Dingdong loses his ‘edge’

DANTES. His key advantage has been frittered away.

Dingdong Dantes started off well in his new teleserye, “Ang Dalawang Mrs. Real,” with a focused and felt portrayal that made real his character’s love for his older wife, played by Maricel Soriano. Without that felt believability, the new series’ entire dramatic premise would have come off as awkwardly fake, so Dingdong should be credited for enabling the show to start off confidently and credibly.

More weeks into the teleserye’s storytelling, however, we find that Dingdong’s key advantage has generally been frittered away and coopted by the many subsequent melodramatic turns and twists that the plot has been made to take.

For one thing, Dingdong’s character is now less true-blue, because he’s fallen for and gone to bed with an inamorata in Cebu, and hasn’t confessed to her that he’s married! Naturally, his “love on the side” (Lovi Poe) keeps hoping that things will eventually turn out right for them. —Now, what does that say about Dingdong’s character being a man of principles?

And his by now suspicious wife, Maricel, adds to the series’ problems by “decorating” her portrayal with too many facial “quiverings” and such! Yes, they do denote her character’s fretful insecurity to some extent, but they get to be distracting because they’re so all over the place.

As for Lovi, she’s turning out to be the weakest lead player in the series’ dramatic equation (like Maja Salvador, who also played the other woman in “My Legal Wife”). We liked Lovi’s character at first because she was shown to be an exceptionally independent woman who could even fix her own car. But, before we knew it, she was given a potentially serious medical problem and started chasing Dingdong like a giddy teen, thus eroding her character’s initially impressive “defining strength.”

‘For the fans’

Yes, the show has to occasionally go romantically  gooey “for the fans”—but, not to the extent of making Lovi’s “other woman” character come off as silly and shallow.

Other new developments: The birth mother of Dingdong and Maricel’s adopted son has just come back to assert her claim on the boy, getting Maricel hysterical and even more insecure than before. Interestingly, the birth mother, as portrayed by Ina Feleo, is low-key in her thespic projection. The contrast is an arresting one, and we hope that the show will benefit from Ina’s judiciousness in the face of all of its “coagulating” Sturm und Drang.

On other shows: Before “My Legal Wife” ended last Friday, JC de Vera’s character was given a “goodbye” scene with Angel Locsin, and we hoped that the too-low-key actor would finally be able to generate some thespic involvement, commitment and heat before he permanently faded from view—but, it was not to be.

Next time around, JC should realize (along with Piolo Pascual and Coco Martin) that “underplaying” may have its virtues, but it can’t be extended for long, because there’s a “character arc“ that all good portrayals have to describe to create a full, three-dimensional thespic portrait. —And you can’t do that if your performance is too even-keeled and bereft of highlights, contrasts and dynamic character change!