REVIEW: Heartwarming Jose Mari Chan Musical might be what the doctor ordered to close out this challenging, crazy year
Warning: This review contains spoilers.
A big Christmas-Valentine’s stage musical that plays a lot like the romance-comedy movie Love, Actually was probably not on many people’s theater cards for 2024 but it’s exactly what Repertory Philippines has dealt with its latest production, Going Home to Christmas: A Jose Mari Chan Musical. And as far as gifts go, it’s aptly all sorts of merry and lovely, and one of the most entertaining shows of the year.
It’s the legendary theater group’s first OPM jukebox musical, coming on the heels of six pieces—Sa Wakas (Sugarfree), Rak of Aegis (Aegis), 3 Stars and A Sun (Francis M), Ang Huling El Bimbo (Eraserheads), One More Chance: The Musical (Ben&Ben), and Buruguduystunstugudunstuy (Parokya Ni Edgar). Who knew the almost purely-English language house that the Zenaida Amador and Baby Barredo built where the likes of Lea Salonga were born and raised had the chops to do Pinoy middlebrow and do it so well.
The show is so accessible and charming it may even disarm people who can’t stand Chan’s ubiquitous holiday classic Christmas In Our Hearts, which is not even performed in its entirety. In fact, there is a character in the play that hates the song. Parts of the tune are also peppered throughout the show with different lyrics, sometimes to tie or bridge moments together but mostly to further add spice to the script. Meanwhile some songs, while sung straightforwardly, are performed with a comical touch. This is a jukebox musical that’s also a jokebox musical.
This keen self-awareness and let’s-not-take-ourselves-so-seriously is one of the Going Home’s biggest surprises and what makes it most endearing. While it pays very loving tribute to Chan’s music, it’s not beyond taking lighthearted potshots at the icon himself and the place his songs occupy in Filipino life and pop culture.
Penned by a trio of award-winning veteran theater writers, the many intertwining stories about finding romance, rediscovering love, arriving at closure, and reconnecting to roots, and how easily recognizable and relatable they are, are further proof of the timelessness and universality of Chan’s music. Those pushing for him to be declared National Artist have just received a gift they can use for their cause.
Director Jeremy Domingo keeps things moving along briskly and dynamically. He constantly fills the industrial-looking stage, which is made to look like the lobby of an airport, with lots of moving parts, both set pieces and performers (around two dozen). A particularly clever move is having onstage movers and props staff dressed as ground crew, further recreating the environs of the narrative’s setting: a few breathless, chaotic hours on Christmas Eve. It’s like one huge balikbayan box that, once opened, reveals lots of goodies and trinkets that can be rearranged over and over in many different ways.
It’s not all Christmas songs all the time. Chan’s most indelible hits are here—Beautiful Girl, Please Be Careful With My Heart, Tell Me Your Name, Can We Sit and Talk A While. Even his very first recording, Afterglow, and a classic advertising jingle are in the 22-song mix together with a few tracks like the OPM classic Hahanapin Ko that not many might know are Chan compositions (he wrote the music to the searching, yearning 1980 love ballad, whose long-distance love story the show captures beautifully, poignantly as a portrait of a fractured OFW life).
All told, Going Home to Christmas may not be as laugh-out-loud funny as Rak of Aegis, as searingly dramatic as Huling El Bimbo, as swoon-inducing romantic as One More Chance, or as psychedelically fantastic as Buruguduystunstugudunstuy, but it is arguably better. It has a little bit of all the best parts of these older jukebox musicals and serves them up in just the right blend and temperature to make it palatable for, to rephrase a lyric from another Christmas classic, “kids from nine to ninety-two.” Chan’s music, after all, has that wide an appeal.
Going Home to Christmas is indeed worth going to, especially after a year fraught with challenges, uncertainty, and craziness. It might just be what the doctor ordered: a generous dose of warm, bright, feel-good love, actually that might make the most wonderful time of the year a truly perfect Christmas.
***
Going Home to Christmas: A Jose Mari Chan Musical is currently playing at the RCBC Plaza in Makati until Dec. 15. For tickets to the Dec. 7 matinee show at 3:30 p.m., contact 09175112110; for the Dec. 12 show at 8 p.m., contact 09688808717; or purchase online here.