Review: ‘Mabuhay ang Bagong Kasal’

There is a high bar to clear for UP Repertory Company’s season-ender production, “Mabuhay ang Bagong Kasal” (MBK). After all, the recent years have not seen a shortage of politically charged shows, no thanks to the return of Marcoses to power and the compounding pressing issues of the day that pervade the Filipino people.

Inasmuch as MBK attempted to showcase political issues, interspersed between a wedding-reception-turned-disaster, intertwined with a blushy hotel crew love story, the production attempted to implant all sorts of subjects that it ended up, much like what its poster depicts, chaotic and rowdy.

First off, the audience were welcomed by a sheepish emotional cheating scene between Greg and Sonia, whose reference of “moving on” smacked with Martial Law revisionism already seemed too trite and bland. Then, there’s the issue of the transport crisis which was awkwardly blamed for the tardiness of the wedding reception’s guests. It’s a nonsequitur, but for the purposes of comedy, it worked. The play’s lack of proper and sufficient world-building has dashed any hopes of the transport crisis being the one to blame for the wedding disaster.

Then, we turn to the staccato of the hotel crew love story which primarily tackled the issue of contractualization and unionism. No doubt, the two’s contradiction in holding a nuptial of their own is indeed sufficiently grounded on their measly wage, and lack of social benefits and security of tenure. MBK simply told the audience that it was illegal to form a labor union for contractuals (this isn’t actually true), but it fell short of telling in more detail how unionists are being slaughtered and maligned by the state—a gruesome prospect, should Greg and Sonia decide to be organized. By merely peppering the 10-year-old couple’s contradictions throughout the play, it seemed that their situation and the issues they faced were merely an afterthought for the production.

But what’s most disappointing in the production was its attempt to scatter narratives of the war on drugs throughout the play, as if the killings were a mere literary device to drive MBK’s story. At the backdrop of the wedding reception was an Oplan Tokhang operation nearby. This backdrop is more possible to the imagined realm, rather than the play’s overarching theme of a political satire-cum-realpolitik. It provided neither context-building nor closure to the supposed Tokhang ops nearby. In doing so, MBK may have inadvertently downplayed the issue of extrajudicial killings and impunity surrounding the state’s antinarcotics campaign. The victims of the said Tokhang remain nameless, and Sonia’s last-minute revelation that her cousin has fallen to the drug war didn’t help as well.

As an unabashedly progressive and militant theater company, our friends at the UP Repertory Company could’ve done better. MBK tried to convey too many things all at once, and in doing so, it conveyed little. The production could’ve been a perfect way to convey the meaning of all these societal shenanigans—how counterinsurgency, crackdown on dissent, transport crisis, drug war, local politics, wedding, and a love story would intertwine. These issues are, after all, connected to each other, in the body politic of the Marcos-Duterte tandem. The character could’ve been the driving force in melding the issues—and not the other way around. In this sense, MBK shied away from the grand narrative. It might as well be a reflection of our tumultuous times.

MBK ran as part of the UP Repertory Company’s 2023 season.