Romeo + Juliet (Broadway)

♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

Romeo (Kit Connor) is a Montague and Juliet (Rachel Zegler) is a Capulet. Those two families just do not mix, or else there will be conflict. And conflict there was, indeed. From the moment the two lovebirds set eyes on one another, it was love they felt, and they became inseparable since then, but in secret. Nobody could know about their budding relationship or else there will be trouble, but there is no hiding a secret for long. Juliet’s Nurse (Tommy Dorfman) can’t be supportive knowing the consequences. When the secret is revealed and people start getting wind of the situation, tensions run high leading to some deaths, like that of Mercutio (Gabby Beans) who is Romeo’s friend or Tybalt (Tommy Dorfman), Juliet’s cousin. In a world that is persistent in tearing them apart, will romance be enough of a deterrent for a happy relationship between star-crossed lovers of two feuding clans?

Cabaret (Broadway)

♣♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

The Emcee (Adam Lambert) of the Kit Kat Club welcomes us to Weimar era Berlin, where merrymaking and hedonism know no bounds. He introduces us to the girls and boys of the club but saves the best for last. Sally Bowles (Gabi Campo) is your stereotypical 20’s flapper, a cultural refugee from the British Isles who moves to Germany for a life of pleasure and penury. Soon to join the ranks is penniless American writer Clifford Bradshaw (Calvin Leon Smith) with whom she forms a platonic bond. Eventually they all end up under the roof of Fraulein Schneider (Bebe Neuwirth), a German spinster who relies on rent money for subsistence. Clifford makes ends meet by offering English lessons as well as doing errands for his friend Ernst (Henry Gottfried), a political upstart quickly rising within the ranks of the emerging Nazi party. As Hitler ascends into power, dynamics change and loyalties shift. Will it be a quickly passing tide or are they soon going to drown in a sea of prejudice?

Sunset Boulevard (Broadway)

♣♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

A dead man emerges from a body bag and takes us back to 1949. Armed with lofty Hollywood ambitions, Joe Gillis (Tom Francis) finds out the hard way that the entertainment industry is not for the faint of heart. Even so, he makes a pact with fellow writer Betty Schaefer (Sydney Jones) to write a screenplay together. Living in penury, he evades the agents trying to repossess his car due to late payments by driving into the garage of a dilapidated mansion along Sunset Boulevard which turns out to be the residence of washed-out has-been Norma Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger). The aging film star lives in solitude and is served unconditionally by her protective butler Max Von Meyerling (David Thaxton) whose unwavering support includes writing fake fan mail to her to make her feel that she is still relevant. When she finds out that Joe is a writer, her eyes light up and she takes him under her wing, asking him to edit a script she wrote for her comeback film.

Mcneal (Broadway)

♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

Jacob McNeal (Robert Downey Jr.) has had an enviable career publishing several novels and even winning a Pulitzer. The only award missing now is a Nobel prize for Literature. Arguing with his family doctor Sahra (Ruthie Ann Miles) about his alcohol intake and how this can lead to incurable stage 4 liver failure in three months if not controlled, he goes on a tirade about life, death, and being a writer when his phone suddenly rings with a call from a Swedish number. Confirming his win, he is confronted by his guilt, or lack thereof, of passing off his wife’s unpublished manuscript as his own as well as using the AI he has openly lashed out against to write his latest work. Add some drama from his estranged son Harlan (Rafi Gavron) as well as pressures from his agent Stephie (Andrea Martin), McNeal is on the brink of a nervous breakdown, but AI just won’t write a plausible death, a human concept it does not fully understand.

The Notebook (Broadway)

♣♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

Old man Noah (Dorian Harewood) checks into a care center facility but instead of undergoing physical therapy for his knees, he spends most of his time reading the contents of a notebook to Allie (Maryann Plunkett), an elderly woman with Alzheimer's who struggles to remember anything about her past. What the notebook contains is a love story between two teenagers Noah (Benji Santiago) and Allie (Anna Zavelson) who fall in love at first sight one summer but are kept apart by her parents who have a more viable prospect of marriage for her, not to mention plans for her future that does not involve a lumberjack’s son. Flash forward a decade later, Allie (Aisha Jackson) is engaged to be married to a wealthy lawyer while Noah (Ryan Vasquez) ends up in the newspaper in a feature of a house he built from the ground up, the house that he promised he would build for her.

