And where was Nyoy Volante all the while?

Curtain-raisers:

• Why didn’t the director shout “Cut!”? That was what those on the set of a movie which was being shot outside of Manila were asking. The director and the leading actress were acting “lovey-dovey,” holding hands and hugging according to the Funfare DPA. Was the director teaching the actress how to do a love scene? But the cameras were not rolling and the “romantic” scene looked much too real. The “witnesses” tried (in vain) to look the other way. The director is married to a celeb with whom he has a child while the actress is reported to be recovering from an ugly breakup with her actor-boyfriend.
• A starlet got her wish to do a movie with her dream leading man, a top actor, thanks to her DOM (Darling Older Man) who invested heavily on the project just to please her. The actress hit the stars with her dream-come-true but the movie hit rock bottom. Result: the actress’ career has stalled, hopefully just for a while.
• Friends of a band member are amazed by how he’s able to attract beautiful women even if, according to another Funfare DPA, he’s not really “a looker.” His latest conquest is the daughter of his friend who is also a band member. The daughter is deeply in love and her parents couldn’t stop her. She’s half the age of her lover who is as old as her father. Age doesn’t matter when the heart rules the kind, does it? “The sad part is that it was the girl’s father who helped his friend band member when the going was rough,” said the DPA. “And their rendezvous is the girl’s condo unit her father bought for her!”

* * *

Believe it or not but when Edmund Silvestre, Jerry Donato (with a friend) and I watched Kinky Boots (the much-talked-about big hit musical in town these days) last Sunday at the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium at RCBC Plaza, we didn’t see Nyoy Volante at all during the three-hour performance. All we saw was the character Lola, the fabulous livewire entertainer already in sky-high red boots yet still in need of sturdy stilettos, strutting and singing and spitting out witty lines as she sashayed and danced without missing a beat and without slipping at all in his high heels, running back and forth on stage, charging it with inexhaustible energy and owning it while leaving the full-house audience in awe, clapping at her every turn and, at curtain call, giving her and the rest of the cast a standing ovation.

Nyoy with four of the supporting cast, all of them hilarious

Produced by the Atlantis Theatricals Entertainment Group composed of Bobby Barreiro (now a Kapamilya), Antonio “Mr. T” Tuviera (big boss of Eat, Bulaga!) and Bobby Garcia (also the director), Kinky Boots is the Tony/Oliver/Grammy award-winning musical with music and lyrics by Cyndi Lauper and book by Harvey Fierstein, based on the Miramax movie of the same title, written by Geoff Deane and Tim Firth. It’s about Charlie Price (played by relative stage newcomer Laurence Mossman with restraint) who reluctantly inherits his father’s factory which is on the verge of bankruptcy. To save the family business, Charlie finds inspiration in Lola who turns out to be the one person who can help Charlie become the man that he is meant to be.

If you didn’t know Nyoy, you would think that he’s typecast as a drag queen, a screaming gay to the gender born. He so disappeared into the Lola persona that Nyoy totally shed his real self which we saw only backstage after the play, graciously doing selfies with members of the audience who swarmed around him. Off stage, Nyoy showed not a trace of Lola even if he still had his make-up on for the day’s second show. With him is his wife Mikkie Bradshaw and their little daughter who, according to Mikkie, calls his dad “Mommy” right now.

“It takes me three hours to apply his make-up,” shared Mikkie, also a theater actor whom Nyoy met when they were doing Rock of Ages in which Mikkie played a stripper. “He fell in love with the stripper,” quipped Mikkie. “We’ve been together for five years, married for a year. We are partners at work and at home. I am his biggest fan and his worst critic,” adding that she initially didn’t like Nyoy’s kind of music because she preferred the Led Zeppelin sound, “but I love his humor. He seems serious because of the music he writes but the truth is that he is kenkoy.”

Asked if he had any difficulty balancing on high heels, Nyoy smiled.

“Actually, I did have a lot of practice during my stint in Your Face Sounds Familiar (YFSF, the Kapamilya show) in which I did impersonation of singers like Katy Perry and Tina Turner. I have my own collection of heels at home because I’m asked to do impersonation in some shows.”

The musical is about being what you are, what you are meant to be without fear of what other people might say.

“And that’s what kind of scared me because I was doling something that represents a really big part of the community, those who have yet to make up their mind, and I didn’t want to let them down. I have to do it properly. I have to put respect somewhere there.”

Oh, yes, I was happy to see my friend Christine Flores in the cast. First time I saw her onstage which, I realized, is her true world and not in domesticity as the better (bitter?) half of a popular politician (their marriage had been annulled). I’ve known the quiet (domestic) side of Christine. From the souvenir program, I learned about her, well, other side: started with Repertory Philippines in 1999 as Genoveva in Miong and later appeared in Beauty and the Beast (as Beauty Mimi), Mulan (Ancestor Zhang, Sleeping Beauty (Queen), Wizard of Oz (Glinda the Good/Aunt Em), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Queen Hypolita) and many others.

Anyway, you have one more weekend to catch Kinky Boots (until Sunday, July 23, with a matinee at 2 p.m.; or tickets, call Ticketworld at 891-9999 or visit www.ticketworld.com.ph).

Watch it and maybe you will know what you are meant to be — that is, if you have yet to make up your mind (hehehe!!!).

(E-mail reactions at [email protected]. For more updates, photos and videos, visit www.philstar.com/funfare or follow me on Instagram @therealrickylo.)