REVIEW: ‘La Voix Humaine / Boses’ attempts to blend opera and drag in a daring experiment

REVIEW: ‘La Voix Humaine / Boses’ attempts to blend opera and drag in a daring experiment

This twin bill meant to showcase the range of the human voice in expressing grief at love lost is an audacious attempt to combine opera with drag.

 

Only one with a long career of defying convention would bring two art forms together in a way that has not been seen in Manila. Director Anton Juan brings audiences opera and drag in one show–a combination of art forms that on the outset couldn’t be more different from each other.

The Human Voice

An air of gloom pervaded the red and white set as we audience members tiptoed inside what felt like a woman’s boudoir. At the very front is an old-fashioned telephone with an eerily long cord, the kind without any numbers where you need to speak to an operator to connect you to your party. Emptied bottles of wine and overturned containers of pills amidst the sea of cloth already tell the audience not to expect a happy ending. “La Voix Humaine” is Jean Cocteau’s tale of woe; the only thing prolonging Juliet’s life is a goodbye phone call from her Romeo. 

Francis Poulenc set the French text of the original Cocteau play to music in a one-woman opera, which soprano Kay Balajadia performed again (having sung the same opera before in 2016 and 2017). English surtitles were flashed above the set, allowing the audience to follow the story of a desperate woman on her last phone call with her lover, set to marry another tomorrow.

Balajadia’s Elle (an anonymous “She” in French) emphasized beauty of tone and line above demonstrating the fraying of her will to live, giving a moving (if a bit detached and cerebral) performance on the night we watched. The tessitura of the score fit Balajadia’s strong middle and low notes well, with the occasional soaring soprano high note on moments of extreme emotion. Balajadia never loses her composure; a proud lady to the last. 

Musical direction was superbly done by Arthur Espiritu, whose deep breaths and conducting ensured that the piano (played by Gabriel James Frias on preview night) seemed almost to be the duet partner of the solo soprano. At the line where Balajadia sings, “For a quarter of an hour, I’ve been lying,” I glanced at my watch and smiled to see that yes, it had indeed been fifteen minutes since the start of the opera, showcasing a remarkable fidelity to Poulenc’s score and tempo.

At the end of the opera, production assistants whipped off cloths and covered the grand piano, bringing in a barre bedecked with glitter and feathers. In a matter of minutes, we were brought squarely to the present, in the dressing room of a drag performer.

Boses

Drag performer Brigiding Aricheta starts off the second performance “Boses” by lip synching the first few lines to the anthem of the unapologetic, “I Am What I Am” from La Cage aux Folles, but then starts singing on top of the track for real. The song ends, the spotlight turns off, and the queen removes her wig and outfit as she picks up her cell phone and dials her lover. 

This is how the second performance begins, a prolonged monologue translated by director Anton Juan from the original French into Filipino. It could be argued that it’s more of an adaptation than a translation, as places are changed from Marseilles to Vigan, an evening dinner to pares, and irritating wrong numbers from operators to Shopee delivery men (which elicited laughs from the audience, something we couldn’t do in the very serious opera that came before). 

Anton Juan also changes the ending. After hanging up on the phone call and seeming to die from an overdose of pills, Brigiding rises to her feet and laughs triumphantly as her iPhone rings and rings, unanswered. It was rather jarring how beautiful music would play in the background at times (Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise” on violin), with the iPhone ringtone layered over it simultaneously.

It finally ends with her throwing the phone to the audience. This rewritten ending posed a problem for this viewer, as it had the effect of seemingly negating the authenticity of the relationship Brigiding shared with the unheard caller. Was everything that came before a mere performance? 

We are all Human

In Juan’s hands, the same story told twice was a novel experience.

For this viewer, the first performance was moving, as Balajadia’s focus and intensity were unwavering, and her ending truly tragic. Brigiding, for this viewer, gave the impression that she was hitting certain poses like check marks in blocking, and did not have quite as emotional an effect, despite the immediacy of our understanding the Filipino words.

Despite the uneven emotional tenor of the twin bill, the memorable evening seemed like a meditation on how, across the divide of time and art forms, the human heart speaks with one voice, a desperate cry for connection in an increasingly disconnected world.

 

Tickets: P1,300.00
Show Dates: February 15, 16, 22, 23, 28, and March 1, 2025 (8:00 PM)
Venue: The Mirror Theatre Studio, 5th Floor of SJG Centre, Kalayaan Avenue, Makati
Running Time: 40 minutes (La Voix Humaine) and 30 minutes (Boses), with a 15 minute intermission in between
Company: MusicArtes, Inc.
Creatives: Francis Poulenc (Composer), Jean Cocteau (Libretto), Anton Juan (Director / Translator), Jay Glorioso Valencia (Producer), Arthur Espiritu (Music Director)
Cast: Kay Balajadia (Elle), Brigiding, Rudolf Golez / Gabriel James Frias (Piano)