Who decides what Annie is worth in ‘Bongga Ka ’Day: The Annie Batungbakal Musical’?

The partnership with Aurora (Jackie Lou Blanco) could have answered the question. Two women of different classes, one with the name and the other with the talent, build a business together, and that relationship interests me more than anything else in the evening. Aurora spends a lot of time nagging Annie and then signs on as her partner so suddenly in the end. The closing fashion show should rescue the boutique, though the show never says how. A woman wrote this book and a man directed it, and the staging favours the spectacle of the door over the interior of the woman who walks through it. The rest of the plot perhaps leaks in the same way. Romer, for example, leaves in the second act to go back to his job as a flight attendant, and the story forgets him. 

Muhlach lands her steps and her marks, and her Tagalog sounds crisper than in her earlier screen work (Bad Genius: The Series), though she sometimes outruns her own lyrics. Blanco delivers Aurora’s barbs with the poise of a tita who knows she is the richest woman at the table, John Lapus times the zingers of the door-keeping Tarurit like a drummer and Estrada lets Burn’s feeling show in his slouch and his hands.

The dialogue crackles with the slang of the period and the jokes land, but the quieter lines where a woman might say what she wants and why disappear first.

The look of the show nearly redeems the gaps. Ohm David’s design for House of Pasion opens like a dollhouse and exposes its rooms to the audience, and when it turns, the boutique slides away and reveals Coco Banana and its grand staircase. John Batalla’s beams cut the haze into bright diamonds across the floor, and Bene Manaois’s projections supply colour that could belong to any city. Hershee Tantiado’s costumes carry the argument, since the sequins, kaftans and hippie fringe tell us who Annie wants to become before she opens her mouth. Vince Lim’s arrangements and Stephen Viñas’s choreography fill the stage with bodies moving in step.

Chris Millado directs for scale, building a bigger entrance, then a bigger reveal, then a bigger finish, and he moves the audience past each hole before it can ask a question.

See also: Ayala Land and Circuit Makati present ‘The Nutcracker’ at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater

The “it” factor lives in the Coco Banana sequence, where the mirror ball turns splendidly, the staircase fills with dancers and the 1979 waiting outside the doors falls away. The theatre sang (and some even danced) along without anyone asking.

Annie reached the club and the show ended, and what she wanted and what she paid for it stayed outside with the queue.

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