Titanique (Broadway)

♣♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

A group of visitors arrive at the Titanic Museum and are welcomed by a guide who explains each item that they come across from the sunken ship. Their tour is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of a hooded figure who, upon removing her hood of trash bags, is revealed to be none other than Céline Dion (Dee Roscioli). Everybody is quick to recognize the My Heart Will Go On singer but nobody is ready for her claims that she was actually onboard the Titanic in 1776 when it sank to the bottom of the Atlantic. Her recollection, belted out through her string of Billboard Hits, introduces us to the love story of Jack Dawson (Michael Williams) and Rose Dewitt Bukater (Tess Marshall), whose mother Ruth (Sara Gallo) is hell bent on marrying her off to wealthy first class passenger Cal (Terrence Williams Jr.). As drama unfolds, an Iceberg (Marcus Antonio) hops onboard to test the unsinkable ship.

Yellow Face (Broadway)

♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

Asian-American playwright David Henry Hwang (Daniel Dae Kim) causes a ruckus when he openly criticizes the casting of Jonathan Pryce, a white actor of Welsh descent, for the role of the Engineer in Miss Saigon which is set to transfer to New York after a successful run at London’s West End. The media attention opens up an avenue for discussion regarding the place of Asian-Americans on Broadway. As the controversy dies down, DHH prepares to cast an actor for his theater comeback, years after winning the Tony for his magnum opus M. Butterfly. He eventually selects Marcus (Ryan Eggold) after a successful audition. There is one problem, though: Marcus is not really Asian. He only claimed to be part Asian and banked on his ambiguous looks to be cast in the role. As DHH deals with the backlash and accusations of hypocrisy, his Father (Francis Jue) becomes the target of an ongoing espionage investigation, accused of furthering mainland Chinese interests in the US political landscape through his bank.

Little Shop of Horrors (Broadway)

♣♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

1960’s. A trio of sea urchins takes us to a flower shop in an urban skid row where an orphan by the name of Seymour (Nicholas Christopher) has been making a living. Abandoned by his parents when he was young, he was taken in by the owner of the flower shop, Mr. Mushnik (Stephen DeRosa). Mr. Mushnik is strict and rather distant, not just to Seymour but also to his co-worker Audrey (Sherie Rene Scott) on whom he harbors a crush. Despite being friendly toward one another, Seymour and Audrey maintain a platonic relationship because she is currently seeing psychotic dentist Orin (Johnny Newcomb) who regularly subjects her to emotional and physical abuse. Just as Mr. Mushnik announces that he will be closing shop soon due to poor sales, meaning he is letting them go, Seymour introduces them to a strange plant hybrid he found not so long ago, which he discovers later on to be thirsty for human blood and flesh.

The Great Gatsby (Broadway)

♣♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

Young World War I veteran Nick Carraway (Noah J. Ricketts) scores a relatively cheap cabin in New York as he ventures into a new trade, that of being a bond salesman. His new residence is located right next to a huge mansion overlooking the bay owned by a mysterious man everyone calls Gatsby (Jeremy Jordan) who regularly hosts parties at his estate. The two are acquainted and Gatsby immediately asks his new neighbor a favor, that of orchestrating a chance meeting between him and his cousin Daisy (Eva Noblezada), a socialite married to former football star Tom Buchanan (John Zdrojeski). The husband and wife share a daughter but he is unfaithful, engaged in an extra marital affair with Myrtle (Ryah Nixon), who happens to be the wife of George Wilson (Paul Whitty), a poor gas station owner who doubles as a middle man for Gatsby’s illicit businesses. Nick also gets to meet Jordan Baker (Samantha Pauly), Daisy’s golfer friend who takes pride in being free from the pressures of marriage.

The Roommate (Broadway)

♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

Sharon (Mia Farrow) has been living a rather quiet life in her big house in Iowa. Divorced from her husband and with her son residing somewhere far away, her life tends to revolve around the daily mundane routine she keeps as a person living solo. Enter Robyn (Patti Lupone), the new roommate who responds to her call for a room to lease. Unlike Sharon, Robyn is mysterious and edgy, hailing from The Bronx and moving to Iowa City for reasons that she does not seem to want to share with her new landlord. Soon, Robyn encourages Sharon to get out of her shell, convincing her to go out and date guys, smoke marijuana she herself has cultivated, etc. A friendship develops, even though they don’t want to admit it. When Robyn finally lets Sharon in on her dirty little secret, she thinks she would be shunned and chased out of the house. Surprisingly, her landlord appears too eager to try it out herself.

