the weekend update

my weekend this week turned out to be the most activity-packed of them all. it all started with watching the tony award winning musical "into the woods" at the music museum on saturday night with my brother, richie and karts. originally performed by an all star cast headed by the great bernadette peters, the philippine production casted theater stars like menchu lauchengco-yulo, jamie wilson, lyn sherman, and michael williams.

ever since i saw this musical way back when i was in high school on betamax (o di ba!!! betaMAX!! it's so retro!), it has been one of my favorites. i loved the songs, the singing, the acting and of course the story. if i were able to have the chance to actually see a musical done live in broadway, this would be one of them. the local production was done by the theater company owned by monique wilson.

to start things off, we got to the venue rather late despite leaving a full 2 hours before the show. traffic, it slipped my mind, on a saturday is terrible in the metro. add to that that we were heading towards greenhills and that it was christmas MADNESS season. needless to say, we missed a good portion of the first part of the show (where the witch raps about her story) and had to sit at the back till the intermission. o well, at least we were finally inside.

having seen the performance of the original cast, i could not help myself but make some critiques and also in the process, sing along, of course! the play was generally good. the performances were great by some, not so great by the others, and some, well, i wonder what the HELL they were doing there in the first place, second place? there were a lot of comical lines in the play, some that are truly ingenious but unfortunately, due to poor delivery, were not properly conveyed to the audience. the story came through rather clear though, despite a lot of limitations as far as production design is concerned, which i guess is what matters the most. there is still more to pick on, but i choose to just let it go and enjoy the fact that i at least got to experience a bit of my childhood again through the efforts of these wonderful people. (it has to be said though and i can't let it go, that i sincerely feel that i could have played the witch's role FAR better... sorry. i just had to get it out of my system).

sunday came by and after church, my brother brought me to mall of asia, SM's gargantuan megacomplex, to walk around and watch a movie. the movie we decided to see was "hitman". despite having been directed by someone i have never heard of before and the roles performed by actors who seemed to have popped out of no where, the movie turned out to be not so bad. well, of course that wouldn't mean i have nothing to say about it. the plot just wasn't that original, despite it being based on the video game of the same name. the movie to me just felt too "bourne identity" wannabe. the acting was something else as well. timothy olyphant was very stiff, as in cadaver stiff. a little grace would have made his character a bit sexier. you know, ur bald, ur buff, u carry a BIG gun, the least u cud do is make ppl forget James Bond exists for a few seconds and wish you were real! there's a lot of mystery that surrounds agent 47 (or 49, i forget which number he was) but that mystery never got translated through the screen, much more, the curiosity stirred up in the audience. bad acting i suppose. all the other characters in the movie, i'm afraid suffered from the same bad-acting disease. it wasn't really amateur acting, but more like over-kill acting. my brother said the same thing about tim curry once. i guess that's why he's only good when doing voices for cartoons. i have a feeling, i'l see these ppl's names on the cast of cartoon voices soon as well.

speaking of cartoons, i also got to see "enchanted". now, this is the feel-good movie to see if you want to, well, feel good. i was supposed to watch this yesterday but didn't get to the theaters on time. i instead got to see it this afternoon with my friend, ian, whose visiting from toronto. this movie was nice!! the story was great and the acting, brilliant. it's basically what Disney does best! there's nothing much to say about it except that it was a great movie to see!