"ART" one-night-only

"Three men talking about a painting. It’s easy to brush off the premise of this straight play, seeing as how it can easily be boring. Or weird. Or both.Thankfully, Yasmina Reza’s “Art” is none of the above. It offers an engaging and hilarious opportunity to eavesdrop on three best buds as they traverse the fine line that defines their friendship." -- Walter Ang, The Philippine Daily Inquirer

Art is a brilliant comedy about a friendship that is threatened when one member of a barkada does something that upsets another member – in this case, buying a painting that he finds “pretentious.”

Originally written in French and produced by Sean Connery in London, Art has won numerous awards, including the 1998 Tony Award for Best Play and the 1997 Olivier Award for Best Comedy, and has been translated into, among others, English, Mandarin, Japanese, German and Spanish. This sparkling new translation by Lito Abaño captures all the humor of the original while adapting its language into an easy, colloquial and thoroughly contemporary Filipino.

Jett Pangan, front man of The Dawn and star of such musicals as Once on This Island, Beauty and the Beast, Baby and Tick, Tick Boom!, makes his non-musical, “straight play” debut playing Mar, the quintessential leader-of-the-pack-head-of-the-gang alpha male who is looked upon by the rest of the barkada as the de facto leader. He sets the pace for the rest of the gang and has a force of personality that vacillates between bullying and considerate.

Michael de Mesa, last seen on ABS-CBN’s Sana Maulit Muli plays the sophisticated dermatologist, Serge, whose restless exploration of new worlds and new stimuli leads him to modern art and a whole set of new friends – a move that alarms and offends Mar and sets off the comic consequences of the play.

Caught in between these two explosive personalities is Jun, the perennial “follower” whose life revolves around the only friends that will tolerate him — Mar and Serge. Played by Ricky Davao, Jun is the central comic character of the play. Ricky Davao was last seen on GMA’s Lupin.

I'm selling ORCHESTRA CENTER tickets to the one-night-only staging of "ART". It's coming to Manila on September 22, 2007, 8pm, at the Music Museum in Greenhills. Tickets at 700 each.

For ticket reservations, please e-mail me at lmvarias@yahoo.com.