Ma-Buhay! The Road To Rainbow Stage

Ma-Buhay! A New Musical—Tom Hendry Warehouse

This was complete amateur hour—and by that, I don’t mean the show. The show was a slick, well-oiled
machine. By amateur hour, I’m talking about the audience, which was a disgrace. I know there were a lot of friends and family out the support the actors but there are Fringe rules—there aren’t many, but it seems like every one of them was broken today.

Before I get into that, are the rules about late entry relaxed this year? It seems like every second show, someone arrives after the show already started. Today, someone entered 15 minutes after opening. The first thing they did after sitting down in front of me was turn on their phone and start video recording. I know for a fact they were not part of the company’s media team because my vantage was not a desirable one. After 15 solid minutes of flipping between video and texting, I told her to put her phone away, and thankfully she obliged. My voice carried far enough to catch the person in front of her doing the same thing, but not the 10 other people in the theatre.

Finally: if you bring young children to an adult show, be prepared for them to get bored. And when
they get bored enough to whine continuously, it’s time for you to leave. I was half a theatre away and I could hear the whining clear as day—I can imagine what the people proximal to them thought.

Now, onto the show. As I already said, it was well-presented, well-rehearsed and well-executed, but I feel that it’s somewhat out of place. To me, Fringe is a platform for performances that are so far off Broadway, they’re outside the “fringes” of New York. Being on Rainbow Stage is about as mainstream as it gets. I don’t want to see The Fringe Festival become a farm team and practice market for big theatre. I understand this is not the first time the Fringe stage has been used for as a workshop project, but this is not the trend I hope to see. This is a spot that a small company could have used to showcase their talent. Ma Buhay’s showcase is yet to come—on a much bigger stage.

Perhaps a better venue for this show would have been Folklorama. The premise was pitched as a
talent show but what’s unsaid is that it’s a show put on entirely by Filipino people, promoting and celebrating the culture and heritage, which is exactly the mandate of Folklorama.

Ray Yuen