Boy meets girl, and girl meets boy. It’s the oldest premise in all of fiction, and yet people keep finding new ways to tweak the formula. Sometimes, it works out; sometimes, it doesn’t. Breakups and Breakdowns, The Ateneo Blue Repertory’s (BlueRep) first musical production of the year, lies somewhere in the middle.
Originally penned by playwright Joel Trinidad and composer Rony Fortich, Breakups and Breakdowns follows a quartet of young artists as they navigate the tricky, treacherous modern games of love. Their peg is Friends, but with the wink-wink sort of subversion tailor-made for a generation weaned on silly love stories. For the most part, it’s exactly as fun as it sounds.
While director Reb Atadero and the rest of the crew do an admirable job with the source material, there’s no getting around the simple fact that the plot has been done many, many times, and none of the characters are quite compelling enough to get it over that hump. They are half-formed things, each just falling short of being complex enough to represent anything beyond momentary diversions.
Fortunately, the cast consists of seasoned BlueRep veterans AM Masucol, Raffy Nepomuceno, Celine Bengzon, and Angela Mercado, and they all do a fairly convincing job of giving life to these characters falling in and out of love with each other. Mercado, in particular, impresses as an awkward girl attempting to channel her “inner hottie”—all in the name of the game, of course.
Of course, because this is a BlueRep production, everyone on the cast can carry a tune, and everyone brings their A-game to this production. While the music may lack the show-stopping numbers audiences have come to expect from the company, there are still ample set pieces for people to tap their toes to.
Kayla Teodoro’s austere set design—its centerpiece being an immaculately curated shelf of knick-knacks that subtly speak volumes about the characters—wastes no space, and the Gonzaga Fine Arts Theater makes for appropriately intimate viewing. However, the sound mixing is inconsistent and often muted, and the lighting felt erratic and uninvolved at times. Overall, the technical aspects of the play are a mixed bag, with the hits ever so slightly outweighing the misses.
Like the four hopeless romantics it stars, Breakups and Breakdowns isn’t perfect, nor does it aspire to be. While the production is bound to get better over the course of its run, its goal isn’t simply to impress audiences with its quality. Rather, it wants its audience to feel, and through these half-formed characters searching for a whole, it accomplishes just that. It may not be “the one”, but it certainly is worth your time.
Editor’s Note: The original article that appeared on this site mentioned Red Atadero as director instead of Reb Atadero. This has since been corrected.