chronicles of the glass slipper.

(The piece below was chosen as the winner of the “Cinderella: The Musical” online review-writing contest sponsored by the Philippine Daily Inquirer, with the ultimate arbiter being no less than Lea Salonga herself. Thanks, Lea!)

“It was midnight when I saw the pair of shoes, making the fairy tale association easier: the ball gown and the horse-drawn carriages would revert to its origins as cinder rags, squash and rodents but the glass slippers would remain irreversible.”

- Wilfredo Pascual Jr., “Devotion” -

Part I: The Encounter (Almost)

“Look! It’s Lea!”

I almost choked on the ice-cold beverage I was lazily sipping when I heard my mom’s excited voice, which drew my attention to a gritty halt. Heeding warnings that a Sunday night turnout would be ruthlessly massive, we arrived at least two hours early before the scheduled 8 pm run of Cinderella at the CCP, giving us the pleasure of time to dawdle at nearby Harbour Square. There, seated with my back facing the window, I whirled around just in time to see a young woman in shades and stilettos steadily approaching the café we were in. My mind was racing. Almost instinctively, I ran a quick initial profile of the image:

Assessment # 1: Too young.

Assessment # 2: Too short.

Assessment # 3: Too much brown hair.

Final verdict: Not Lea.

“Surely not Lea,” I casually remarked, albeit a tad disappointed. “Only a look-alike.”

Yes, it couldn’t have been Lea. It was only someone walking along with a man named Robert Chien who was carrying an adorable toddler named Nicole and accompanied by what I presume was the nanny in white. Alas that someone – fresh from her matinee show – promptly took a left turn, entered the next restaurant, and disappeared out of sight.

“Did we enter the wrong place?”

Bam.

Part II: Once Upon A Time

The first time Lea brought the house down during her packed gig in Iloilo last January, I was stuck with medical school here in Manila. When she held her two-night “My Life On Stage” concert last May, I was back home in Iloilo for summer vacation. Opposite ends of a pole? Not quite. There’s something about her I find interesting:

She was a former pre-medical student who peerlessly rose to unparalleled stardom on Broadway.

I, on the other hand, am a medical student who had always fancied being on Broadway.

Before Broadway, there were fairy tales. I was a certified Disney baby as a child, and Cinderella was one of those classic tales I got acquainted with early on. One eventually outgrows that phase, however, and I came to realize that even as the plot remained timeless, the film fell short of everything else – despicable villains, memorable scenes, heart-wrenching songs – heck, the heroine only got through in the end because she happened to have a frumpy, overweight, wand-wielding pixie for a godmother!

I reckoned that if it were not for the chance to see Lea live, Cinderella might live up to its silver screen counterpart and bore me to death with its trite, hackneyed once-upon-a-times and happily-ever-afters.

Boy, was I wrong.

Never see a play merely because of an actor.

And never judge a play before you’ve even seen it.

Part III: Music And Magic

The first scene of Cinderella tells you nothing about glass slippers. The curtain rises and the storyline unfolds with Cindy wearily scrubbing floors in a supposedly drab and dingy room, simultaneously breaking into sweat and song. With a wave of the maestro’s enduring baton, luxuriant notes gushed out like concentric ripples across the river-of-an-audience, keeping us gripped to our seats in an element of enthralled, awestruck, whatever you term it. The magic has begun.

As a theater enthusiast, it amazes me how one can trace musicals back to their composers. Andrew Lloyd Webber, for instance, relies on the stark grandiosity of his creations. Sondheim, on the other hand, is heavily thematic. Cinderella easily identifies with Rodgers and Hammerstein through and through – the trademark light and easy type – lush, romantic and almost bordering on pretty (as what Julie Andrews calls it) but never losing verve and vibrancy.

Credit the vitality of this production to the energetic members of the company, who are in a league of their own. Charlie Parker was effectively effervescent as the “frumpy, overweight, wand-wielding pixie”, playfully romping and prancing about the stage like a schoolgirl on extended vacation. Julia Cook was all raspy and stormy as the scheming stepmother, while stepsisters Jen Bechter and Brandy Zarle successfully kept our stomachs sore from guffaws while demonstrating how it is to have an IQ 50 points lower than the normal population. Peter Saide – the tragically happy Prince – may get a bit too slushy at times, but he generally delivered his lines with just the right punch. And of course, there was Lea herself with her constant switching from tragic girl to resplendent royalty, from underdog to celebrity – in perhaps a little more than a twinkle of an eye.

