October 17, 2026
From her humble beginnings as the daughter of a fish vendor, Betty a.k.a. Miss Bu (Janine Lloce) is the CEO of Bubu Beauty Company on the Tuktok app. Board member Atty. Dick (JP Ortiz) and marketing guru Mama J (Yan-Yan Gervero) wanted to boost the sales of Ms. Bu's products in her upcoming 6.6 Live Selling event by inviting Ms. Bu's fan club president Trixie (Abby Reynes) and hunky underwear seller Tom Rodrigo (Rem delos Reyes) as guests.
Newly-hired marketing assistant Cindy (Hannah Salvan) idolized Mama J as a pillar in the industry. However, she soon saw how unscrupulous his gimmicks were from behind the scenes. He saw nothing wrong about abruptly cutting off the segment of Ms. Bu's BFF Trisha (Joni Gee) from the live show. He scoffed at Cindy's promotional ideas as silly and low class, but never acknowledged her efforts when they actually worked.
This new play was the first full-length play written and directed by Filipino spoken-word artist Mark Ghosn. Ghosn and his group had been doing "Ampalaya Monologues" since 2015, so this one was a very big step up for them. Ghosn had personally experienced going viral with his online content, and had once worked in the marketing team of a company. This insider-view made him the ideal creative to come up with the exposé aspect of this play.
The cast and crew behind this play is very Gen Z (and young Millennial), so the style, language and humor Ghosn used in writing his script reflected their high-speed culture very much. I have to admit that I am not exactly the target audience of this material. A good percentage of the Tiktok live-selling jargon and online influencer references went right over my head. Don't get me wrong, there were jokes that I did get, and they were very funny.
Since this is the first show I had seen from this company, I did not know any of the young cast. It did seem that the other people in the audience already knew them well from the previous shows. They were very much into the satirical nature of their play, and were gamely giving it their all with their over-the-top performances, especially Janine Lloce as Ms. Bu and JP Ortiz as Atty. Dick, who never broke character even as their scenes got chaotic.
***********
TENTENENEN runs from October 10 to 25, 2026 at the black box studio of Teatro Marco, located on the third floor of #65 Maginhawa St, Diliman, Quezon City. The show runs for almost 2 hours without an intermission. Tickets are selling at P999 each, at Ticket2Me.
No comments:
Post a Comment