It rained on the way to Newport, the first time in months. Any shut-in goblin would call that prime weather for staying home and doing nothing, but I had already bought the non-refundable tickets, and I was meeting a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. I tried listening to Parokya ni Edgar on the way to familiarize myself further, but the rain begged for indie folk. 

I value three things in life: sweets, my mother’s love, and music. I’d rather lose my other senses than have my hearing taken away. No genre comes to mind as a clear favorite, as long as the artist’s intentions are present and their craft permeates through the sound. My adjacent love for musicals stems from my old school, where every year we would perform, and watch the seniors do their own larger scale production. 

Going into Buruguduystunstugudunstuy, I had heard not-so-great things. Still, I had high hopes. Few Filipino bands are more iconic than Parokya ni Edgar, with their tito-core anthems and vulnerable declarations of love. They captured that essence of being a Filipino man, and while I wouldn’t call myself a fan, their music was easy to enjoy, as they didn’t take themselves too seriously. 

So I met up with my friend, and we saw it. As the curtains were drawn shut after the last scene, my friend and I turned to each other, and let out a collective, “What the fuck”. 

Condensing this oddity of a musical into one paragraph isn’t easy, but this is me trying: Four women, each with different ages, backgrounds, and problems, are transported to the Parokya, a surreal world where the Bigotilyos are front and center. They help the women solve their problems by transforming them into Filipino folklore creatures, giving them the power to run away from their struggles. After a number of conflicts and realizations, they all go back to the real world as humans, living their lives with a newfound perspective. 

The musical got a lot of things right. The cast played their roles with the energy you’d expect from a Parokya ni Edgar production. The land of Parokya was brought to life with colorful set and costume design, matching the absurd characters they draped. Other departments left me genuinely confused. 

Some of the band’s songs lent themselves well to the musical context, particularly the slow ones where the musicians let their guard down and poured their heart out. Other tracks did not have that luxury, with their dressed-up compositions, on-key vocals, and strange absence of the guitar. 

The recontextualizing also hurts the narrative. Most musicals write the songs around the story beats, or may already have those story beats in mind with the plot written around them. Parokya’s discography was never intended to be story beats, and the resulting production swerves the narrative into unnecessary conflicts with immediate resolutions just to accommodate the songs.

That point had me thinking if Buruguduystunstugudunstuy would have benefited from a less traditional story structure. Cats, for example, had no real plot. It placed great emphasis on its characters as individuals, expounding on their backstories, all while playing up everything in true musical fashion. While PnE’s songs aren’t exactly character studies, a looser string tying everything together would remove the need for their songs to be major plot points that link to the next.

I left the theater wondering who this was for. It felt so disjointed from the reference material, almost as if they were ashamed of the original and tried to put them in a more modern, acceptable light. 

At least it wasn’t boring. I would even say that I had a good time. The people behind Buruguduystunstugudunstuy took Parokya ni Edgar’s music where no one thought to take it, and tried to make it work. On the car ride back home, discussion over their creative choices filled every second of conversation, and Magic Spaceship bounced around my head for the rest of the weekend.