‘Himala’ reimagined: Musical filmed like ‘Wicked’
Just like in the American musical fantasy film “Wicked,” the actors performing in Pepe Diokno’s musical “Isang Himala,” led by Aicelle Santos, each wore in-ear monitors (IEMs), where they all received the music they would be singing to.
This also meant that no music was played on the set while the live vocals were recorded. “We wore lapels, too, so the set had to be really quiet. We would hear the music from the IEMs and what people on the set heard were just our voices,” Santos explained in a recent interview with Lifestyle.
The movie “Himala,” released in 1982, was a collaboration of three National Artists for Film: director Ishmael Bernal, writer Ricky Lee, and actor Nora Aunor. Some years later, Lee turned it into a stage musical with the music of Vince de Jesus. “Himala, Isang Musikal” has been staged at the Cultural Center of the Philippines once, and twice in Makati City, featuring Santos and Bituin Escalante. This is the version that Diokno brought to film.
Diokno said Lee gave him full access to the material. “He told me: ‘It’s yours now. Feel free to be faithful and unfaithful to it.’ So, that was a challenge. We reimagined it in the sense that whatever was seen in the original film, we did the opposite,” the director said.
Made-up world
“Cupang in the ’82 film is set in the sand dunes of Ilocos. We thought, ‘What if it’s a made-up world? What if it’s surreal—somewhere in between reality and fiction. Hindi dito, hindi doon; hindi ngayon, hindi bukas,” Diokno added.
“When we made the decision, Sir Ricky said, ‘Cupang was never real.’ Vince, when they first staged this at the CCP, said, ‘Cupang is like purgatory.’ We built the set as a result of that decision. We built it from the ground up, inside a studio. We created an entire barangay.”
The contained set also allowed Diokno and his team to capture live performances from the actors. “For me, when I watched the musical, so much of the performance was in the delivery of the vocals—the way songs were sung, the breaths taken, the pauses made, and even the imperfections. There are so many layers to that. As a viewer, you will really feel the authenticity in their performance. You will notice the big difference if everything is lip-synched.”
Santos agreed and said, “Especially for the emotional scenes. It’s so hard because you have to time everything, even the sniffing and the cracking of your voice.”
We then asked Santos to take us back to the time she made the musical in 2018. “When I got the role, I really felt intense pressure, especially because I first watched it in 2010 and was amazed by what I saw. So, when I was told I’d be playing Elsa, I said, ‘Are you sure?’ because it’s such a big role.”
Santos said it was the most difficult role she has done so far, even more challenging than her stint as Gigi Vahn Tranh in the “Miss Saigon” edition that toured the United Kingdom in 2018.
“Aside from the fact that Elsa is in most of the scenes, character-wise, the story revolves around her. Also, there were so many layers in her lines and songs that I can’t just deliver ‘as it is,’” she pointed out.
So, she first read up on Elsa and then combined the character’s experiences with her own. “It’s a role that’s very difficult to portray, but I’m thankful that I was given that opportunity, twice,” she stressed.
Shooting the musical film was a good learning experience, she added. “In theater, you follow a character arc. You have a beginning, a climax and an ending. Everything is linear. But performing for a film is repetitive. I had to cry for the same scene five times. I respect film actors so much. This is their process,” Santos said.
Challenges
“As for theater actors like me, we’re used to doing everything only once or twice in a day. Another challenge is singing during the live recording, even though you can’t really hear your voice that much,” Santos said while touching her right ear, as if the IEM was still there. “Even though we had to go through all these things, I actually enjoyed the process.”
For Diokno, filming a musical was an emotional experience. “Of course, we had a lot of technical challenges. When you are filming a straight drama, there are very rare moments that you would be behind the camera and still get touched by the performances. This is because there is so much going on,” he said.
“Filming a musical was something else. For example, we would be shooting a scene and I would be watching through a monitor Aicelle’s performance. And then I would look to my left and there was Sir Ricky, crying. There were a lot of moments like that in shooting a musical,” Diokno said.
“Music has this power. It has an emotional power to draw us in. Even if we’ve already heard the song many times, it still gives us that emotional hit. It was very emotional for me,” the director declared.
“Isang Himala” will run at the 2024 Metro Manila Film Festival from Christmas Day to Jan. 7, 2025.
