Cover Myke Salomon, Luigi Quesada, Maronne Cruz, Gab Pangilinan and Gio Gahol for Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s ‘We Aren’t Kids Anymore’ (Photo: CJ Ochoa; courtesy of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative)
Myke Salomon, Luigi Quesada, Maronne Cruz, Gab Pangilinan and Gio Gahol for Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s ‘We Aren’t Kids Anymore’ (Photo: CJ Ochoa; courtesy of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative)
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Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s staging of ‘We Aren’t Kids Anymore’ moves with breath and precision—but its emotional structure, like the adulthood it depicts, is deliberately unsteady
It begins without warning—the way growing up often does. No exposition, no overture, just a sudden entrance. What follows is a rollercoaster of emotions: 19 back-to-back numbers, with a spoken word piece performed near the end.
We Aren’t Kids Anymore, a song cycle by Broadway composer Drew Gasparini, doesn’t follow a linear arc. Instead, it moves through recollection and revision, shaped less by plot than emotional contour. There are no character backstories, no central conflict to resolve—only five performers arriving one by one, trying to make sense of life as we all do: haltingly, hopefully and sometimes with great heartache.
Debuted in 2019 and world premiered at the Savoy Theatre just this April 2025, the show now finds a deeply felt staging in Manila through Barefoot Theatre Collaborative, whose past works (Mula sa Buwan, The Last Five Years, Bar Boys: A New Musical) have drawn praise for their emotional and conceptual clarity. Under the direction of Rem Zamora, with musical direction by Myke Salomon and Farley Asuncion, this production handles the song cycle’s fluid form with precision and restraint, offering a 90-minute show on adulthood that’s equal parts tender and joyously alive.
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Above Myke Salomon is part of the all-star cast of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s ‘We Aren’t Kids Anymore’ (Photo: CJ Ochoa; courtesy of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative)
Myke Salomon is part of the all-star cast of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s ‘We Aren’t Kids Anymore’ (Photo: CJ Ochoa; courtesy of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative)
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Above Myke Salomon, Maronne Cruz and Gio Gahol for Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s ‘We Aren’t Kids Anymore’ (Photo: Kyle Venturillo; courtesy of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative)
Above Gab Pangilinan for Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s ‘We Aren’t Kids Anymore’ (Photo: Kris Rocha; courtesy of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative)
Myke Salomon, Maronne Cruz and Gio Gahol for Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s ‘We Aren’t Kids Anymore’ (Photo: Kyle Venturillo; courtesy of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative)
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Because the piece lacks a traditional narrative, Zamora builds a different kind of storytelling—one formed by rhythm, emotional pacing and spatial interplay. “It needs to move, it needs to breathe,” he says—and the result is a staging that flows like memory: fragmented, associative, and at times contradictory. Movement director Jomelle Era ensures that transitions feel lived rather than staged; the cast does not so much exit scenes as drift between emotional states, making the invisible inner life visible.
The show features an outstanding ensemble of contemporary Filipino theatre talent—Gab Pangilinan, Maronne Cruz, Gio Gahol, Luigi Quesada, and Salomon—each embodying different emotional registers of the same evolving self. Rather than play discrete characters, they function as facets of a shared experience. Adulthood, here, is not a destination but a process, a series of improvisations made in the absence of a traditional script.
Above Joining director Rem Zamora is Jomelle Era as the show’s movement director (Photo: Kris Rocha; courtesy of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative)
Joining director Rem Zamora is Jomelle Era as the show’s movement director (Photo: Kris Rocha; courtesy of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative)
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Gasparini’s varied music—shifting between pop-inflected joy and piano-led sadness—does much of the dramaturgical lifting. Meaning accumulates not through plot but through juxtaposition and repetition. The songs operate as standalone vignettes, but heard together, they trace a kind of emotional map: of ambition deferred, friendships fraying, identities reshaped, and so on. Cruz’s rendition of We Aren’t Kids Anymore, What the Hell Am I Doing With My Life? and When I Go are standouts, unspooling vulnerability without melodrama.
The production’s visual and sonic landscape supports this emotional terrain with care. D Cortezano’s lighting design (who also serves as technical director) conjures mood with subtlety, while production designers Joey Mendoza and Hershee Tantiado provide a set that is spare but suggestive—an open canvas for the mind to wander through. At the centre of it all, visible to the audience, are the instrumentalists—the show’s beating heart—whose responsiveness lends each performance a sense of immediacy and breath. (Their entrance, even before the show began, was already met with well-deserved applause.)
Above Luigi Quesada for Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s ‘We Aren’t Kids Anymore’ (Photo: CJ Ochoa; courtesy of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative)
Above Maronne Cruz for Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s ‘We Aren’t Kids Anymore’ (Photo: Kris Rocha; courtesy of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative)
Luigi Quesada for Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s ‘We Aren’t Kids Anymore’ (Photo: CJ Ochoa; courtesy of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative)
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Above Myke Salomon, Luigi Quesada, Maronne Cruz, Gab Pangilinan and Gio Gahol for Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s ‘We Aren’t Kids Anymore’ (Photo: Kris Rocha; courtesy of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative)
Myke Salomon, Luigi Quesada, Maronne Cruz, Gab Pangilinan and Gio Gahol for Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s ‘We Aren’t Kids Anymore’ (Photo: Kris Rocha; courtesy of Barefoot Theatre Collaborative)
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Late in the show, a spoken-word poem by Keith White—delivered with quiet, sincere power by Quesada—precedes the hopeful ballad I’ll Stick Around. In this brief intersection of verse and song, the production offers one of its most memorable moments: a glimpse of stillness amid the churn.
What makes Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s staging so affecting is its refusal to neaten adulthood into something manageable. Something predictable. The musical doesn’t offer closure, only the echo of uncertainty: the distance between who we thought we’d become and who we are still becoming. That’s the emotional terrain this show dares to inhabit—the in-betweenness, the unfinishedness. And in doing so, it finds something remarkably honest.
Anyone with the misfortune—and privilege—of growing up will likely find themselves in this show, whether confused, conflicted or still trying. Which may be the most grown-up feeling of all.
We Aren’t Kids Anymore will be staged from May 2 to 25, 2025 at the Power Mac Center Spotlight Blackbox Theater in Circuit Makati.
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Angela Nicole Regis Guiral is the assistant digital editor of Tatler Philippines. She studied journalism and has since written features that look closely at how culture, lifestyle and social impact converge, while occasionally wandering into the worlds of style and travel.
