THERE IS nothing like a Christian musical for kids that can get any adult-with-a-heart clapping with glee and stomping her foot to the beat. Trumpets? ?NOAH, No Ordinary Aquatic Habitat? did just this.
I had braced myself for a Born-Again musical, one with a lot of preaching and conventional praise songs. Despite some of these, Trumpets still managed to surprise me, what with its wit and humor, and even more so with some political consciousness ? in a Christian musical?
In ?NOAH,? while God may have been speaking to Noah from the heavens, He is also quite political. When the Flood finally cleans up the world, the Narrator (Sam Concepcion) doesn?t just talk about the literal trash and decadence that was washed away, he also mentions corruption and politicking.
One of the antagonists who first appears onstage looks like President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, complete with the hairdo and the mole, as well as a placard that screams ?Vote Me!?
Which may be lost on the kids, but is quite a stark statement for half of the audience who are adults.
This and some of the musical?s wit ? when Noah asks if he can call God ?Bro? (after the soap opera ?May Bukas Pa?), and when the baby pig born in the ark is named Ba-Boy ?might not resonate with anyone who isn?t into Pinoy popular humor.
Rony Fortich?s music, while harking back to the praise song, also seems to be more attuned to pop and hip-hop.
The lyrics of director Jaime del Mundois sometimes out-of-sync with the light and fun tune ?NOAH? seems intent on creating.
But there is choreography and costumes, animal parade and breakdancing, to distract from this musical?s flaws. Because in a Trumpets musical, you must enter a bubble where the stories of the Bible are wonderful and true, where God is the center of all things, and where He appears as a good-looking teenage boy who can dance and sing, too!
Concepcion as the Narrator/God proves himself competent in carrying a show like ?NOAH,? and is a reminder that talent need not be in the form of Charice Pempengco (whom he beat in a singing contest cum reality show, and has since been deemed more ?successful?).
This is not to say his acting was anything extraordinary. The role requires him to be likeable onstage, with great English diction, nothing else.
This might have had everything to do with the genre of a musical for kids, but this doesn?t keep Carlo Orosa as Noah from being his fabulous actor-self. With material that?s mostly funny even in its seriousness, Orosa?s take on Noah is an interesting mix of frustration and resignation, kindness, but not gullibility.
As far as the singing is concerned, though, it is Sheila Francisco?s show. Playing Mrs. Noah, she just takes every song given her and runs away with it. In the ensemble numbers where she competes with the yet undisciplined voices of the actor-brothers who play her sons, she just soars. In her solo numbers, one can?t help but be overwhelmed by her talent.
When ?NOAH? ends, it does so with you in high spirits, not so much because you believe in God any more than you did when you entered the theater, but because there is nothing like the bubble of Christianity to remind you that sometimes life can be utterly, utterly simple. Talk about escaping the Flood.