Sybil

♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

Sybil Isabel Dorsett has not been herself for as long as she could remember, experiencing blackouts in which she could not recall anything until she “comes to” or regains consciousness. She is also perplexed by the social network she has developed without her knowledge, meeting people who say they know her and claim to be her friend even though she hadn’t really met them before. Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, a psychoanalyst, comes to her aid and discovers something psychologically perplexing as she sits with her patient during sessions. Sybil does not always come to these sessions as herself, or sometimes she does, before she suddenly has a momentarily blank expression and then claims to be Vicky, Peggy Ann, Peggy Lou, etc. The psychiatrist observes the differences in nuances, behaviors, and attitudes of her patient’s various selves, counting up to sixteen of them all living in one body through the extent of their decades-long battle for integration.

[PRACHUAP KHIRI KHAN] Budget and Itinerary

SATURDAY: October 19, 2024

Ora Hostel Bangkok (1 Night) - 355.00

THB355.00

[SAM ROI YOT] Phraya Nakhon Cave

The first time I came across the name Hua Hin was when I booked a Bell Travel Services bus from Suvarnabhumi to Pattaya. I noticed that they also had a bus headed to the other side of the Gulf of Thailand. If you look at a map of the country, you will notice that there is some sort of a huge cove south of Bangkok. Pattaya and Hua Hin share that opening into the sea with the capital, to the east and to the west respectively. And so I decided then that a future trip to the kingdom will include Hua Hin. We are all about convenient transport links, you know.

[CHIANG MAI] Budget and Itinerary

TUESDAY: October 15, 2024

Cebu Pacific (Manila - Don Mueang) - 1,050.00

Space Station Hostel (1 Night) - 450.00

THB1,500.00

The Handmaid's Tale

♣♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

In what used to be the United States of America rises a totalitarian state named Gilead, where women garbed in red known as Handmaids are assigned in rotation as birth vessels to men of power known as Commanders. Their role is simple: to serve the biological purpose of reproduction, after an unmentioned phenomenon leaves much of the country with fatal levels of infertility. One such Handmaid only referred to as Offred, based on a genitive naming system after the names of their Commanders who serve as their owners, tells the story of her everyday life and routine, how she discovers an underground resistance group known as Mayday, and how both her Commander and his Wife make her complicit in their various secret schemes that neither must be aware of. In a new world order where the only purpose of a fertile woman is to give birth, Offred tries to reconcile her current situation with fleeting memories of the past, her partner and daughter, and hopes that she might be reunited with them again one day.

Slaughterhouse-Five

♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

All this happened, more or less. Billy Pilgrim is captured as a prisoner of war and is sent to Dresden with fellow American POWs to live in Schlachthof-fünf (Slaughterhouse-Five), which as the name suggests used to be a storehouse for meat. There they serve as contracted laborers and survive the Allied bombing of Dresden that kills tens of thousands and reduces the city into rubble. Pilgrim and company are saved by the underground bunker in their make-shift residence but only a few of them make it back to America alive. He rebuilds his life and finds wealth in optometry in his hometown of Ilium, marrying the daughter of the owner of the school he attends and having two children with her. And then he is abducted by extraterrestrials and taken to the planet Tralfamadore where he is housed in a zoo for observation and given another human being as his mate, a porn star named Montana Wildhack with whom he sires another child. Later on in life he claims to be capable of time travel, jumping to different moments of his life at will. So it goes.

Joker: Folie à Deux

♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) goes on trial for the multiple murders he has committed prior to ending up in prison. Arkham State Hospital guard Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson) becomes his watcher and vouches for his good track record inside, taking him to Ward B from time to time where they witness a group session that utilizes music as therapy. There Arthur locks eyes with Harleen Quinzel (Lady Gaga), a patient who instantly develops an obsession with him and goes on to encourage him to unleash the Joker. His legal team led by Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener) is preparing an insanity plea, looking at the possibility of using a split personality diagnosis as his get-out-of-jail-free card. However, upstart prosecutor Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) is hell bent on pursuing a guilty conviction for Fleck, revealing in a TV interview that he wants nothing less than the death penalty for him. As the trial begins, a group of Joker sympathizers come up with a drastic plan to rescue their idol.