Theater Review: Love and comedy in 'They’re Playing Our Song' 

The point of course is some comedy, but the moment you hear Lorenz Martinez (Vernon Gersch) sing “Falling” in the first 20 minutes of this musical, it will be difficult not to get carried away. Or to keep from being awed, really. 

 

At some point you will find yourself looking at Nikki Gil (Sonia Walsk), who’s hamming it up for the audience,  to Gersch’s back turned, playing the piano. But the earnestness in Martinez’s voice, working with the honesty that comes from Vernon’s having put music to lyrics not his own, is one to upstage the comedy of this moment.   

To have kicked it off on such a high note, is to say that this production of “They’re Playing Our Song” was setting itself up for an amount of failure. 

 

None of the funnies are lost here, don’t get me wrong. Sonia and Vernon after all are tried and tested characters that feed off each other: eccentric versus straightforward, quirky versus serious, fun versus square. The tunes here are familiar, including those that aren’t love songs, and there is a sense that while we might know of how this story unfolds, what will hold us captive are these two characters. 

 

But that is to say that they must hold their own individually, their characters must make sense, quirky and eccentric, conservative and straight, included.

 

Unforgettable Gil

 

Gil’s Sonia is not so much unsuccessful, as it seems to be riddled with too much of Gil, and too little of the person she is portraying. I didn’t see her in “Legally Blonde,” but as the lead in “Sweet Charity” she seems to have held it together better. That might have been due to a clearer sense of the limits of Charity as a character, one who was naïve about love, and quite optimistic about the world. 

 

Sonia isn’t as simple, and there was a need to portray her to be as complex; creative streak and independence included. Sonia is a firecracker yes, and seemingly slaphappy too, but at the core of this character is the craziness that we expect of the more creative among us, the ones who live off that layer of frantic and confused, until the bundle of nerves becomes a self-contained fireball that can churn out lyrics like there’s no tomorrow. 

 

Gil’s Sonia meanwhile seems too. . .normal for comfort. Where the quirkiness is left to the clothes she wears and doesn’t seem to be based on anything deeper or larger, and where her thought process is rendered simple – even with those three other selves singing and dancing in her head. 

 

It doesn’t help that while Gil knocks it out of the ballpark for the more quiet and calm song numbers here, the moment the note is too low we can’t hear her, and the moment it requires some belting – well, she transforms from Sonia to Gil in seconds. As such, it is also her voice here that fails her, even when her singing is flawless. Sadly, it is flawless as Gil, and not as Sonia. 

 

Ah, but her “If He Really Knew Me” was the perfectly poignant moment for Sonia’s high-strung self. And her “I Still Believe In Love” was en pointe, where the belting finally sounded like Sonia, all pained. For those two things, Gil is worth seeing here.

 

Vernon’s presence

 

It is Martinez who is able to be Vernon through and through here, from that moment you hear him sing “I’m afraid to fly” to the last scene where he asks to get back together with Sonia.  It would seem that it worked in favor of Martinez that he isn’t one to be cast as lead in a love story and, as such, he doesn’t have the baggage of being a self-conscious-leading-man. So, ultimately he just became Vernon: serious and punctual and organized, but also ill-prepared for a girl like Sonia, who knocks him off balance. 

 

But this Vernon’s success also happens because of the consistent voice and tone that Martinez uses for the character, where you completely forget that the last time you saw him was as Snoopy, dancing and singing with some swagger on that same stage. There is a stability in Martinez’s Vernon, a weight in his step, a confidence that is about knowing what he can do, and how he wants things done. And yet it also makes sense when he admits to insecurity, and tells Sonia of the limits of his understanding of her ways: Vernon becomes frustrated with the other, and yet the frustration is so obviously borne of his inability at dealing with her eccentricities, including her kindness. 

 

Martinez makes this internal conflict of Vernon’s real, as he allows for a wholeness that Gil doesn’t quite do for Sonia. As such there is a sense of why Vernon does what he does; there is a rationale to his behavior, which is to say his irrationalities are better contextualized, the three versions of himself in his head included. It goes without saying that Martinez also has the comedy down pat, even as he lets go of his usual swagger, and lets Vernon’s kind of controlled creative craziness happen on stage. 

 

This is Martinez’s show. We will just be too distracted by Gil’s star power to see it. 

 

Comedy, ultimately

 

It also seems like the male trio in Vernon’s head did better than the female trio in Sonia’s, where the former is more dynamic and their diversity is clearer. Reb Atadero as the smallest voice in his head, and James Spacey as the biggest one, is funny by default; it helps too that Atadero is just in a world all his own here, doing the dance moves infinitely better than the rest of the ensemble. His character works because we imagine this version of ourselves actually existing – that is, that part of us that will do crazy dancing and get lost in the music. 

 

Which you will also be able to do as audience for “They’re Playing Our Song,” where the more fun numbers are familiar enough to be enjoyable, and where the sadder songs are beautiful enough to be awed by. That set adds to the enjoyment, with a rotating platform on which much of the set changes happen, and which both Sonia and Vernon navigate quite well. Now the voices in their heads meanwhile, tend to cramp this space up, and it becomes obvious that there are too many people on the platform as it starts to wiggle as they dance – not a good thing. 

 

The choreography as such could do better, especially for the two sets of trios. There is nothing memorable about what they do really, and there is no sense of whether the difference within each trio is even supposed to be there. Yet, they are certainly fodder for comedy, and in that sense it is the mere timing of their entrances that work – imagine how much funnier it would be were they doing more than merely being present.

 

Which is what both Martinez and Gil do here, regardless. It is obvious that Gil worked hard at making this character distinct from the ones she’s played before – all fun and happy women as these are – but maybe the task has to involve seeing how deeply connected to creativity Sonia’s craziness is, and work from there. Martinez meanwhile, is the one person on that stage who isn’t drowned out by the music of 9:PO, and might lay claim to being the one who sings with them, performing on that stage and holding his own. 

 

For both Martinez and 9:PO, “They’re Playing Our Song” is worth your money. And really, if you’ve got the ability to laugh at Valentine’s season and say it’s single-awareness week? Then this is the play you should see. -- KDM, GMA News

 

“They’re Playing Our Song” is directed by Robbie Guevara for 9Works Theatrical with set by Mio Infante. The book is by Neil Simon, music by Marvin Hamlisch, and lyrics by Carol Bayer Sager. This production runs until March 3 2013, at the RCBC Plaza in Makati.  

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Katrina Stuart Santiago writes the essay in its various permutations, from pop culture criticism to art reviews, scholarly papers to creative non-fiction, all always and necessarily bound by Third World Philippines, its tragedies and successes, even more so its silences. She blogs at radikalchick.com. The views expressed in this article are solely her own.