PETA’s latest coup

MANY YEARS AFTER THE BREAKUP OF BUKLOD, Noel Cabangon is writing the libretto of the Philippine Educational Theater Association’s (PETA) season ending musical, Mga Kuwento ni Lola Basyang, which attempts to help our youth out of a growing malaise known as attention deficit span.

Multicolored beads encircle the right wrist of Cabangon, who had to put his fifth solo album on hold since contracted to the PETA project, as he sips hot sinigang soup at the Ilustrado restaurant in Intramuros on a rainy August day, with typhoon Huaning just around the corner.

"The younger the generation gets, the shorter the attention span," he observes, explaining why through music, the age-old stories of Lola Basyang, better known as Severino Reyes, will work its charm on a young audience too enamored with the ironically labeled information age, and where Severino Reyes for some of them is just a street in Manila.

Aside from the background score, there are at least 12 songs Cabangon has written for the play conceived by children’s story writer Christine Bellen, about a Lola Basyang who would rather have Alzheimer’s in order to jolt her now dwindling band of loyal listeners to remember her stories.

Three of her wards try to rescue Basyang from a creeping amnesia indicative of our times of information forgetfulness, and they each recount a story by the lola in which they morph into the lead character, and soon enough sing songs written for them by Cabangon: the scaredy-cat prince, the prince with a long nose, and the young woman who defeated a king.

Cabangon rushed writing the songs in three weeks even as daily rehearsals commenced in PETA’s rented theater digs on E. Rodriguez Ave. to make it to two weekends of playdates at SM Centerpoint. Critics night was held on the Monday before the first scheduled playdate, the better to fine-tune the production.

There were instances when Cabangon would be writing a melody in his head while driving the chaotic streets of the city, and once while he was singing into his handy cellphone cum recorder a motorist suddenly cut into his path, and so expletives could be heard along with the captured melody on tape, but no "Hello Garci".

Songwriting for Cabangon, who first made the airwaves with his partner Rom Dongeto in Buklod and their undying Kanlungan‚ in the grim and determined post-EDSA I 1980s, follows a creative process similar to some writers of the plain written word, only too aware that a songwriter is also a storyteller. He gets up early in the morning when it’s still silent and tries to write a song on the guitar, always with a handy recorder nearby lest the inspiration is lost to the early morning wind. No, he doesn’t write on the piano, as some song-writers are wont to do; it’s just the guitar for him, he humbly admits.

While Cabangon is overall musical director of Basyang, the musical arranger is jazzman Bob Aves. There’s a full orchestral backdrop courtesy of the wonder of synthesizers, even as songs are all done minus one, mind you, as lead players Berna Bernardo (Basyang), Miles Pasamanero (Sharai), JK Anicoche (long-nosed prince), and Eric dela Cruz (cowardly prince) sing and act and do their stuff on stage along with puppets, masks, the whole gamut of postmodern gadgets courtesy of production designer Ogie Juliano to prove that Lola Basyang like a good story never goes out of style.

The songs of Basyang do not incorporate Cabangon’s own political advocacy, the composer says, because one should be distinct from the other. In the play, the method is pure pop entertainment, and the singer himself is mum whether he performs some of the new songs during his solo gigs at Conspiracy on Wednesdays and 70s Bistro every other Thursday with a full band complement that includes jazz bassist Simon Tan.

This biweekly Thursday gig is unique as he gets to stretch out in rock form and focus on doing covers of a particular artist, among them James Taylor and Sting. Neil Young? It’s on the drawing boards, he says, you can’t ignore those repeated requests for Heart of Gold‚ or Four Strong Winds.

His political advocacy he voices out in his talk-and-sing campus tours, part of Rock Education’s alternative classes in universities. RockEd is in line with the UN’s millennium development goals, dealing with environment issues and poverty eradication.

If we can take PETA’s word for it, there’s no politics involved in Lola Basyang, which was conceived as part of the group’s Children’s Theater Program, following past productions of Mga Kuwentong Asyano and the translated tales of Hans Christian Andersen.

There’s a suggestion that the show be brought to the campuses, the better to get the grade schoolers to watch it. Next year, Basyang will go to the provinces. But financial logistics are constantly evaluated before the mountain can go to Mohamed.

Or even have a live radio feed of the musical, as if it were a regular concert, as Cabangon says that Lola Basyang can still be heard afternoons on the recesses of AM radio, which he once chanced upon while riding in a taxi and that familiar mellow voice came on the microphone, he is the minstrel, we are the song.

A zarzuela, meanwhile, opens PETA’s new season later this year, Mario O’Hara’s prizewinning Ang Palasyo ni Valentin, which inaugurates the theater group’s new home in Quezon City behind the sports plaza.

After Basyang, Cabangon goes back to his interrupted fifth solo album, his first full-fledged independent effort after his Jescom (Ateneo Jesuit Communications) tetralogy.

On TV we can catch him occasionally on that rollicking, rocking music video, Kayod Kabayo‚ that has great guitar player Noli Aurillo mimicking a great guitar player.

Where’s Rom Dongeto now? "He’s with an NGO," Cabangon, himself a member of PETA, says, laughing off possibilities of any local Simon and Garfield reunion in the immediate future.

Cabangon, a regular lead in the yearly productions of Jesus Christ Superstar at 70s Bistro, promises us a copy of his limited edition previously released CD, we assume also under the auspices of Jescom, but this one an artist’s cut.

"For your listening pleasure," he says, sounding like a Basyang character stuck deep in his grim and determined days, but none the worse for wear. We’re waiting to savor it like the callos of Ilustrado.

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Mga Kuwento ni Lola Basyang is on stage at Cinema 5, SM Centerpoint on Sept. 1 and 2 at 10 am and 3 pm and on Sept. 3 at 10 am 3 and 7 pm.