LOS ANGELES?AMID HIS EXhilaration on being chosen as a finalist in the ?Oscar Designer Challenge? last month, Alan del Rosario was curious about the coming ?Divas 4 Divas? concert in LA. He asked if we were attending the show starring four of the Philippines? best performers: Kuh Ledesma, Zsazsa Padilla, Pops Fernandez and Regine Velasquez.

Alan?s curiosity about the LA stop of the show that packed the Araneta Coliseum last December augurs well for Starmedia Entertainment, which is presenting the concert on Saturday, March 28, 7:30 p.m. at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. Another gauge that the concert may be a huge hit was a sense of extra excitement and anticipation in the air at the press conference last Wednesday evening at the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood.

The Pop Diva, Divine Diva, Concert Queen and Asia?s Songbird appeared more like chummy former college classmates as they sat before a table on the stage. Jokes flew fast among them as they answered questions from the Filipino-American press.

Kuh, clad in black, is still very much the elegant stunner she has always been. Zsazsa is the sexy siren in the bunch. Pops comes across as the friendly one, as cited by her fellow divas.

Regine may earn another title, Funny Diva, if she keeps being as amusing as she was at the press con moderated by Vic ?Teng? Perez and Miss Body Language-turned-dentist Frieda Fonda Brookshire (with Starmedia?s statuesque Anna Puno?she could be Concert Impresario Diva?as the evening?s gracious host). Regine has perfect comic timing, dishing her quips in a winning droll manner. At one point, she said she stars in the drama series ?Totoy Bato.? She quipped, ?Ako ho yung bato.? Then she deadpanned, ?It?s a hard role.?

Dolphy?s funny bone may have also rubbed off on Zsazsa and turned her into another Funny Diva contender. When a reporter asked why Lani Misalucha was not included to make ?Five Divas,? Zsazsa joked that Kuh and Lani will have their own concert??Kuh-Lani.?

Midway through the press con, we wanted either Regine to just stand up and keep delivering her hilarious one-line bon mots or all four of them to stand up and sing. That didn?t happen since the ladies had more things to do like pose with the show?s sponsors for pictures. For many Pinoys in LA, the place to be next Saturday is the Pasadena Civic Auditorium where the divas are expected to display vocal pyrotechnics and, we hope, funny banter, in between their numbers. More information about the show is available on www.starmediaentertainment.com.

Feeling homesick

?Some things have been updated since we last did it but, never fear, fellow Pinoys, the Filipina character is still in it.?

That?s Filipino-American actress Marie-France Arcilla, buoyant about ?Working,? the musical mounted in Florida last year and playing at the revered Old Globe in San Diego, California.

We wrote last June that when Marie-France (we like to kid that she?s a stage diva-in-the-making) was in Florida rehearsing for the restaging of ?Working??which earned several Tony nominations on its Broadway premiere in 1978 ?she was surprised with a brand new song, with Filipino lyrics to boot, for her to sing. Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose own musical ?In the Heights? went on to win four Tonys last year, was tapped to add that new song and another tune. A reader who requested anonymity wrote PDI, saying a Filipino, Aileen Payumo, helped Lin-Manuel write the Filipino lyrics.

?Nangulila ako bigla!? we quoted Marie-France as saying about this song in which she portrays a Filipino mother singing to her daughter who?s far away. The mother is one of the various characters that Marie-France and her cast mates?Donna Lynne Champlin, Wayne Duvall, Danielle Lee Greaves, Nehal Joshi and Adam Monley?essay throughout ?Working,? which is about the joys and frustrations of various workers, from immigrants to flight attendants.

Great feedback

Nina Faso and Stephen Schwartz, the award-winning composer behind such musicals as ?Wicked,? ?Pippin? and ?Godspell,? adapted ?Working? from the best-selling book by Pulitzer Prize winner Studs Terkel and asked several songwriters, including folk-rock legend James Taylor, to contribute songs.

As she did in the Asolo Repertory Theater production in Sarasota, Florida, Marie-France (who began her performing career in Manila) is earning favorable notices in the current San Diego incarnation of ?Working.?

Variety?s Bob Verini, in his review, praised the musical and cited several in the cast, including Marie-France: ?At the risk of violating the evening?s democratic spirit by singling anyone out, it?s only right to mention a few Employees of the Month: Nehal Joshi, dazzling in Miranda?s new near-rap about food deliveries; Duvall?s unbearably moving Joe the retiree; and Marie-France Arcilla?s devastated mill hand.?

Los Angeles Times? Charles McNulty declared: ?The women in the cast (Marie-France Arcilla, Danielle Lee Greaves and Donna Lynne Champlin) eclipse the men, though Wayne Duvall makes a strong showing as a retiree grappling with tedium and an ironworker who knows he?s part of a ?dying breed.??

Marie-France, who appeared in plays in New York where she lives, shared with us via e-mail her excitement about being in the West Coast: ?The first thing that comes to mind is how happy I am to be doing this show again on so many levels: I love the show itself. I fiercely love the people that I am working with and I love that I am in San Diego while it is 30 degrees in New York City. I?ve already found my local Seafood City (a Filipino supermarket chain) and had dinuguan, bibingka, Chickenjoy, and buchi from Chowking. And lanzones (!) in the freezer section. Oh, and balut. Mmm!?

About the show, which opened last March 12, she added: ?We had a great opening night?both Lin-Manuel Miranda and Stephen Schwartz were there. We are currently playing to great houses. I think the show is so much more relevant now given the current economic climate. A lot of what the characters say in the show about their jobs and how they feel about them really hits home, more so than it did a year ago in Florida.?

Fellow kababayans in Southern California, catch Marie-France while she?s on our coast with ?Working.? More information about the musical which runs through April 12 is on www.theoldglobe.org.

E-mail the columnist at rvnepales_5585@yahoo.com and read his blog, ?The Nepales Report,? on http://blogs.inquirer.net/nepalesreport.