Play Review - "Sandosenang Sapatos"

 

Tanghalang Pilipino opens its 27^th season (2013-2014) with “SandosenangSapatos”, the heart-warming story of the love between a father and a daughter which transcends even death.

“Tinay”, a former student of mine, texted me at around lunch time last July 14, Sunday, inviting me to watch “Sandosenang Sapatos” at the CCP. This was the same student who invited me to watch the staged reading “Jun Ispater” which was previously reviewed on this blog.

I arrived at the CCP around 15 minutes after the play began. I introduced myself as the guest of “Sequins”, which is Tinay’s role in this play. I was promptly given a ticket, signed in a sheet (listing down who is whose guest) and ushered into the theater. I was ushered into the Tanghalang Huseng Batute and seated on an upper seat on the balcony. The protective handrails kept obscuring my view of the action below.

According to the playbill that I bought, “Sapatos” is a children’s book written by multi-award winning author “Tito Doc” Luis Gatmaitan. The play’s libretto was written Layeta Bucoy and directed by Tuxqs Rutaquio, the same people who gave us “Jun Ispater”. The music was composed by Noel Cabangon, known for the song “Kanlungan” and Jed Balsamo.

A promotional picture for "Sandosenang Sapatos" featuring Susie and the Shoes. (Photo courtesy of Lhorvie Ann Nuevo on Facebook.)

Comparison between "Jun Ispater" and "Sandosenang Sapatos"
“Sandosenang Sapatos” stands in stark contrast with “Jun Ispater”. If "Ispater" was painted in dark colors of black and red, “Sapatos” is painted in cheery pastels. I instantly recognized the cast of “Ispater” in the play—instead of wearing black, they were now dressed in gaudy, colorful costumes. “Ispater” was staged at the smallish Tanghalang Amado Hernandez, which was more of a room than a theater. “Sapatos” is staged at Huseng Batute, which is small as far as theaters go but definitely bigger than the Amado Hernandez.

Stage Setting

The Huseng Batute is a “theater-in-the-round” (in this play's set-up), where the audience is seated in front and both side of the stage, but some of the audience is actually seated to the back of the stage. The stage was composed of a figure eight with two sloping platforms in the center of the circles. A trio—a piano player, a percussionist, and an acoustic guitar player—provided the superb music to the play.

Susie with the Shoes in dreamland. Note the audience seated "behind" the stage. (Photo courtesy of Carmela Manuel on Facebook.)

I entered just as “Susie”, the main character, was having a dream sequence. It turns out that the colorfully-dressed characters are the Shoes, who serve as the chorus in the play. (My student, clad in a golden brown outfit with Chun-Li style hair, plays a Shoe named “Sequins”.) The Shoes went around in rollerblades—which is hard considering that the stage was small and they had to sing, dance, and act. Hats off to the Shoes!

Characterization of the main character

Susie is a girl who was born without feet. Her dream was to have feet so that she can make her father’s dream come true—to have a daughter who is a ballerina. Every eve of her birthday, the Shoe Fairy would visit her in her dreams and give her a pair of feet and a pair of shoes so that she can dance for one whole night. Her father’s birthday was arriving but she has nothing to give him. She asks the Shoe Fairy if she can have feet for her father’s birthday but the Shoes tell her that she can only talk with the Shoe Fairy on the eve of her birthday. When she wakes up, she gives her father a music box with a dancing ballerina.

Trixie Esteban, who plays Susie, is a very adorable girl with a fair complexion and round cheeks. (She’s fourteen, according to “Sequins”.) Her voice has a certain purity and innocence in it—not the vaulting, crystalline voice of Charlotte Church (before she fell into the Dark Side)—but that of a young Sharon Cuneta (think of “Mr. DJ, may I have a request…?”). I think she does strain her voice a bit on the high notes but she pulls off her role very well. (I hope when she grows up, she'll have a voice like Hayley Westenra.)

Conflict and Resolution

Back to the play, it turns out that her father, a shoemaker, was sick and he eventually dies. (The lights flickered ominously signaling his death.) Susie sank into a pit of despair, not even wanting to talk with the Shoe Fairy on the eve of her birthday and to accept the pair of shoes. But it was revealed that the shoes were actually from her father, who appears to her in the dream. She was able to dance with her father the whole night—a scene that made me wipe tears from my eyes. 

Susie glazing in wonder at a dozen shoes floating above her. (Photo courtesy of Trixie Esteban on Facebook.)

When Suzie wakes up, her mother and older sister find a box in her father’s workshop containing a dozen shoe boxes—one for every year of her life. (The shoes were ingeniously rigged to a set of cables from the ceiling, creating a mobile.) The line between the waking world and dreamland becomes blurred when her father, the Shoe Fairy, and the Shoes appear and they launch in a song which says that love even conquers death.

Tinatawid ng pagmamahal ang panaginip
Sa mga sandaling akala mundo’y naiidlip
May isang pusong hindi mapakali
Upang pangarap ng minamahal ay tuparin.

Theological Reflection

In the Catechism of The Book of Common Prayer (1979) of the Episcopal Church USA, there is a question on praying for the dead:

Q. Why do we pray for the dead?
A. We pray for them, because we still hold them in our love, and because we trust that in God’s presence those who have chosen to serve him will grow in his love, until they see him as he is.

Protestants generally dismiss the concept of praying for the dead. But one of the most popular Protestant hymns, “For the Beauty of the Earth”, describes the “mystic harmony” of the church on earth and the church in heaven:

For the gift of human love,
brother, sister, parent, child,
Friends on earth, and friends above;
for all gentle thoughts and mild:
Lord of all, to thee we raise
this our hymn of grateful praise.

Conclusion
The jaded and the cynical among us may dismiss the play as playing on a child’s fleeting fantasy. Some social justice advocates may be up in arms, denouncing the social structures that discriminate “differently-abled” children. Heck, the feminists may even denounce the daughter for not overthrowing structures of patriarchy for reasons I can’t even imagine.

But it all boils down to seeing things in the eyes of a child. No wonder Jesus said, “Assuredly, I say unto you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). We have become so “grown-up” that we have forgotten to be a child; where the line between fantasy and reality is blurred and that there is nothing more reassuring than the love of a Father.

A YouTube video of the final song, "Tinatawid ng Pagmamahal ang Panaginip":