The audience, incidentally, was just as entertaining.

A kid kept on giggling every time Cinderella and the Prince sidled up for a short smooch. A few meters away, some middle-aged woman roared away without brakes every time the stepsisters cracked up an especially comedic stunt. The mother-daughter pair beside me, meanwhile, animatedly discussed the veracity of Lea’s character after witnessing her quick, instant costume changes.

“No way! That’s not Lea! No one can dress up that fast!”

“Yes, dear – that’s her – she’s just really fast!”  

Though I must admit these surreptitious ad hoc scenes provided an amusing distraction, I can’t help agreeing that I, too, am yet to see someone who can expertly don a ‘do-and-gown’ in the span of a few seconds. The question thus arose: Just how believable are fairy tales?

Part IV: Reality Bites

My epiphany arrived in the form of a well-written script.

Now I particularly relish plays and musicals with witty scripts – the types that exude charm and sophistication with a single line, a pun, a repartee. While Cinderella certainly did not compare with the hair-raising terror of Phantom Of The Opera, the curdling patriotism of Les Misérables, or the subtle fragility of Miss Saigon, it was in the dialogue that I derived much insight from – plus a bundle of hearty laughs.

Because that is precisely the challenge posed by Cinderella the musical: to defy the stereotypes and turn a proverbial fairy tale into a story in sync with the times. In this regard, The King (Jefferson Slinkard) in all his miserliness and cynicism stands out as the real hero of the show. Just when you thought things were hopelessly headed in the direction of dreamy-eyed and sickly-sweet, out he comes to save the day – unbuttoned pants and all – throwing in a fair bit of beer, inflation, and the Secret Service. Trust His Majesty to cook up something relevant and true-to-life as a crucial part of the recipe.

Of course, watching Cinderella meant that temporary two-hour escape from the outside world into the nooks and crannies of our erstwhile childhoods – something which we all crave for once in a while, and which can be therapeutic. In psychology, they call it regression: a reversion to an earlier, less “mature” state as an adaptive mechanism.

But the most important reason is also the reason why fairy tales like Cinderella exist in the first place. They’re there to remind us to keep believing. Specifically – to quote something cliché out of the musical – to believe that the impossible can be possible. When I slipped into the shoes of Herr Zeller (the diehard Nazi captain in “The Sound of Music”) way back in high school, I was plain dumbfounded on how to go about portraying a villain, a military dog at that, for the first time. With hard work and a bit of believing, however, impossible became possible, and I somehow pulled it off in the end.

Lea may have also felt the same way filling in the glass slippers of THE Julie Andrews, her idol. While she definitely has no problem navigating the raggedy-lass-cum-regal-princess role, it is a great deal to match (even attempt to surpass) an already recognized standard. Such a challenge must have loomed all the higher with the fact that you have the same piece of material on the palm of your hand for a straight grueling eight months. And you have to make sure it is always genuinely magical every night.

So, can one be a doctor and a Broadway star at the same time?

I’m not counting that one out.

Part V: Happily Ever After

The curtain finally rose for the last time, and the applause was expectedly thunderous. I was clapping hard for everyone onstage, for every single member of the cast who diligently underwent arduous daily rehearsals and unforgiving routines. Theater actors are the epitome of stamina, and confronted with the additional task of having to traverse dimensions and generations, the working pillars behind Cinderella appeared to have done a good job.

Just to be curious, how do they do it?

Lea herself let out the secret in one of her “backstories”. “Pretend it’s the first show,” she quips. An actor must always look for something new at his/her “own little corner” and share it with the rest of the world.

Ironically, the same rule applies to us audience members.

If you don’t like fairy tales to begin with, pretend you’re a child. Pretend it’s the first time. And if you have come to grown tired of them, pretend it’s not just the same old story, but a new one you have come to love again and again. Because at some point in our lives, we are going to need fairy tales.

Not just the dreary and the dreamy, half-wanting to escape the brusque reality.

Not just the wan and the weak, half-wishing to possess the strength of adversity.

On the contrary, it’s for the ordinary, faceless, nameless person out there – simply because fairy tales are for grownups too, simply because it wouldn’t hurt to have a little magic now and then. Keep it real, find your escape, but never stop believing – because who knows – you might just get to live happily every after.