Oh, the musical! It's kind of my favorite genre and I'm not ashamed to say it. I like it campy and overdone, with lots of witty dialogue and dancing and people bursting into song. I mean, why not?
In the Philippines we have a long standing love affair with the musical. We have an old tradition in inserting musical numbers in our stories. Remember the zarzuela? A popular form of entertainment back in the day, the zarzuela usually had a three act structure with music, dancing, and singing interspersed with prose dialogue. It seems we haven't lost our taste for it, the plots are slightly altered but the basic formula remains the same: lots of singing with scenes of melodrama, comedy, and satire. It's very Pinoy. After all, we like to sing and it seems we cannot live without melodrama.
In Emir, the new "original Filipino musical written for the screen" (directed by Chito Roño and produced by 
the Film Development Council of the Philippines) this formula is applied to a contemporary issue. Amelia (Frencheska Farr) is a young Ilocano girl who wants to help her poor family, so she goes to the Morocco to become a maid in the great house of a sheik. The plot meanders (and sometimes drags) through more than a decade of Amelia's career as a nanny and her life as an OFW. She and the rest of the Filipino staff at the palace sing about loneliness and struggle. They decorate homemade Christmas trees in a land where there is no Christmas and teach their alagas to speak in Filipino; they sing and dance about the jet-set nanny life. Essentially, the movie pays homage to the Filipino OFW, it's the big fat yaya musical.
And while the movie had some peak cinematic moments–riding home on the family kalabaw against the Ilocos sunset, dramatically wide shots of the desert landscape and traditional Moroccan architecture–I sat there watching it with a feeling that it might work better as a stage musical more than anything else. I would love to see Emir staged at the CCP. On stage, perhaps the material can snap and sparkle and crackle with energy that comes from live performance. Then at least we can allow ourselves to be swept away by the theatrical experience and suspend our disbelief a little longer. There's always a happy ending in a musical–but as we know, this is not always the case in real life.
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While we're on the subject of musicals, I cannot wait to see Romeo Candido's Prison Dancer (www.prisondancer.com)!
Di ba?
Photograph from Facebook page of Emir the Movie.
