It’s been three years since Trumpets, the theatre company known for plays with a distinct religious message, put on a production. “The gestation period of any original [play] is about three years,” Trumpets founder and president Audie Gemora tells Coconuts Manila during the sneak preview for The Bluebird of Happiness, a musical based on the play The Blue Bird by Nobel Prize laureate Maurice Maeterlinck. “I have been pushing this idea for decades, especially since the late 1990s, but none of my writers picked it up, until Jaime [del Mundo] did a year and a half ago.” His own immediate inspiration was the 1940 film starring Shirley Temple, which he had seen around 40 years ago.
The play is set on the night before Christmas and tells the story of two children who go on a quest for an elusive bluebird whose song could bring happiness and everything their hearts desired. The music for this play was by Ron Fortich, and the book and lyrics were written by Jaime del Mundo, who also directed the play. “A few days ago last year, actually, exactly two days ago last year,” says del Mundo, “we had a workshop reading for this thing. So I spent about a year doing the script and the music and another year revising it.”
Del Mundo emphasized that the play took its cues more from the original five-act play rather than the Hollywood adaptation: “Although Audie [Gemora] remembered the movie as The Blue Bird, I knew it was based on Maeterlinck. I went back to the source, obviously because the movie is an adaptation of the source, and I knew we couldn’t adapt the movie, but we could adapt the source.” When asked about what was most challenging about adapting the play, del Mundo said, “You know, it’s easier to turn it into a musical than to write a play without music, particularly with a subject like this. Happiness is so emotional. And any emotional subject lends itself so easily to music. Fantasy lends itself to music, and the [original] play, which was five to six acts long, is filled with symbolism and luscious dialogue, and it was just wonderful to pick from there! Obviously we had to do our own adaptation; there are many things here that you would not find in Maeterlinck. But it was a wealth of source material. It just begged to be turned into a musical.”
What’s del Mundo’s expectations from the audience? “What I always say when people ask [me] what’s the bluebird about, and everyone thinks it’s about finding happiness. And I go, ‘No, the bluebird is about recognizing happiness.’ That’s the point of all this.” He hopes people would recognize happiness in the everyday.
While the story is set in Christmastime, del Mundo noted, “The original play takes place on Christmas Eve. Now, mind you, The Bluebird of Happiness is chock-filled with Christian symbolism, even the original Maeterlinck play. And of course, it was perfect for Trumpets. The very fact that it happens on Christmas Eve happens to be the celebration of a new birth. Christmas Day has connotations for Christianity, obviously, but [as] for rebirth…”
It is worth noting that Trumpets has been an evangelical Christian theatre company from the start. Maeterlinck, on the other hand, was opposed to organized religion, most notably to the Catholic Church, and his works were placed on the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books in 1914.
Asked whether the play would receive the same kind of word of mouth as one of Trumpets’ most successful productions, its adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, del Mundo said, “The thing is, it’s getting harder and harder to produce stuff. Obviously, the costs have gone up. And The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe had word-of-mouth, but we did it three times. And now, there’s a certain mystique about that play which we did how many years ago. So now we’re hoping that people do talk about this, because if it is successful this year, then we can do it again next year. As a director, I would love to do it again next year, because we can rethink and come up with new ideas and do whatever needs to be done. On Broadway, they have this thing called the one-month preview in which the play gets to be put in front of an audience and they see what works and what doesn’t. It’s not even a preview [now], it’s an opening night with the press!”
That night, there was a sense of hopeful optimism that Trumpets would, in an increasingly exciting Manila theatre scene, speak its unique voice. Whether that voice continues to be heeded will remain a mystery. Ren Aguila
The Bluebird of Happiness runs from Sept 27-28, Oct 5-6, 12-13, 19-20 at Meralco Theatre, with 3pm & 8pm timings. PHP573.10-PHP1,771.40. Tickets are available via TicketWorld.
