ARTISTANG ARTLETS, the official theater guild of the Faculty of Arts and Letters, concluded its 45th season by staging “Hanggang Humupa” from May 14 to May 16, at the Girl Scouts of the Philippines National Headquarters on Padre Faura Street in Manila.
“Hanggang Humupa” is a slice-of-life drama that centers on residents of Barangay Hanggan, a flood-prone area, as they try to survive within systems that disregard and fail them.
While there was a valiant effort to delve into this intricate and long-standing problem, the book written by Kyte Villanueva, a fourth-year communication student, erroneously equates fleeting references to current events with profundity.
Despite Villanueva’s depiction of topics, such as pregnancy and financial pressures, the conflicts that arose from these lacked merit and cohesion.
The development of the ensemble’s individual interiority largely relied on what characters said about one another, without much insight into their sense of self.
Alyssa Esmeria and Samantha Agbayani, however, succeeded in conveying the devastation of the character Mylene, a teenage mother who faces loss.
Tepid direction from fourth-year political science student Chloei Angeleine Fornea turned the musical into a park-and-bark, halting the little momentum it had left.
The material lends itself better to a straight play than to a musical, and it shows.
With a mere four musical numbers sporadically spread throughout a two-hour duration, the production of “Hanggang Humupa” suffers from a noticeable dearth of narrative weight, rendered even more glaring by the cast’s sudden transitions into song.
The inclusion of kilig-inducing moments drew reactions from the audience, but it is a thinly veiled attempt to make a lasting impression on its viewers.
Nonetheless, “Hanggang Humupa” shows immense promise as a timely work about the strength of community and as a critique of the systems that refuse to uplift those in the margins.
