Let’s get two things perfectly clear about this musical: It’s not a Jose Mari Chan concert and it will not feature a performance by the superstar behind ‘Christmas In Our Hearts.’
The show is the latest in a growing list of OPM jukebox stage musical plays built around the catalog of popular Filipino artists. It follows the groundbreaking comedy Rak of Aegis, the Eraserheads friendship drama Ang Huling El Bimbo, the stage adaptation of romance movie classic One More Chance featuring the songs of Ben&Ben, and Parokya Ni Edgar’s psychedelic fantasia Buruguduystunstugudunstuy.
With Going Home to Christmas, the 79-year-old hitmaker, who has been writing songs for 55 years now, becomes the first solo Filipino artist to have his own musical. Why has it taken this long?
Turns out the idea for the show actually came to Carlos Perez-Rubio, husband of Repertory Philippines (REP) president and CEO Mindy Perez-Rubio and a good friend of Chan’s, way back in 2019. It would have been staged as early as 2020 had the pandemic not arrived and shut everything down.
I’m always grateful that my music has brought so much joy to a lot of people. I’m excited to see all the stories and elements that REP has woven together to add new meaning and life to these songs.”
Everyone then had to wait for the perfect time to start working in earnest on the project, which is also the veteran company’s first jukebox musical. That came late last year. It is now just a few weeks away from the show’s November 29 debut at the Carlos P Romulo Auditorium in RCBC Plaza, with performances running until December 15.
“I’m honored that REP, which is known for its decades of bringing quality theater to Filipino audiences, selected my body of work as their inspiration for this holiday production,” Chan says in the press notes for the show.
Although set during the holiday season rush, Going Home To Christmas will not feature a purely yuletide repertoire. All of Chan’s other big hits are in the musical’s 22-song soundtrack, including Beautiful Girl and Please Be Careful with My Heart and his very first recording, Afterglow. It will even serve up Hahanapin Ko, an OPM classic from 1980 that Chan wrote the music to.
This last song was a particular highlight among the performances the show’s cast gave as preview during the recent press conference. A yearning love ballad about a long-distance relationship, the tune, co-written with lyricist Jimmy Santiago, promises to be a showstopper as it encapsulates one of the show’s main themes—what Christmas means for Overseas Filipino Workers.
Marked by quivering passion, the elegant, heartfelt, soaring performance by theater veteran Carla Guevarra-Laforteza brought Chan to tears. At the end of the song, Chan gave Guevarra-Laforteza a standing ovation and a tight hug.
In the talkback that followed, Guevarra-Laforteza admitted that she was extremely honored but quite nervous performing the song for the first time in front of the OPM icon himself, a sentiment echoed by everyone in the cast, including the youngest members.
“I’m always grateful that my music has brought so much joy to a lot of people. I’m excited to see all the stories and elements that REP has woven together to add new meaning and life to these songs,” Chan says.
What REP has done is to look at what inspired Chan to write his songs, what makes his songs so appealing, and what people take away from his music.
“We don’t just honor Jose Mari Chan,” notes show director Jeremy Domingo, a veteran actor and director who has a career now spanning 34 years with over 120 shows under his belt. “We also honor what his music means to so many people. If you listen to the music, the joy of it is in the idealism. There’s an unjaded sense of romance, there’s a wide-eyed innocence.”
This inspired the show’s award-winning writers Luna Griño-Inocian, Robbie Guevara, and Joel Trinidad to craft a tapestry of intertwining stories in the vein of classic romance movie Love, Actually about Pinoy holidaymakers finding love, finding themselves, and finding the real essence of Christmas as they make their way home for the festive season.
The play boasts a huge gallery of 24 characters including a couple on their second honeymoon, a group of lovelorn best friends, and hardworking OFWs looking forward to being with their families.
At the very least, Going Home To Christmas, with musical arrangement by acclaimed and in-demand musical director Ejay Yatco who, this year alone, has worked on six hit musicals including Buruguduystunstugudunstuy and Tanghalang Pilipino’s historical piece Pingkian, promises a unique experience of Chan’s timeless music that nobody has ever had before. And if REP gets it perfectly right, the show just might become to theater what Christmas In Our Hearts is to music—an iconic holiday staple.
“The show makes us ask ourselves, ‘How can we love more?’” Domingo offers. “Using Jose Mari Chan as a template for being, his music is really transformational because it reminds us of the basic values of communication, of understanding, of empathy, of romance. And what I’ve realized is it’s subversive in these edgy times to go back to the basics, to the simplicity and the beauty of his music.”
The beauty of this production is the icon himself need not be physically present to make the show work. His music and the stories it has inspired are more than enough to give viewers what potentially will be a singular musical experience they will not forget soon after leaving the theater, right smack in the middle of the most wonderful time of the year. That’s something an ordinary concert won’t do.
For tickets to the December 7 matinee at 3:30pm, click on https://ticket2me.net/event/21926 or contact 09175112110.
