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Tuesday, July 23, 2002
YAP: Once
By Januar E. Yap
For out of what we live/ and we believe/ our lives become/ the stories that we weave.”—from the play
That was a “supremely fine fare watching Hendri Go’s (and his superb cast’s) version of the award-winning Broadway musical Once on this Island. If anything, Hendri has not landed on the rogue’s gallery of poseur thespians who abound on this side of the universe. If anything, I felt guilty I wasn’t part of the paying audience.
If Disney’s The Little Mer-maid was a social leveler, Once is a reality check. The Little brought ashore a be-limbed mermaid and spun the hard-fought yet inevitable “lived-happily-ever-after” by way of royal wedding. With Once, what accidents put together, the weather will put asunder.
The elements (or their proxy gods: love, water, earth, death) are central to the story, which was why Once’s major prods abroad placed premium on backdrop. Gerry McIntyre’s 1995 prod banked on a set with a sky that was as expressive in the narrative as the other elements in the play: opaque clouds and translucent sky turned into shifting mirrors against the story’s emotional outbursts. On that aspect alone, Hendri’s Once was the light director’s feat, weaving the tale with light (or its opposite) and chromatics.
Once is a story of Ti Moune, a peasant girl, who took as love and deliverance a car crash that fed into her life Daniel, the rich boy from the other side of the island. Like Freud’s intense triumvirate (Id, Ego, Superego), the story also has the four gods constantly seeking elbowroom in Ti Moune’s life. On the whole, Ti Moune’s story was a story two island raconteurs told a child to comfort her amidst the storm. The story warns about love that outsizes the heart, about the windfalls and pitfalls of falling in love.
Hendri’s Once featured two sets of cast, and it was Rochelle Vega’s that I saw. What can I say, they delivered. And breezily excellently, to think that it was mixed with slim professional theater credentials, just sheer verve tucked in their portfolio. Ah, but they were performers in their own right.
If anything, the debut director has shown sincerity in his craft. I met Hendri when he was still in his teens, and he was then trying his hand in writing. The next time around, I found him behind major prods (Loveletters) with still a long list of to-do’s that you often think goes straight to the moon. There’s a recurrent phrase in Once, “courage to dream.” Hendri has chosen his material.
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