The principal cast of Last Dance: Hubo’t Hubad . Image courtesy of the production. Last Dance: Hubo’t Hubad could have been staged in a theater. It is better that it was not. I watched the 3 PM press preview of Last Dance: Hubo’t Hubad on September 28, 2026 at Halxyon Club in Poblacion, Makati. Staging the play inside an actual nightclub immediately gives it something a conventional theater would have had to recreate. The compact stage, club lighting, tight spaces and nightlife atmosphere already belong to the world of the story. The play first shows the men at work, dancing and selling the fantasy expected from them in a male revue bar. It eventually leaves the club stage for a practically rundown communal dressing room, where most of the story stays. Attention moves with it, from what these men present to customers to everything they carry backstage. The work behind the fantasy Stories about men in this kind of work could easily be sensationalized, romanticized or ...

PETA brings Mga Kuwento ni Lola Basyang at iba pa… back to the stage for a new generation. Photo courtesy of PETA. PETA’s Mga Kuwento ni Lola Basyang at iba pa… is back at the PETA Theater Center in Quezon City from September 21 to 30, 2026 , bringing together two stories by Severino Reyes, a new story by J-mee Katanyag, and a refreshed production aimed at children growing up in a very different media landscape. Very limited public tickets range from ₱1,000 to ₱1,800, with a longer run already planned for February 2027. Lola Basyang has been around long enough to outlive several ways of telling a story. She began in the pages of Liwayway , then moved through film, comics, radio, television, books, ballet, animation, and theater. PETA first staged Christine Bellen’s theatrical adaptation in 2005. Twenty-one years later, the company is opening the book again without pretending that the children listening today live in the same world. Old stories, new questio...

Gen G: GG na ’to! is the centerpiece of PETA and Move to Change Foundation’s Project GG. Photo courtesy of PETA. When I first wrote about PETA’s Gen G: GG na ’to! , the focus was on the choices audiences would make inside the play. Young people find themselves running a community in a flooded Philippines, and the audience helps decide what happens next. The production is also part of something that extends beyond its performances. Project GG: Game Changers for Good Governance is a youth-centered theater and civic participation campaign from the Philippine Educational Theater Association and Move to Change Foundation, Inc. Alongside Gen G , it brings together workshops, learning activities, storytelling, and community conversations. PETA describes its aim as giving young people opportunities to practice participation through listening, asking questions, making decisions, and working with others. The distinction is useful: Gen G is the play, while Project G...

Tententenen runs at Teatro Marco in Maginhawa, Quezon City, this October. Official artwork courtesy of Teatro Marco. A Reddit rumor is threatening Miss Bu’s dream wedding. As the head of Bubu Beauty Company, the top beauty brand on the fictional “TukTok” Shop, she has a business at stake, too. Her team has to save the celebration without losing the brand. Tententenen , written and directed by Mark Ghosn , brings that crisis to Teatro Marco in Maginhawa, Quezon City, from October 10 to 25, 2026 . The new Filipino comedy draws on memes, liveselling, fandoms, and blind items, with characters including an underwear liveseller and a high-waist-loving dancer. “Sabi nga nila, mahirap i-explain ang humor natin sa iba, isang word o expression lang, gets na natin agad ang isa’t isa,” says Ghosn. He wants the play to pay tribute to those shared references and preserve something of what Filipinos found funny in 2026. Who is in Tententenen? Janine Lloce plays Miss ...

Update, September 14, 2026: The official Puregold Teatro Panalo application form is no longer accepting entries. The original deadline was September 11, 2026, at 11:59 PM. This article preserves the original call for the planned 2027 festival. The original announcement called for 12 one-act works: eight straight plays and four musicals. It offered each selected playwright a ₱100,000 fee and full production support, including cast and crew fees. The festival was planned for February to March 2027, with no venue named in that announcement. Who could submit Amateur and professional playwrights aged 18 and above could submit. The call welcomed comedy, drama, experimental work, musical theater, and other approaches. The call accepted scripts in English or any Filipino language. Regional-language entries required an English translation. Each playwright could submit up to two entries, with only one work per applicant eligible for selection. Selection ...

PETA is putting young people in charge of a flooded Philippines and asking the audience to help decide what happens next. That is the setup of Gen G: GG na ’to! , a new interactive production from the Philippine Educational Theater Association and Move to Change Foundation, Inc. Set in an alternate Philippines in 2028, floodwaters overwhelm the country and young people end up in temporary communities called Balangay Gen Zones. The adults promise to return, but they don’t — so the young people have to figure out how to run the Balangay themselves: who gets welcomed, what matters when resources run low, and what kind of community they want to build. The audience gets involved in those decisions too. Gen G uses voting, negotiation, and other forms of participation to influence what happens onstage. Co-playwright Jhudiel Sosa describes one of its starting ideas as a “decision-based game”: you choose, the story responds, and then you deal with what that choi...

I went to Halxyon Club in Poblacion on August 27 for the press conference of Last Dance: Hubo’t Hubad , and the obvious thing to talk about would be the bodies. The production makes no effort to hide them. Five attractive men, shirtless key visuals, harnesses, a male revue bar, an 18+ advisory, and partial and full nudity are all part of what is being sold. Even the title tells you exactly where your eyes are supposed to go first. But after listening to the cast together and then speaking with each of them more closely, I came away thinking the bodies may actually be the easiest part of this show to understand. Written and directed by Jojo Urquico, Last Dance follows five performers inside the dressing room of a struggling male revue bar on what may be their final night. There is a storm outside, the possibility of a police raid, and five men carrying their own dreams, relationships, fears and compromises into one room. It also opens the door to som...

Image supplied by Puregold. There are plenty of calls for scripts. There are fewer that say, plainly, what happens if your script is chosen. Puregold Teatro Panalo has laid out its offer: 12 original Filipino one-act plays and musicals will be selected for production, with each playwright receiving Php 100,000. The writers will also enter a development program led by Wishbone Collective, Inc., with dramaturgical guidance, production support, and a live staging. For playwrights, that is the detail worth pausing over. A script can be finished and still remain stuck in the folder where it was saved. A festival cannot solve every problem surrounding new writing, but a production commitment, a paid development process, and an audience give a writer more to work with than exposure alone. What Puregold Teatro Panalo is offering Presented by Puregold and produced and organized by Wishbone Collective, Teatro Panalo is an inaugural festival for original one-act straight plays an...

Mapanakit: Mga Dulang Bittersweet brings YPC Stage’s Biñan-born production to KAL-IBG Theater in UP Diliman beginning July 25, 2026. Photo courtesy of YPC Stage. Metro Manila gets a lot of the theater spotlight by default, sometimes too much. So when a homegrown production from Biñan makes its way to UP Diliman, the more interesting question is not just “what is the show?” but “what kind of theater life is trying to be seen?” That is the context around Mapanakit: Mga Dulang Bittersweet , YPC Stage’s collection of three one-act plays written by Eljay Castro Deldoc and directed by BJ Borja. YPC Stage, a theater group from Biñan, Laguna, is bringing Mapanakit to KAL-IBG Theater in UP Diliman, Quezon City, beginning July 25, 2026. The production is described as Biñan’s first homegrown theater production to be staged outside city borders, following a community run in December 2025. For YPC Stage, the UP Diliman staging is being framed not only as a production run, b...