sweeney Todd" (2009) and "August: Osage County" (2014), as its titular hero Apolinario Mabini.

Queen Mia, Sigrid Balbas, Arya Herrera, and Hazel Maranan were also cast as Mark Twain, Charles Jasper Bell, Gen. Douglas McArthur, and William Howard Taft, who were, with the exception of Twain, portrayed as ruthlessly cheerful colonizers.

Vaudeville and the slightest hints of chiptunes, coupled with emphatic projections of blood and the night sky, round up the oddities of "Mandirigma."

"Ang style ng play is Brechtian—in the sense that what it is interested in is to communicate certain ideas. Ang dapat lumutang ay ideas na 'yun," Tiongson explained in an interview with GMA News Online on Friday. "So may mga devices to create what [Bertolt] Brecht called alienation. Not alienate from the play but distance enough so that the audience watches the play and concentrates on the ideas rather than the emotion."

These choices serve to detach the audience from the stage in order to focus on Tiongson's proclamation in the program: "Mabini is the hero par excellence for the Philippines today."

He is still the hero the country needs, he adds in the program, because the hurdles the Philippine government faced in 1898 and 1899 are the same as today's: feudal patronage, private armies, the use of violence in subduing dissenters, and use of legislature to consolidate power and wealth.

To show how part of these problems came to be, Tiongson chose steampunk, a genre that emerged in the Age of Industralization, to embody the foreign and the elites.

"From the point of view of the Europeans who are industrializing, the invention of steam and the age of the machine made them feel that they were on the verge of a new world, na sila yung nagle-lead," Tiongson said.

"But from our point of view, that same age was what pushed America to come to our shores. In other words, that's the ugly side of industrialization," he continued.

This message is relevant, especially in the light of the 2016 presidential elections, when some if not all of the aforementioned problems could be solved by electing the right leader.

"When you do theater, just like any art form, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's cognizant of certain social happening and what is very important is coming up, is the elections. So what better way for an art form like musical theater to engage with your current milieu," director Chris Millado said.

"Definitely, it tries to stimulate a discussion with regards to corruption, with regards to excess, with regards our idea of what our country should be and what kind of leaders we should have." — BM, GMA News

"Mabining Mandirigma" is currently playing at the Cultural Center of the Philippines' Tanghalang Aurelio Tolentino. Closing date is March 13. Tickets are available at the CCP and at Ticketworld.