Now, for the really tough part
AICELLE SANTOS IN “RAK OF AEGIS.” Great ensemble performances helped make up for storytelling lapses.
A couple of seasons ago, we cited the makers of the Apo movie musical, “I Do Bidoo Bidoo,” for their big, bright brainstorm of coming up with a fun storyline that stitched together some of the popular singing group’s iconic songs.
After watching the finished film, however, we had to come to the sad conclusion that the bright idea really didn’t translate into a movie that was as memorable as it should be, given all those wonderfully “relatable” songs.
After we came to that anticlimactic conclusion, we realized that bright brainstorms are great, but the really tough part is being able to actually follow through and translate them into fully fleshed-out and finished productions that not just “work,” but do so to a properly memorable degree.
Now comes “Rak of Aegis,” another really bright ideational brainstorm that rides high on the clever “light-bulb” concept of coming up with a musical-theater piece that tells its story though the popular Aegis rock group’s own compositions. Would the new musical be more successful at the admittedly difficult task?
Last Feb. 23, we caught the show at the Peta Theater Center and found that the storyline thought up to stitch Aegis’ songs together involved an impoverished neighborhood that was so frequently flooded that coping with it had become a way of life for its poor but gutsy residents.
More promising
This was more promising and “relevant” than the Apo musical’s ploy of using “feuding” families and an unwanted wedding as the “hook” for its own storytelling—so that was all to the good.
As the detailed esposition of the Aegis musical continued to unspool, however, we noted an excessive use of just “snippets” of the group’s songs—so, in time, the cumulative effect was too much “edge work” and not enough overarching structure and “vision” to make for a truly unified, organic and integral plot and thematic progression and conclusion.
Too many diverting details, both in script and in performance, were there for their own sake, rather than to cumulatively advance the themes the show had put in place.
The flood, the gutsy coping mechanisms that the residents had learned to resort to, the effects of their consequent poverty not just on their prospects but on their entire view of life—all these were positive factors that helped the material gain in focus and power.
But the song snippets and the messy little subplots worked against the rising arc and trajectory needed for the diverse bits and pieces to make forceful and focused sense on an enlighteningly thematic level.
Things went from bad to worse when a “smiling villain” was introduced who ostensibly came to dispense much-needed charity, but was actually involved in the subdivision whose faulty drainage system caused the poor community’s 24/7 flooding in the first place.
It didn’t help that this key character was weakly performed, but even as written, it was a problematic turn of character and events. Thus, the optimistic finale that the production strove mightily to end up with unfortunately felt forced and not sufficiently “earned.”
Also distracting and tendentious was the storytelling’s overreliance on a fundraising show and clothes and shoe design initiative to transform the community from poor to fashionably “negotiable.”
The truly wonderful cast’s great ensemble performances helped make up for some of these storytelling lapses, but more work clearly needs to be done for “Rak of Aegis” to be as memorable and moving as it deserves to be.
